SOAR Analysis

In modern work culture, constant back-to-back meetings have become the new norm. More often than not, these meetings are oriented toward potential threats for a company like competing markets, leaving us thinking: what’s with all the negativity? 

To inspire a more optimistic, energizing way of thinking, a SOAR analysis may be just the solution, regardless of what role someone may play in their organization. 

A SOAR analysis is a framework used to guide constructive conversations by focusing on the four aspects of its acronym: Strengths (S), Opportunities (O), Aspirations (A), and Results (R). A company’s current capabilities may be investigated using SOAR from the perspective of all employees at all levels of the organization, which can then be applied to achieve long-term and sustainable growth. SOAR is especially useful for establishing a mutually agreed-upon pathway to success.¹ 

The analysis begins with a strategic inquiry, where an organization’s most important Strengths and Opportunities are discovered and explored by its employees.¹ This is followed by stating an appreciative intent—where employees share their Aspirations for their company while simultaneously recognizing and rewarding contributions to achieve Results.¹ 

To fully understand SOAR, it is key to lay out each of the four questions that company managers should be asking all of their employees based on the acronym:

1. Strengths: What is our company great at?
2. Opportunities: What are the possibilities of our company?
3. Aspirations: What dreams or wishes does our company have?
4. Results: What are the significant outcomes of our company?

A SOAR analysis commonly visualizes the four letters of its acronym using a 2 x 2 matrix:

SOAR is distinct from the ubiquitous SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis that is commonly seen across business management. SWOT is known to be the “old standby” for strategic planning models.¹ In contrast to SOAR, strategists who conduct a SWOT analysis assess the threats a company faces to make recommendations for ensuing alternative plans for the organization. Instead of applying strategic inquiry and appreciative intent to its four acronym features, SWOT considers internal assessments (Strengths and Weaknesses) and external assessments (Opportunities and Threats).¹

In contrast to a gap-focused, analysis-oriented SWOT, SOAR is a more positive, action-oriented method, discovering the potential of each individual within a company and how the collective group can define the future potential for the organization and its stakeholders. In essence, a SOAR analysis focuses on strengths and future potential, whereas a SWOT analysis focuses on weaknesses and looming threats when it comes to managing business strategy. 

SOAR is the foundational framework of an appreciative inquiry (AI) approach for organizational change, which allows a business to focus on what matters the most: the future of the company and the people who work there. AI provides SOAR with its ability to do strategic inquiry while purposefully recognizing a company’s Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results through the lenses of all employees.¹

Strategic planning: A holistic business planning approach that considers the scope of an entire business instead of individual branches like marketing or finance. Often, this includes a strategic planning process that takes into account internal and external factors that impact a company’s present status and future goals.¹ This concept originated in the 1960s at Harvard Business School, but by the 1980s it became a subject field with courses regularly offered in business schools.

SWOT Analysis: A conventional strategic planning process that consists of Strengths (S), Weaknesses (W), Opportunities (O), and Threats (T) to determine a company’s present and future by application of internal and external variables.¹ Following a SWOT, recommendations are typically made for alternative strategies to improve a company’s development—making it a more defensive strategy due to its emphasis on possible threats and problems for a company.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI): A method of open dialogue to help companies and their stakeholders find a shared vision of what works well over what doesn’t work. AI asks a company what is smoothly running in the present based on positive elements of work, its relationships, and its culture.¹ This is the foundation of the SOAR approach, where AI uses either a 5D (define, discover, dream, design, and destiny) or 5I (initiative, inquire, imagine, innovate, and inspire) cycle in its application to a business.² A SOAR analysis is always done with AI in mind and can use 5D or 5I as needed.

Strategic Inquiry: The first phase of the SOAR model, where Strengths and Opportunities are found and explored by a company’s employees. This includes both past examples of what has worked well at the organization as well as what is hoped for in the future.¹ It is followed by appreciative intent.

Appreciative Intent: The second phase of the SOAR model where Aspirations are shared by employees for their ideal version of the company's future while they are recognized and rewarded for their work as a way to measure Results.¹ It is preceded by strategic inquiry.

5D Cycle: A method from appreciative inquiry that may be used when conducting a SOAR analysis, where employees are asked how they want to apply SOAR to:²

1. Define: Identify shared values, visions, and missions of a company.
2. Discover: Ask SOAR-based questions to open the conversation externally with stakeholders.
3. Dream: Establish long-term goals for the company.
4. Design: Decide on short-term goals for the company.
5. Destiny: Integrate the strategies found in SOAR to the present and beyond.

The 5D cycle may be used interchangeably with the 5I cycle and is not necessarily needed to apply SOAR, but can be added in addition to the usual acronym.

5I Cycle: A method from appreciative inquiry that may be used when conducting a SOAR analysis, where employees are asked how they want to:²

1. Initiate: Identify shared values, visions, and missions of a company.
2. Inquire: Ask SOAR-based questions to open the conversation internally with employees.
3. Imagine: Build a shared vision of the company’s future, including alternative versions and recommendations.
4. Innovate: Create a plan and program to make changes.
5. Inspire: Integrate the strategies found from SOAR to the present and beyond.

The 5I Cycle may also be used interchangeably with the 5D cycle and is not necessarily needed to conduct a SOAR, which can be administered alone without either cycle applied. 

Though the SOAR analysis officially emerged in 2003 with David Cooperrider and colleagues’ paper, “Strategic inquiry appreciative intent: inspiration to SOAR, a new framework for strategic planning,” its origins are fundamentally rooted in Cooperrider’s work back in the 1980s on appreciative inquiry and strategic planning.¹ 

Cooperrider invented appreciative inquiry (AI), the primary theory and inspiration behind the SOAR framework.² AI includes recognizing the contributions of people at a company (“appreciate”) as well as taking on a lens of discovery for future possibilities (“inquiry”) with its stakeholders’ values and shared mission. AI (not to be confused with the usual kind of AI nowadays) can be put into action through either a 5D cycle (define, discover, dream, design, and destiny) or a 5I cycle (initiative, inquire, imagine, innovate, and implement).² 

While Cooperrider was working on AI in the mid-1980s through to the 1990s, Jacqueline Stavros completed her dissertation in 1998 in which she suggests there is a relationship between AI and a company’s driving force: the people themselves.²  In the coming years, Stavros and Cooperrider collaborated to develop AI, in particular applying SOAR to all types of organizations. Following his work on AI as the blueprint for SOAR in the 1980s, Cooperrider presented a series of real-life anecdotes to illustrate the application of SOAR itself in his 2003 paper with Stavros.¹ 

One such story that demonstrated SOAR’s prominence was at Roadway Express, a Fortune 500 trucking company in Akron, Ohio. Roadway shared its enthusiasm for SOAR being successfully applied to dozens of its strategic planning summits. SOAR was further recognized after being used in its CEO endorsement, and perhaps above all, its engagement with employees from “the whole system”—from dock workers to sales reps, drivers to mechanics, and even its customers.¹ Better yet, what SOAR truly helped Roadway achieve was not merely business strategies and revenue growth, but human development—where leadership was implemented at every level of the company over time instead of in a single instance.

David Cooperrider

An American management school professor at the Department of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School of Management who co-created the SOAR analysis. Cooperrider holds the Covia - David L. Cooperrider Professorship for his renowned work on appreciative inquiry. David has advised leaders from a plethora of businesses like Apple, United Nations, and Johnson & Johnson, and an impressive repertoire of world leaders including His Holiness the Dalai Lama and President Jimmy Carter. 

Jacqueline M. Stavros

An American author and management school professor at the Lawrence Technological University (LTU) College of Management who co-created the SOAR analysis. With over 25 years in strengths-based practices, Jackie has co-authored six books as well as more than 70 chapters and articles related to both appreciative inquiry and SOAR. Jackie is also a member of the Appreciative Inquiry Council of Practitioners for the David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry and Taos Institute. Some of Jackie’s notable companies she has helped with strategic planning include Ford Foundation, Girl Scouts, and the U.S. Army. 

SOAR is used in all kinds of contexts involving strategic planning. Tying back to its roots in AI, organizations that have exemplified SOAR analyses include private and public nonprofits, for-profits, governments, and international agencies. Two contexts that have especially benefited from the use of SOAR are education and agriculture. 

SOAR in Online Education

Inevitably, e-learning has been on the rise since the pandemic. While convenient, any student knows that Zoom classes come with their own set of unique challenges—which luckily can begin to be addressed using SOAR. This framework can be applied to evaluate how students are coping with online education to see what obstacles may be getting in the way. 

Kumar et al. (2024) investigated the perception of e-learning and e-modules for almost 700 undergraduate medical and dental students in Chennai, India using a SOAR analysis.⁴ The authors found that online education could be improved in a variety of ways using the acronym: sharing of knowledge between students online easily (Strengths), more engagement of students in Zoom classes (Opportunities), and building on current strengths to improve online learning environments (Aspirations). 

SOAR in Non-WEIRD Contexts

SOAR may be applied outside of business-like and corporate settings, too. It is crucial to consider individuals and communities that may benefit from these types of thinking aside from the usual “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) demographic—one such group being the coffee farmers in Tombo Village in the Dieng Mountains of Indonesia. 

Dzakiroh et al. (2021) looked into how a SOAR analysis could help empower Tombo Village coffee farmers, who faced many issues with the post-harvesting and marketing strategies of their agricultural products. For this reason, the researchers were curious if a SOAR may be an effective means to address the farmers’ needs, issues, and necessary environmental conditions for successful coffee production. Following a SOAR analysis, the authors were able to identify seven elements that would allow the coffee farmers to support themselves, including but not limited to: building coffee farmer awareness to do proper post-harvest processing, improving farmers’ resource quality, and assisting farmers to access capital. 

Crucially, SOAR can seemingly have a positive impact outside of Western populations to improve work abilities and conditions beyond traditional business settings.

In the world of organizational development theories and strategic planning, SWOT is not the only framework facing critics—SOAR has its limitations, too. The first one has to do with a lack of evidence. Zaretsky & Cole (2017) conducted a scoping study looking at the literature on SOAR being applied.⁶ In the 27 articles they examined, there were positive opinions overall, however many gaps were found in terms of empirical support. 

These critiques raise a valid question: though companies may anecdotally praise SOAR, what if there’s not enough research and data to support its application? As critics of the SWOT analysis often cite this method as being a “waste of time,” SOAR may find itself facing similar issues without evidence to support its efficacy—and its distinction from SWOT may not be significant enough to prove its usefulness yet.8 This speaks to an ongoing, bigger issue in behavioral science and its adjacent fields about how much can we trust the data we already have. 

McClean found several other limitations when it came to SOAR, questioning the method in the paper title itself: “...will SOAR Really Help Organization Development Soar?”⁷ Aside from the lack of data, the author presented three explanations on the limits of SOAR: a lack of systems to organize positive psychology, strategic planning being ineffective overall, and not enough results in organizational development research—a field that requires ongoing improvements, according to McClean. 

Overall, these other limitations may be wider-reaching issues that are not unique to SOAR alone. Though we must consider the large variety of different companies’ needs, values, and scales, SOAR has a flexible nature that allows for tailored solutions—regardless of the company itself.

SOAR for Making Tough Organizational Changes

There are times when SOAR may be used to make important yet tough decisions that fundamentally change how a company operates. One context where this occurred was with Tendercare, a company providing assisted-living centers, nursing homes, and other long-term care services in Michigan.

In 2002, Tendercare’s management found that a handful of its centers were losing money without any corresponding action being taken. Leaders were not only concerned about revenue but also the company’s reputation when facing negative press possibilities or angry families. In short, Tendercare was in jeopardy of not living up to the promise of its name.

Tendercare decided to apply SOAR to address these anxieties over six weeks with its stakeholders. Due to this analysis, the company came to the bittersweet realization that closing a particular center may be the best option. This distressed Tendercare in another light: who would this closure impact? Closing an assisted living center is no simple task considering how it may impact the lives of those who need support with everyday life in addition to the livelihood for a variety of healthcare workers. 

Despite facing a difficult choice that impacted employees and patients alike, the vice president of Tendercare’s market development cited that using SOAR led to “a dramatic shift… by taking a positive and proactive approach, we are able to invest in our good centers instead of spending enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources in the couple of centers that seem to drain energy and resources”.³ This anecdote demonstrates that although SOAR has a generally positive orientation, it is still capable of identifying when change is needed—even if it's not always optimistic.

SOAR in Improving Online Communication for Church Communities

During the pandemic, various communities faced changes in their ability to connect face-to-face in never seen before ways—one such place being church. In March 2020, Reverend Dr. Bill Lyons chose SOAR as a means to engage dozens of community members who represented several churches, along with outside stakeholders. He thought this was the best way to guarantee that all voices were part of the conversation while transitioning to online church services.

In his decision to use SOAR, Lyons spoke to his success of applying appreciative inquiry in the past, noting that “SOAR … allows us to construct our future through collaboration, shared understanding and a commitment to action.”² Lyons expressed this to be true in “ecumenical, interfaith” settings—where each person related to a broader scope of church partners had the chance to contribute to SOAR discussions of the 6,000 members. The 5D cycle, minus the last D (Destiny), was used to ask the following questions:

• Discovering: What do churchgoers want and need during a pandemic?
• Dreaming: What does the community look like in a pandemic setting (such as Zoom services and drive-in worship)?
• Designing: How can we think up new ways of service not previously attempted?
• Delivering: How might a pandemic help us further improve what we already do well?

Following the analysis, Lyons discovered a connection between virtual ministry and the strengths found using SOAR—where churches who preferred community over service production used platforms like Zoom to continuously interact.² As a result, SOAR helped Lyons find out what mediums for holding church services were preferred by the majority of their members to foster community the most in times of crisis. 

What may be most intriguing about this instance of SOAR application was that the pandemic had already begun. SOAR played an integral role in preparing a diverse community of churchgoers for the virtual times that were looming. As COVID-19 started to spread, this framework enabled conversation on how to transition to online services, maintaining community while handling an unprecedented crisis.²

How to use AI-enabled nudging to mutually benefit managers and employees

While SOAR is heavily founded in the version of “AI” being appreciative inquiry, it is no secret that the other type of “AI” (artificial intelligence) can be applied to companies for behavioral change to workers in various roles. This piece outlines how artificial intelligence may be en route to change how business management is done overall—-by permitting AI-based “nudges” for managers to improve how to assess employee and team performance. 

The Tale of Positive Psychology and Behavioral Economics

As SOAR co-creator David Cooperrider himself received praise from the father of positive psychology Martin Seligman for his work,¹⁰ it is worth learning more about the foundations of this field. This piece outlines such history—and how the branch of positive psychology is underappreciated in its key impact on behavioral economics in practice and in research. 

1. Stavros, J., Cooperrider, D., & Kelley, D. L. (2003). Strategic inquiry appreciative intent: inspiration to SOAR, a new framework for strategic planning. Ai Practitioner, 11, 1-21.
2. Stavros, J. M. (2020). SOAR 2020 and beyond: Strategy, systems innovation and stakeholder engagement. AI Practitioner, 22(2), 70-91. 
3. Stavros, J., Cooperrider, D., & Kelley, L. (2007). SOAR: A new approach to strategic planning. The change handbook, 3, 268-284.
4. Prabu Kumar, A., Omprakash, A., Chokkalingam Mani, P. K., Kuppusamy, M., Wael, D., Sathiyasekaran, B. W., Vijayaraghavan, P. V., & Ramasamy, P. (2023). E-learning and E-modules in medical education—A SOAR analysis using perception of undergraduate students. PLOS ONE, 18(5). 
5. Dzakiroh, D., Suwarto, & lrianto, H. (2021). Empowerment strategies for coffee farmers based on the SOAR Analysis: A case study in the Dieng Mountains.
6. Zarestky J., & Cole C. S. (2017). Strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results: An emerging approach to organization development. New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development, 29(1), xx–xx.
7. McLean, G. N. (2017). Reaction — will SOAR Really Help Organization Development Soar? (An Invited Reaction to Zarestky and Cole, 2017). New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 29(1), 25-28. https://doi.org/10.1002/nha3.20168
8. Hill, T., & Westbrook, R. (1997). SWOT analysis: It's time for a product recall. Long range planning, 30(1), 46-52.
9. Maymin, S. (2007, September 17). Report from the 2007 AI Conference: Cooperrider, Buckingham, Seligman. Retrieved from https://positivepsychologynews.com/news/senia-maymin/20070917398.