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Position · Diagnose

PESTLE

A scan of the weather outside the business. Its weakness is that everything it finds is true, and most of it does not matter — the discipline is throwing nine tenths of it away.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
01 Diagnose
Works at
Corporate, Business
Maturity
Early startup → Large organisation
Time
90 minutes

What it is

A structured scan of the external environment across six categories, so that a strategy is not built assuming the world stays as it is. The framework is a checklist rather than an analysis — its value is entirely in the filtering you do afterwards, because a complete PESTLE is mostly noise.

Political
Government stability, policy direction, trade posture, public funding, procurement behaviour. Not party politics — the decisions of state that change what is possible or profitable.
Economic
Growth, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates, employment, consumer confidence. The ones that reach your P&L through demand or cost.
Social
Demographics, attitudes, working patterns, health, how people buy and why. Slow-moving and therefore easy to ignore until it is late.
Technological
What is becoming possible, cheap or expected. Includes what your customers can now do themselves without you.
Legal
Regulation, compliance, employment law, standards, liability. Distinct from Political: this is what is enforceable now or shortly.
Environmental
Physical climate, resource availability, energy, waste, and the reporting obligations attached to them.
The mistake people makeTeams produce forty observations and act on none. The output is not the list, it is the two or three forces that would change a decision — everything else is context you have now read and can stop worrying about.
What it’s forExternal forces are moving — regulation, technology, demographics — and you need them on one page before planning.
What it’s not forYour problem is internal or competitive. PESTLE produces a lot of true-but-useless observation when the pressure is coming from a rival.

How you run it

  1. Set the horizon before you scanThree years is usual. Without a horizon you collect everything, because everything is happening somewhere.
  2. Work each letter separatelyPolitical, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental. Do them one at a time or the whole thing collapses into Economic.
  3. Apply the so-what testFor every item ask: if this happened tomorrow, what would we do differently? No answer means it comes off the list. Most items come off.
  4. Rate what survivesLikelihood and impact. You are looking for the two or three that are both, not a balanced scorecard of forces.
  5. Assign a watcherEach surviving force gets a named person and a place it gets reviewed. A PESTLE nobody revisits was a morning spent reading the news.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans — from £19 a month

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • A defined market and geography
  • Whatever you already read about your sector
  • Someone who follows the regulation

You’ll end up with

  • Six lists, ruthlessly cut to what touches you
  • The three forces that would actually change a decision
  • A watch item for each, with who is watching

Runs well with

AI risk classification and governanceAnalysis planBusiness Model CanvasComparable company benchmark