4 How might these factors affect you and your organisation?

The wider factors that you have identified by scrutinising the ‘big picture’ will influence events within your organisation or workplace in different ways. These will depend upon the capacity and willingness of the organisation or workplace to respond in a meaningful and appropriate way. No two organisations are the same and consequently responses will vary. What influences these variations?

Any organisation possesses resources and it is these that will dictate the extent to which it can respond to the kind of external influences that you identified in the PEST analysis. You may have heard the term ‘resources’ used in many different contexts, for example human resources, energy resources and natural resources. This course will use it to mean all of these in line with the definition provided by Oxford Dictionaries, that is a ‘stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively’ (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016).

These can differentiated further between tangible resources and intangible resources.

• Tangible resources: these can be observed and measured, and include staff (human resources), premises, equipment, stocks, finances and so on.
• Intangible resources: these cannot be observed or measured so easily, although they may be equally important, and include experience, know-how, leadership, structures, communication, reputation, intellectual property and so on.

Having a clear understanding of these resources will help you to assess whether or not your organisation has the capacity to deal with the factors identified by the PEST analysis; this is called a resource analysis.