Strategy Decide

Playing to Win

Playing to Win is five linked strategic choices: the winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, the capabilities required, and the management systems behind them.

The questionWhere will we compete, how will we win there, and what has to be in place for that to hold?

The strategy choice cascade. Its companion method is strategic choice structuring, built around the question "what would have to be true?"

Process · A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, 2013

1
Winning aspiration What winning means, and for whom
2
Where to play Customers, channels, regions, products
3
How to win The advantage that wins there
4
Capabilities What the firm must be able to do
5
Management systems Measures and processes that sustain them

Schematic of the five choices. Each one narrows the next, and a choice that cannot be supported sends the team back up the chain.

When to use it

The client's strategy document is a list of goals and initiatives, and nobody can say which customers the business will not serve.
A business unit is choosing between two or three distinct ways to compete and the leadership team keeps arguing about data.
A portfolio review needs every unit to describe its strategy in the same terms, so the choices can be compared.
Capabilities and systems have grown up without reference to any choice, and the client wants to know which ones the strategy actually needs.

When to avoid it

The organization has no real freedom to choose where it plays, as in a regulated utility or a single-contract supplier. The cascade will produce a description of constraints.
The question is narrow, such as a pricing decision or a single investment. A business case or a decision tree is quicker.
The team needs to understand the industry before it can choose. Run industry and customer analysis first, then use the cascade to make the choice.
The real need is execution of an agreed strategy. Goal and measurement tools such as OKRs or the Balanced Scorecard fit better.

Overview

Playing to Win treats strategy as five linked choices: what winning means, where to compete, how to win there, which capabilities that requires, and which management systems keep those capabilities in place. It supports a decision between distinct ways to compete, and it forces the team to say what the business will not do.

The choices have to fit each other, so teams work the cascade in both directions and revise an upper choice when a lower one cannot be supported. Most teams run it with the companion question, what would have to be true for each option to work, and then test the weakest conditions first. The common misuse is a cascade where every box is filled and nothing is excluded.

The five choices

Winning aspiration

A statement of what winning means for this business, defined against customers and competitors. It should be specific enough that some outcomes would clearly count as losing. Revenue targets alone do not qualify.

Where to play

The choice of field. Which customer segments, geographies, channels, products, and stages of the value chain the business will compete in, and by implication which it will leave. A where-to-play choice that excludes nothing has not been made.

How to win

The advantage that will win in the chosen field. Lafley and Martin reduce this to two broad routes, lower cost or differentiation, and require the answer to fit the field. A how-to-win that would work anywhere usually means no real advantage has been identified.

Must-have capabilities

The few activities the firm must do very well, and in combination, to deliver the how-to-win in the where-to-play. This is a short list. Capabilities the business has but the strategy does not need belong on a separate list.

Enabling management systems

The processes, structures, and measures that build and sustain the capabilities and keep the choices in force, such as planning routines, performance measures, and talent processes. This is where the strategy reaches budgets and reviews.

What it is not

A one-pass sequence. The choices are meant to fit together, and teams move up and down the cascade as a lower choice turns out to be unsupportable.
A template to fill in. Writing an answer in each of five boxes is easy. The work is choosing among real alternatives and testing them.
A vision statement. "Be the most trusted partner in our markets" is an aspiration with no field and no advantage attached.

The steps

Frame a real choice

Turn the issue into at least two mutually exclusive possibilities, each with its own where-to-play and how-to-win. If only one option is on the table, keep generating until there is a credible alternative.
Sketch each possibility as a cascade

For each, draft the aspiration, field, advantage, capabilities, and systems at a level of detail someone could disagree with. A slogan is not a possibility.
Ask what would have to be true

For each possibility, list the conditions that must hold about customers, the industry, competitors, costs, and the firm's capabilities. Do not argue yet about whether they are true.
Test the doubtful conditions first

Rank the conditions by confidence, and design a test for the weakest ones that the most skeptical person agrees in advance would settle the question. Run the cheapest decisive tests first.
Choose and cascade down

Pick the possibility that survives. Then name the few must-have capabilities and the systems that will build and measure them. Stop initiatives that serve none of the chosen choices.

In practice

The leadership team of an industrial coatings business arrived with a strategy deck of twenty-two initiatives. When the consultant asked where the business would not play, nobody answered. The team built three possibilities instead. One was to serve large automotive suppliers on cost. A second was to become the specialist in fast-curing coatings for small fabricators. The third was to sell coatings plus application services to infrastructure contractors.

For each, the team wrote what would have to be true. The specialist option needed small fabricators to pay a premium for cure time, a distributor network that could reach them, and a formulation lead of at least two years. The least certain condition was the premium, so it was tested first, through priced quotes to forty fabricators. The premium held for about half of them. The cost option failed on a single condition: the plants could not reach the unit costs the large suppliers required. The team chose the specialist position, cut nine initiatives that served neither of the surviving possibilities, and rebuilt the sales incentive plan around fabricator accounts.

What you leave with

A written aspiration, field, and advantage that a manager two levels down could repeat.
An explicit list of segments, channels, or products the business will not pursue.
The conditions each possibility depended on and the results of the tests.
A short list of must-have capabilities, and the management systems that will build and track them.
A list of current initiatives to stop because they serve none of the choices.

Failure points

Everywhere to play

The where-to-play choice lists every current segment and a few new ones. Nothing is excluded, so resources stay spread and the how-to-win cannot be specific.

Aspiration as a revenue number

The winning aspiration is written as a growth target. It gives no guidance about customers or competitors, and the lower choices are made without a reference point.

Capabilities as an inventory

The team lists everything the business is good at. The capabilities box loses its function, which is to say what the strategy specifically requires.

Testing the easy conditions

The team gathers data on the conditions it already believes. The conditions that would sink the favored option are never tested, and the choice is the one the senior executive wanted from the start.

No systems change

The choices are agreed in a workshop, but budgets, measures, and incentives stay as they were. A year later the business is running the old strategy under a new name.

The failures above are usually Framing: the wrong problem was chosen before this framework was applied.

Origin

A.G. Lafley was CEO of Procter & Gamble from 2000 to 2009, and Roger Martin, then dean of the Rotman School of Management, worked with him as a strategy adviser. The book they published in 2013 sets out the five choices as a cascade and illustrates them with P&G's brand and category decisions from that period. The authors describe the approach as developed and refined through that work. The book's figures on P&G's growth are the authors' own account.

A companion method, strategic choice structuring, was described in the September 2012 Harvard Business Review article "Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy" by Lafley, Martin, Jan Rivkin, and Nicolaj Siggelkow, and is covered in the book. It frames a choice between possibilities and asks what would have to be true for each to succeed, before any analysis starts. HBR Press reissued the book in 2025 with a new foreword and two HBR articles. The cascade is not trademarked or licensed.