Strategy & competition
Playing to Win (Strategy Choice Cascade)
Lafley and Martin's five linked questions that make strategy an integrated set of choices: what is our winning aspiration, where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities must be in place, and what management systems are required.
Also known as Strategy Choice Cascade, Five questions of strategy, Where to Play / How to Win. First set out by A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin in 2013; the primary source is cited in full below.
- Format
- Checklist / audit
- Level
- Corporate · Business unit
- Best for
- Position against competitors · Evaluate options · Allocate resources
- Decision stage
- Explore options · Decide
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Time to apply
- An afternoon to stress-test an existing strategy; several workshops over weeks to build a cascade properly.
Plate · The model
The components
Winning aspiration
The purpose of the enterprise framed as winning with customers, guiding all subsequent choices without pretending to be a strategy in itself.
Signals of strength
Defined around customers and winning, not internal financial targets · Ambitious enough to force real choices downstream · Genuinely shared by the leadership team
Where to play
The chosen playing field: which segments, channels, geographies, product categories and stages of production the business will compete in, and which it will not.
Signals of strength
Names specific segments, channels and geographies · Contains explicit decisions not to play somewhere · Feasible ground on which the aspiration could actually be achieved
How to win
The theory of advantage on the chosen field: the way the business will create superior value for customers relative to competitors, through lower cost or differentiation.
Signals of strength
States a definite advantage rather than listing virtues · Defensible against named competitors on that field · Forms a coherent pair with the where-to-play choice
Core capabilities
The small set of reinforcing activities that, performed together at the highest standard, deliver the how-to-win. Configuration matters more than any single capability.
Signals of strength
A short list of activities, not a skills inventory · Each capability traceably serves the how-to-win · Gaps are named and carry investment plans
Management systems
The systems, structures and measures that build the capabilities, support the choices and reveal when a condition underpinning the strategy stops being true.
Signals of strength
Measures track the strategy's load-bearing conditions · Review rhythms exist to revisit the choices, not just report results · Systems build capability rather than merely monitor it
When it earns its keep
- Strategy exists as plans, budgets and initiatives but nobody can state the choices behind them. The cascade forces the choices into the open.
- You are entering a market or repositioning and need where-to-play and how-to-win decided as a matched pair rather than drifting into both.
- Strategy must cascade through levels: a category, brand or function can nest its own five choices inside the level above, which is the model's quiet strength.
- An existing strategy needs a coherence test: whether the capabilities and management systems actually support the way the business claims it wins.
And when it doesn't
- The market is so nascent or turbulent that where-to-play cannot yet be chosen honestly. Discovery-driven approaches and cheap experiments should precede the cascade, not follow it.
- The organisation faces a specific crisis whose nature is not understood. Diagnosis comes first; Rumelt's kernel is built for that, the cascade assumes the challenge is broadly known.
- Winning is the wrong frame: regulated monopolies, public services and internal functions with a mandate rather than competitors need the questions heavily adapted.
- Leadership will not close options. Filled in without the will to exclude, the cascade becomes a beautifully formatted description of indecision.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- A map of the realistic playing fields: segments, channels, geographies and stages of the value chain the business could occupy.
- Customer and competitor evidence solid enough to say how the business could win on a chosen field, whether through lower cost or differentiation.
- An honest audit of current capabilities and management systems against those the candidate strategies would require.
- A financial baseline and a working definition of what winning would look like against it.
- 1
Set the winning aspiration
Define the purpose of the enterprise in terms of winning with specific customers, because aspiring merely to participate produces mediocrity budgets. Lafley and Martin are pointed on this: playing to play is not a strategy. The aspiration should be ambitious enough to force the choices that follow.
- 2
Generate where-to-play and how-to-win pairs
These two choices are the heart of strategy and only make sense together: a playing field you cannot win on, or an advantage with no field to express it, is not a choice. Generate at least three genuinely different pairs, including one that feels uncomfortable, before evaluating any of them.
- 3
Test what would have to be true
For each candidate pair, reverse-engineer the conditions under which it would be a winning strategy: about the industry, customers, relative position and competitor response. Then test only the conditions the group is least confident about. This replaces arguing about opinions with examining conditions, and it is the engine of the whole method.
- 4
Choose, and define the core capabilities
Make the choice, then specify the small set of reinforcing activities the business must perform at a standard competitors cannot match. The test is the activity system: capabilities should form a self-reinforcing configuration in service of the how-to-win, not a list of generic strengths.
- 5
Build the management systems
Design the systems, structures and measures that build the capabilities and keep the choices alive: review rhythms, resourcing rules and the specific metrics that would reveal a load-bearing condition failing. Without this fifth box the first four decay into a document.
Reading the result
A one-page cascade of five nested choices, each consistent with and reinforcing the others, plus the shortlist of conditions that would have to be true for the strategy to win and the measures that watch them.
- Read where-to-play and how-to-win first and as a pair; they do the heavy lifting, and the other three boxes exist to motivate, enable and sustain them.
- Test coherence in both directions: an inspiring aspiration with unfunded capabilities is a poster, and strong capabilities serving no stated advantage are overhead.
- Look for the words 'we will not'. A cascade without exclusions has not made choices.
- Check that at least one tracked condition could realistically fail; a strategy whose assumptions are all safe is describing the past.
A worked example
A premium stationery brand decides where it will win
A Midlands-based premium stationery maker, cloth-bound notebooks, letterpress cards and a small fountain-pen range, turns over £6m but has stalled. Digital note-taking erodes everyday use while imported lookalikes undercut it at retail, and a legacy office-supplies wholesale line absorbs management attention. The founding family and managing director run the strategy choice cascade over three workshops.
- Winning aspiration
- First draft was 'grow to £10m at 12% margin', which the facilitator rejected as a goal, not an aspiration. Reworked to 'be the stationery brand UK gift-buyers reach for first when the writing matters'. It names the customer, frames winning, and immediately casts doubt on the office-supplies line.
- Where to play
- Chosen field: premium gifting and personal-ritual segments; direct-to-consumer online plus around 200 curated gift and department-store doors; UK first with English-speaking export served through the DTC channel. Explicitly not playing in back-to-school, office supplies or supermarket own-label tenders, all of which the business had been quietly pursuing.
- How to win
- Differentiation, priced 30 to 40% above mass brands: certified British papermaking, visible heritage manufacture, and a personalisation service with 48-hour turnaround that imports cannot match from overseas. Cost leadership was tested as a pair with the supermarket channel and failed its would-have-to-be-true conditions within an hour.
- Core capabilities
- Four reinforcing activities: small-batch finishing and embossing, personalisation operations at retail speed, brand storytelling with provenance content, and curation of wholesale doors to protect price integrity. One honest gap surfaced: DTC merchandising analytics, with a hire and a systems budget attached.
- Management systems
- Monthly sell-through by door with a floor that triggers exit from underperforming stockists, contribution margin per DTC order, a twice-yearly gift-buyer brand tracker, and an annual review of the load-bearing condition: that gift-buyers keep paying the premium in a weaker economy.
The read. The cascade's real work was exclusion: the office-supplies wholesale line, £800k of revenue defended for a decade, proved contribution-negative once service costs were allocated, and exiting it funds the personalisation capacity. The strategy now stands or falls on one named condition, premium gifting demand holding through a downturn, and the management system is built to catch that early rather than explain it afterwards.
Pitfalls
- Filling in the five boxes as a form. A cascade containing no 'we will not' statements is a description of the current business, not a strategy.
- Writing the aspiration as a financial target. Goals answer none of the four questions below them.
- Choosing where to play without a matched how to win, which produces presence without advantage, or an advantage with nowhere to express itself.
- Listing generic strengths ('great people', 'strong brand') as core capabilities instead of the specific activity system the how-to-win requires.
- Stopping after the third box. Without capabilities investment and management systems, the choices decay into last year's slide.
- Running would-have-to-be-true as a formality, testing only the conditions everyone is already confident about.
What the critics say
The evidence base is one company narrated by its own chief executive. Nearly every case is Procter & Gamble under Lafley, and Rosenzweig's halo-effect argument warns that inferring method from a successful firm's self-account overstates causality; several showcased wins, including the Olay masstige strategy, looked considerably less decisive in later years.
Rosenzweig, P. (2007) The Halo Effect... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. New York: Free Press.
The cascade treats strategy as a deliberate, ex-ante set of choices. Mintzberg and Waters showed that realised strategy blends deliberate intent with emergent patterns of action, and critics argue a cascade fixed in advance can suppress exactly the learning through which strategies actually form, particularly outside stable consumer markets.
Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J. A. (1985) 'Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent', Strategic Management Journal, 6(3), pp. 257-272.
The framework assumes the competitive game is already understood. Martin himself, comparing the book with Rumelt's work, accepts that the cascade offers little help with diagnosing what is going on, which is the harder problem in crises and ill-structured situations.
Martin, R. L. (2024) 'Good Strategy/Bad Strategy & Playing to Win', Roger Martin on Medium.
Run it as a workshop
This is a stress-test of an existing strategy, not a blank-page brainstorm; bring the current strategy, plan or pitch into the room to interrogate against the five questions. A cascade with no 'we will not' statements anywhere in it has not actually chosen anything yet.
Running order
| State the current strategy plainly, in the room's own words | 15 min |
| Winning Aspiration: is it a real aspiration, or a financial target dressed up as one | 20 min |
| Where to Play: name what is deliberately excluded, not just included | 30 min |
| How to Win: does it match where you chose to play | 30 min |
| Capabilities and Management Systems: do they actually support the choices above | 30 min |
| Read the cascade back and find the weakest link | 15 min |
| Total | 2h 20m |
You will need
- The five-box cascade drawn large on a wall
- The current strategy document, plan or pitch deck, printed
- A dedicated 'we will not' sheet, kept visible throughout
- Sticky notes in a distinct colour for anything that looks unmatched between boxes
Traps to avoid
- Filling in the five boxes as a form to complete rather than a set of real choices. If nothing has been ruled out, nothing has actually been decided.
- Writing the Winning Aspiration as a financial target. A number answers none of the four questions sitting underneath it.
- Choosing Where to Play without a matched How to Win, which produces presence in a market with no actual advantage once you're there, or an advantage with nowhere to express itself.
- Treating one afternoon as the finished cascade. This session stress-tests and sharpens; building a genuinely new cascade from nothing takes several workshops over weeks, and the room should know that going in.
Sources and further reading
- Lafley, A. G. and Martin, R. L. (2013) Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press. ↗
- Lafley, A. G., Martin, R. L., Rivkin, J. W. and Siggelkow, N. (2012) 'Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy', Harvard Business Review, 90(9), September 2012. ↗
- Martin, R. L. (2021) 'Decoding the Strategy Choice Cascade', Roger Martin on Medium. ↗
- Martin, R. L. (2014) 'The Big Lie of Strategic Planning', Harvard Business Review, 92(1), January-February 2014.