Playing to Win: The Strategy Cascade

Strategy is choice, not aspiration. If your strategy could apply to any company in your industry, it's not a strategy — it's a horoscope. "We will be the leading provider of innovative solutions" is not a strategy. It's a sentence that got approved because nobody could disagree with it, which is exactly the problem. Real strategy is uncomfortable. It requires saying no to good things so you can say yes to the right things.

Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley built the Playing to Win cascade from a simple observation: most organisations confuse having a plan with having a strategy. A plan is a list of things you're going to do. A strategy is a set of choices about where you will compete and how you will win. If you haven't made those choices — really made them, with real trade-offs — you don't have a strategy. You have a to-do list with a mission statement on top.

The cascade is five choices. They must reinforce each other. If any one breaks, the whole thing breaks.

Loading Company Context

Before starting, look for a company-context.md file. Read it if available, focusing on: current strategy, competitive landscape, resources, and any prior cascade work.

If you find context with an existing strategy section:

• Draft a first-pass cascade from what's already there. Pre-populate each of the five choices based on what the context implies, even if imperfectly.
• Present this draft cascade to the user to argue with. A wrong draft you can push back on is worth more than a blank page you're staring at.
• Flag any choices that seem vague, contradictory, or missing. Say where the cascade looks strong and where it looks like wallpaper.

If no context is available, ask:

• What business are we building a strategy for?
• What do you sell, and to whom?
• Who are your most important competitors?
• Do you have an existing strategy document? (If yes, get it — even if it's bad, it's a starting point.)
• Have you done this exercise before? What happened last time?

Additional documents that add value: strategy deck, competitive analysis, customer research, financial performance data, prior Playing to Win work, any output from the VRIO, Market Position, or Strategy Map skills.

Determine the Mode

Ask: "Are we building or rebuilding the full cascade, doing a quick review of an existing one, or setting up alert triggers?"

Then follow the appropriate track below.

Mode 1: Diagnostic (Full Session)

Time guidance: 30-45 minutes minimum. But the best strategic thinking happens between sessions, not during them. Don't rush through choices to fill in boxes. If a choice isn't clear, mark it as contested and come back to it. A cascade with one honest "we haven't decided this yet" is worth more than five choices that sound decisive but aren't.

This is the deep session. Run it the first time, or when the existing cascade no longer describes what you're actually doing.

Choice 1: What Is Our Winning Aspiration?

This is not a vision statement. It's not "be the best" or "maximise shareholder value" or any other sentence that could be printed on a coffee mug. A winning aspiration is a concrete picture of what winning looks like for this specific company.

Ask:

• "If you're wildly successful in five years, what does the business look like? Not revenue targets — what are customers saying? What are competitors doing in response? What has changed in the market because of you?"
• "Who are you winning against, specifically? If you can't name them, you haven't defined winning."
• "What does winning look like for your customers — not for your P&L?"

The competitor test: A real winning aspiration makes your competitors uncomfortable. If they'd shrug at yours, it's too vague. "We aspire to be the market leader in sustainable insect-based protein for European agriculture" names an arena and implies a position. "We aspire to create value for all stakeholders" is a horoscope.

The concreteness test: Can you draw a picture of it? Can you describe what a Tuesday afternoon looks like when you've won? If it's too abstract to visualise, make it more specific.

Capture the winning aspiration in one or two sentences. If it takes a paragraph, it's not crisp enough.

Choice 2: Where Will We Play?

This is about boundaries. What you exclude matters more than what you include, because inclusion is easy and exclusion is where the strategy lives. Every "where" you add dilutes your focus. Every "where" you remove sharpens it.

Map the playing field across:

• Customer segments: Which specific types of customers? Not "everyone who could use our product" — the ones you're choosing to serve at the expense of others.
• Geographies: Where physically? Where not?
• Channels: How will customers find and buy from you?
• Product/service categories: What will you offer? What won't you offer, even if you could?
• Value chain stage: What part of the customer's problem will you own? What will you leave to others?

The hard questions:

• "What are you choosing NOT to do? If you can't name what you're excluding, you haven't made a choice."
• "Is this where-to-play a deliberate choice, or is it just where you ended up? There's a difference between 'we chose mid-market' and 'mid-market is who returns our calls.'"
• "Are you trying to play everywhere? Because everywhere is another word for nowhere. Companies that try to serve every segment end up serving none of them well."

The boundary test: Draw a line around your where-to-play. Now look at what's outside the line. Does it hurt to leave it out? If it doesn't, you haven't drawn the line tight enough. Strategy should make you slightly nauseous about what you're giving up.

Choice 3: How Will We Win?

There are two ways to win. Only two. Everything else is a variant, a blend, or wishful thinking.

Cost leadership: You deliver at a cost structure competitors genuinely cannot match. Not because you work harder or accept lower margins — because something structural about your business makes you fundamentally cheaper. This has to be architectural, not just operational. "We're efficient" is not a cost advantage. "We've redesigned the value chain so that a step that costs our competitors 30% of revenue costs us 8%" is a cost advantage.

Differentiation: You deliver something customers value enough to choose you over a cheaper alternative. The differentiation must be on a dimension the customer actually cares about. Your engineering team's opinion of the product's elegance is irrelevant if the customer can't tell the difference. And it must be sustainable — not just a feature that gets copied in six months.

Ask:

• "Are you winning on cost or differentiation? Pick one. If you say both, you're almost certainly winning on neither. You're stuck in the middle — the most dangerous place in strategy."
• "What specifically can you do that your closest competitor cannot? Not 'won't.' Cannot."
• "Is your how-to-win reinforced by your where-to-play? Your choice of arena should make your advantage stronger, not weaker. If you're a differentiation player competing in price-sensitive segments, the cascade is broken."

The honesty test: Describe your how-to-win to a stranger in the industry. If they say "that sounds like everyone else," you don't have one. Go back and find what's actually different, or admit you need to build it.

Choice 4: What Capabilities Must Be in Place?

This is where strategy meets reality. The first three choices are about intent. This one is about muscle. What do you need to be able to do — and can you actually do it?

Ask:

• "What capabilities does your how-to-win absolutely require? Not nice-to-haves — the ones without which the strategy falls apart."
• "Do you have them today? If not, what's the plan: build, buy, or partner?"
• "How long will each capability take to develop? Is the timeline realistic given your resources?"
• "What capabilities are you carrying from a previous strategy that no longer serve you?"

The furniture analogy: Capabilities from a previous strategy are like furniture from a previous apartment. Some of it fits the new place perfectly. Some of it doesn't fit but you keep it because you already paid for it. And some of it is actively in the way, taking up space that the new strategy needs. Be honest about which category each capability falls into. The expensive capabilities you're proud of are the hardest to let go of — and often the most important to release.

Ask specifically:

• "What are you spending money and time on that the current strategy doesn't actually need?"
• "What's the gap between what you can do today and what the strategy requires? Is that gap closable?"
• "If you listed your top five investments of time and money right now, how many of them directly serve the cascade you've just defined?"

Build a capability map:

Choice 5: What Management Systems Are Required?

This is the wiring. Without it, the cascade is a document that lives in a drawer. Management systems are how the strategy actually gets executed — or how it gets quietly ignored while everyone goes back to doing what they were doing before the strategy session.

Four systems must align:

Measures: What are you measuring? Does it reinforce the cascade, or does it measure something the old strategy cared about? If your how-to-win is differentiation but your primary KPI is cost-per-unit, the measurement system is fighting the strategy.

Resource allocation: Where does the money go? Where does management attention go? Follow the budget and the calendar — they tell you the real strategy, regardless of what the strategy deck says. If the cascade says "invest in capability X" but the budget says "cut costs across the board," the budget wins.

Decision rights: Who decides what? Are the people closest to the where-to-play empowered to make choices that reinforce the how-to-win? Or do decisions get escalated until they lose all context?

Culture and norms: What behaviour does the cascade demand? If the how-to-win requires speed but the culture rewards consensus, you have a conflict that no strategy deck can resolve. Culture isn't something you bolt on — it's something the cascade demands, and if the demand conflicts with the current culture, one of them has to change.

Ask:

• "If I looked at your calendar, your budget, and your KPIs — would I be able to guess your strategy from them? If not, the management systems aren't aligned."
• "What behaviour does this strategy require that your current culture doesn't reward?"
• "Who in the organisation could quietly sabotage this strategy by just... not changing? What are you going to do about that?"

Testing the Cascade for Coherence

A cascade where each choice is individually sound but collectively incoherent is worse than no cascade at all. It creates the illusion of strategy while the organisation pulls in five directions.

Run three tests:

The Reinforcement Test

Take each pair of choices. Does each one make the other stronger?

• Does the winning aspiration sharpen the where-to-play?
• Does the where-to-play make the how-to-win more effective?
• Does the how-to-win dictate specific capabilities?
• Do the capabilities enable specific management systems?
• Do the management systems reinforce the winning aspiration?

If any link is weak or contradictory, the cascade breaks at that joint.

The Capability Test

For each capability you identified in Choice 4, trace it back through the cascade:

• Is this capability required by the how-to-win?
• Does the how-to-win serve the where-to-play?
• Does the where-to-play serve the winning aspiration?

If a capability can't trace a clear line back to the winning aspiration, it's either unnecessary or the cascade has a gap.

The Distinctiveness Test

Read the entire cascade out loud. Now imagine your strongest competitor reading it. Would they say "that's basically what we do too"? If yes, the cascade isn't distinctive enough. Somewhere in the five choices, you need at least one that a competitor would not or could not make. That's where the strategy lives.

What a Complete Strategy Looks Like

A complete strategy fits in five sentences. If it takes more than that, it's not clear enough.

Template:

1. We aspire to [winning aspiration — concrete, specific, names who you're winning against].
2. We will play in [specific segments, geographies, channels, categories — and what we're excluding].
3. We will win by [cost leadership or differentiation — with the specific mechanism].
4. This requires [the 3-5 capabilities without which the strategy fails].
5. We will manage this through [the measures, allocations, and systems that keep the cascade alive].

Write it out. Read it out loud. Does it sound like a strategy, or does it sound like something any company could say? If a competitor could swap in their name and it would still work, start over.

After the Cascade

Before leaving the session, name three things explicitly:

What's decided: The choices where you have genuine commitment. These are off the table for debate — the organisation can now execute against them.

What's contested: The choices where there's disagreement, uncertainty, or insufficient information. These need further work, data, or conversation. Don't pretend consensus exists when it doesn't.

What's missing: The choices that couldn't be made in this session because of unknowns. What information would resolve them? Who needs to get it? By when?

Update company-context.md

After the diagnostic, update the following in company-context.md:

Current strategy section: Replace or update with the five-sentence cascade.

Active assumptions — what the cascade depends on being true:

Add a row to the Session log:

Mode 2: Review

Time guidance: 15 minutes if the cascade is holding. If you start finding cracks, don't patch them in review mode — switch to Diagnostic.

This is the pressure test for an existing cascade. Run it quarterly, or when something meaningful changes.

Steps

1. Load company-context.md. Read the existing five-sentence cascade and session log.

1. Walk through each choice:

• Winning aspiration: Still concrete? Still the right picture of winning? Has success shifted what winning means?
• Where to play: Are you actually playing where the cascade says? Have you quietly expanded into segments or geographies that weren't in the plan? Have you retreated from ones that were?
• How to win: Is the mechanism still working? Has a competitor neutralised it? Has the market shifted so that what used to differentiate you is now table stakes?
• Capabilities required: Are you building what you said you'd build? On schedule? Or have other priorities crowded it out?
• Management systems: Are the measures still aligned? Is the budget still following the strategy, or has it reverted to the old pattern?

1. Quick coherence re-test: For each choice, ask: "Is this choice still reinforcing the others, or has drift created gaps?"

1. The key question: "Are you actually executing this cascade, or has the organisation quietly reverted to doing something else?" This is the most important question in the review. Organisations are extraordinarily skilled at maintaining the language of a strategy while abandoning its substance. The meetings still reference it. The slides still show it. But the actual decisions, the actual resource allocation, the actual behaviour — they've drifted back to whatever was comfortable before the strategy was written.

1. Update or confirm each choice and its timestamp in company-context.md.

1. If anything changed: Note what shifted and why. Did the choice change because the world changed (legitimate), or because execution was hard and the organisation took the easier path (drift)?

Mode 3: Alert Triggers

These are the tripwires that tell you the cascade is breaking before it's fully broken. Define them once, check them regularly.

Cascade-Break Triggers

A choice stops reinforcing the others:

• "If we start competing in [segment outside where-to-play], the cascade is broken — either update the where-to-play deliberately or stop doing it."
• "If our how-to-win requires capability X and we're not investing in capability X, the cascade is broken at the capability joint."
• "If our management systems are measuring things the old strategy cared about instead of what the current cascade needs, the wiring is wrong."

Drift Triggers

Behaviour diverges from stated choices:

• "If more than 20% of new revenue comes from outside the stated where-to-play, we're drifting."
• "If budget allocation doesn't match the capability-building plan for two consecutive quarters, the real strategy has changed."
• "If hiring decisions are optimising for capabilities the cascade doesn't require, we're building the wrong muscle."

Competitive Triggers

A competitor's moves invalidate your how-to-win:

• "If [competitor X] replicates our differentiation mechanism, our how-to-win needs re-examination."
• "If a new entrant offers our value proposition at a structurally lower cost, our cost/differentiation position is threatened."
• "If customer switching behaviour changes — they start comparing us on dimensions we're not competing on — the market has redefined what winning means."

Capability Triggers

A required capability isn't being built on schedule:

• "If [capability] is more than [timeframe] behind the build plan, the cascade may not be executable."
• "If a key person or partner tied to a critical capability leaves, re-test whether the capability still holds."
• "If we're substituting a cheaper version of a required capability, test whether the cheaper version actually supports the how-to-win."

Recording Triggers

Add triggers to the Active assumptions table in company-context.md:

When a trigger fires, run either a Review (if it's a single choice that's wobbling) or a full Diagnostic (if the cascade has meaningfully cracked).

Connection to Other Skills

The Playing to Win cascade doesn't exist in isolation. It connects to the rest of the Eterdis strategy operating system at specific joints:

Strategy Map: The cascade should align with both chains in the strategy map. The winning aspiration defines the top of the top-down chain. The where-to-play and how-to-win define what the delivery capability chain must produce. If the cascade says one thing and the strategy map says another, one of them is wrong.

VRIO: The capabilities required (Choice 4) are precisely the resources that need VRIO testing. A capability the cascade depends on that fails the VRIO test is a strategic vulnerability. Run VRIO on every critical capability — if it's not valuable, rare, inimitable, and organised, you're building strategy on sand.

Market Position: The where-to-play and how-to-win choices define your competitive positioning. The Market Position skill tests whether that positioning is actually defensible and whether the market sees you the way the cascade assumes. If the market position diagnostic says you're stuck in the middle, the cascade needs to make sharper choices.

First Principles: The winning aspiration should reference the theoretical maximum — what would winning look like if physics and economics were the only constraints? First principles analysis prevents the cascade from being anchored to the current state of affairs when the current state is the problem.

Culture: The management systems choice (Choice 5) requires cultural support. If the cascade demands speed but the culture rewards consensus, if it demands risk-taking but the culture punishes failure, the cascade will die on contact with the organisation. The culture skill should validate whether the cultural requirements of Choice 5 are realistic.

Framework Reference

• Playing to Win: Roger Martin & A.G. Lafley (2013), Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Harvard Business Review Press. Built from Lafley's experience as CEO of Procter & Gamble and Martin's work as Dean of the Rotman School of Management.

The Playing to Win cascade, applied through the Eterdis strategy practice. Strategy is choice — and these five choices are the ones that matter. For help making them in your business, visit eterdis.com or book a conversation at eterdis.com/contact.