The questions you may have when using the Playing to win strategy
When and why you should read it
If you plan to consider strategic pivots in your organization, and Playing to win is your go-to methodology, you should review the questions below before engaging several team members in the strategic process. Those questions will likely arise along the way, so be prepared in advance.
Playing to win strategy in a nutshell
The Playing to Win strategy framework, developed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, is a powerful approach to creating and implementing practical business strategies. I like this approach mainly because of its simplicity. It comprises two frameworks: the Strategy Process Map and the Strategy Choice Cascade. Both are the essence of the Playing to Win approach. Still, the first is more often used to develop a strategy, and the second to communicate it effectively.
Strategy process map
This framework consists of seven steps designed to develop a new strategy:
Identify the problem
Frame a strategic question
Generate possibilities
What would have to be true
Identification of barriers
Conduct tests
Choose a strategic direction
This process is a step-by-step guideline for working on the strategy.
Strategy choice cascade
This framework is built around five essential questions that form the core of a grand strategy:
What is our Winning Aspiration?
Where will we play?
How will we win in chosen markets?
What capabilities must we have?
What management systems do we need?
Key questions that arise during conducting the Strategy Process Map
Those two frameworks work hand-in-hand, but I will mainly go through the steps of the Strategy Process Map used during strategy development. For critical steps, I would list and answer the key questions to address to deliver the value.
How can we be sure that we identified the right problem?
Related to the steps: Identity the problem and frame the strategic question
Identifying a problem stage may seem easy, as companies usually have at least a broad understanding of their challenges. However, the tricky part is identifying the problem and summarising all critical aspects, not the most obvious ones. An analysis of the competitors, industry, customer profile, strengths, and weaknesses should precede proper identification. All those findings should then be summarised in the strategic question as a "How Might We".
How would we know that the strategic question is good enough? The rule of thumb is that it should be as specific as possible. Let's look at a couple of examples:
How might we find new customers for our core product?
How might we attract young adults to onboard our product right now, even though they would need us 2 years from now?
The second one is more precise and adequately communicates the company's challenge. The first one is too vague to be called a challenge. It is every company's interest to find new customers.
As practical advice, if the strategic question doesn't seem clear to everyone, it needs fixing.
How can we generate the best possibilities to address the strategic question?
Related to the step: Generate possibilities
Generating potential solutions is essential for Playing to Win to work. We should have distinctive and fresh ideas to ensure our strategic exercise brings value. In reality, it is hard to achieve as most people who work on this strategy are very much embedded into the company context, which leads their ideas to be more down-to-earth rather than challenging the status quo.
To combat that, we can introduce several stimulation techniques rather than the brainstorming that is too often used.
I strongly recommend using the techniques below, but any other methods from the creative thinking category would work.
Collage - a technique in which you ask the team to create an image or magazine frontpage from scraps of the newspapers. It is an effective method for visualizing your new strategic directions.
Pyramid of associations - a technique to stimulate out-of-the-box ideas. You start by simplifying the challenge to one or two words, such as, "expansion" for direction that revolves around new locations or markets. Then, you list six random words at the bottom of the pyramid, and you come off the connections for each pair of words. Once you reach the top of the pyramid, you should have several stimulating thoughts on achieving your strategic direction.
"If [a person] would approach this challenge, how would they solve it?" The essence of this exercise is to answer this question in several iterations by putting different people's names in the beginning. The idea is to trigger different perspectives, such as those of Steve Jobs, Muhammad Ali, and Mother Teresa.
How do we formulate assumptions for the "What would have to be true" stage?
Related to the step: What would have to be true
Make sure that you list your insights in the form of assumptions. Those can't be questions or sentences with multiple options. Instead, use simple statements with clear messages, ie:
“Buyer purchases the product for the user” versus “Is buyer different from the user for this product?”
“Gen Z users are willing to pay more for this service” versus “Gen Z users are willing to pay more for this product or at least not less than the other generations”.
Putting "what would have to be true" sentences in the correct format is critical to follow the next step of the process.
How to distinguish manageable barriers from death-end ones?
Related to the step: Identify barriers
When you start to analyze your assumptions to identify the barriers, you may reach the conclusion that some of them are impossible to address. For instance, if your assumption is: "People aged >70 will become active TikTok users", you could easily see that this assumption is impossible to prove. If this assumption is essential for a specific strategic direction, you may need to drop it from your considerations. This is why the stage of identity barriers is so important.
What does it mean to conduct good enough tests? How should we evaluate their output?
Related to the step: Conduct Tests
By default, when we think of testing something, top of mind are A/B tests, experiments, or any quantitative surveys. But, testing in a strategic context is more of an art than science. We should pick the method and measure that align with what we consider as success or proof for our assumptions. For example, suppose you run a bakery and think of expanding your offering to salads. In that case, you can assume that selling 5-10 salads a day will be enough to add to your regular offer. Why? Because preparing such a number of salads doesn't cost much, and it will bring you a profit from the very beginning. Your test should have a limited scale, like selling three salads a day for 10 straight days is enough to get proof.
Keeping those answers at hand to help you with applying Playing to win in practice.