Playing to Win: Lafley and Martin's Strategy Choice Cascade

By Brian Tr · Updated Oct 10, 2026

Playing to Win is a strategy framework from A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin that treats strategy as five linked choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, the capabilities you must have, and the management systems that support them. Each choice narrows the next, which is why it's called a cascade.

This guide explains each choice, how the cascade works, the "what would have to be true" method for testing a strategy, and how the framework differs from planning and from other strategy tools. It ends with a template you can copy.

Key Facts

• What it is: a five-question model of strategy, published in the 2013 book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin.
• The five choices: winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.
• Core idea: the authors define strategy as choice, not as a vision or a plan.
• Scale: small organizations may have a single cascade, while large ones have levels of choices and interconnected cascades.
• Companion method: "what would have to be true," a question Martin uses to turn opinion fights into testable conditions.
• Best for: leadership teams that have a plan and a vision but can't say, in one page, what they will and won't do.

What is the Playing to Win framework?

Playing to Win comes out of Lafley's years as head of Procter & Gamble and Martin's work as a strategy adviser and academic. Martin's own site describes the approach as founded on a set of five interrelated choices that position an organization to win, and says strategy is not a long planning exercise or document.

The five choices are known as the strategic choice cascade. Farnam Street's summary of the book lists them like this:

1. Winning aspiration: the enterprise's purpose and motivating aspiration.
2. Where to play: the playing field where that aspiration can be achieved.
3. How to win: the way to win on the chosen playing field.
4. Core capabilities: the set and configuration of capabilities needed to win that way.
5. Management systems: the systems and measures that enable the capabilities and support the choices.

The same summary says the authors blame ineffective strategy on a misconception of what strategy really is, plus a reluctance to make hard choices. Leaders often treat strategy as a vision or a plan, and neither one forces a choice.

The five choices in plain language

1. Winning aspiration

What does winning mean for this business? It's the purpose and the outcome you're reaching for. A vague answer ("be the best") gives the rest of the cascade nothing to push against. A usable one says who you want to be better for, and by what measure.

2. Where to play

Where will you compete, and where won't you? That covers customer segments, geographies, products, channels and stages of the value chain. This is the choice most teams dodge, because saying yes to a segment means saying no to others.

3. How to win

On the field you picked, why would customers choose you over alternatives? Martin ties this to the idea of competitive advantage, so it overlaps with Porter's generic strategies and your competitive advantage. The difference is that here, how to win has to fit the where to play above it.

4. Core capabilities

What must you be great at to win that way? List the few activities that carry the strategy, not every skill you have. If your how to win is speed, a slow approval process is a capability gap. For a deeper look at this layer, see core competencies.

5. Management systems

What structures, measures and routines keep the capabilities alive? Think planning cycles, metrics, incentives, hiring and budgeting. The Farnam Street summary describes these as the systems that enable the capabilities and support the choices. A strategy with no system behind it tends to fade after the offsite.

How the cascade works

The cascade is a chain of constraints. The aspiration limits where you can sensibly play. Where you play limits how you can win. How you win decides which capabilities matter. And the capabilities decide what systems you need.

Two things follow from that:

• It runs both ways. Strategy is iterative, and the parts influence one another. A capability you can't build may force you back up and change where to play.
• A real choice has a real alternative. A useful test: if nobody would ever choose the opposite, you haven't chosen anything. "We'll be customer-focused" fails it. "We'll serve mid-size manufacturers and ignore enterprise" passes.

Roger Martin has also said that everybody in an organization is a strategist, and that you can start by making the choices you control within your own domain. So a team lead can run a small cascade for their own team, nested inside the company's.

The "what would have to be true" method

Choosing is only half of it. How do you decide between two options when smart people disagree? Martin's answer is to stop arguing about what's true today and ask a different question: what would have to be true for this option to be a great choice?

IDEO U describes the origin: a mining company meeting where people kept arguing about current limitations. Asking what would need to be true for an option to be a fantastic choice moved the room from opinion to creative thinking. The same article says the question helps you:

• Build an argument for each possibility.
• Design tests to learn more about each one.
• Decide on evidence rather than conjecture.

If everything that would need to be true can plausibly be true, that option is a candidate for your strategy.

A short worked example (hypothetical)

Imagine a hypothetical software company deciding whether to move from small businesses to mid-size companies. Instead of voting, the team lists conditions:

The low-confidence rows are where to spend the next month. If the tests come back badly, the team has learned that cheaply, before committing budget. The numbers here are made up, but the pattern is the point: surface the conditions, then test the ones you're least sure about.

IDEO U also tells the Tennis Canada story. Martin joined that organization's board in 2005, when it was stretched across too many events with limited resources. The team asked what would have to be true to focus on fewer things, tested the conditions (could it hire world-class coaches and win more sponsors?), and acted once the answers were encouraging.

Planning versus strategy

Martin draws a hard line between a plan and a strategy. In his Harvard Business Review article "The Big Lie of Strategic Planning" (January-February 2014 issue), the summary says executives find strategy scary because it forces them to confront a future they can only guess at, and that choosing a strategy means decisions that explicitly cut off possibilities and options.

A plan is a list of things you intend to do. A strategy is a set of integrated choices about where to play and how to win, backed by a theory of why it will work. Planning is comfortable because nothing in it has to be given up. Strategy isn't, because each choice closes a door.

That's why the order matters. Start with the choices and the logic, then plan the work. Plans written before the choices tend to become a collection of initiatives with no spine.

Playing to Win vs other strategy frameworks

The frameworks aren't rivals. Porter's generic strategies and Blue Ocean strategy can feed the how-to-win box. The strategic planning process and OKRs sit downstream, turning chosen strategy into work.

How to run a Playing to Win session

Step 1: Start with a draft aspiration

Write one or two sentences on what winning looks like. Expect to revise it later.

Step 2: List the real options for where to play and how to win

Name three or four coherent combinations, not a menu of everything. Each combination pairs a field with a way of winning.

Step 3: Ask what would have to be true for each

For every option, write the conditions on customers, competitors, capabilities and economics. Mark the ones the team doubts most.

Step 4: Test the biggest doubts

Run the cheapest test you can for each doubtful condition: an interview batch, a small pilot, a data pull. Let the evidence rank the options.

Step 5: Choose, then fill in capabilities and systems

Pick the option whose conditions hold up. Then name the few capabilities it needs and the management systems that will protect them.

Step 6: Write it on one page and revisit

Put all five choices on a single page. Review it on a set rhythm and when a key condition changes. Compare it against your strategy vs tactics split to make sure day-to-day work is serving the choices.

Playing to Win template

Copy this table into a doc or spreadsheet.

Examples by business function

The framework is written for whole enterprises, but the cascade nests. Here is how a function might use it. All examples are hypothetical.

Each row would still need capabilities and systems underneath it. And each should be consistent with the company-level cascade above it.

Playing to Win dos and don'ts

Do

• Make choices with a real alternative. If nobody could reasonably choose the opposite, rewrite it.
• Test the doubtful conditions. Use "what would have to be true" before you commit budget.
• Keep it to one page. If it doesn't fit, you probably haven't chosen.
• Connect it to execution. Link the cascade to your strategy execution routines so choices turn into work.
• Let teams run their own cascade. Keep each one consistent with the level above.

Don't

• Don't mistake a vision or plan for the strategy. Neither forces a trade-off.
• Don't answer where to play with "everyone." That's the absence of a choice.
• Don't skip capabilities and systems. A strategy nobody is set up to deliver stays on paper.
• Don't treat it as a one-time exercise. Revisit when the conditions change.
• Don't assume the framework fits unchanged. It was shaped by one very large consumer goods company, so smaller teams should scale the process down.

Learn more

• Porter's generic strategies: three classic ways to answer how to win.
• Blue Ocean strategy: a way to find uncontested space for the where-to-play choice.
• Strategic planning process: turning chosen strategy into a plan.
• Core competencies: deeper help on the capabilities box.
• Strategy vs tactics: checking that daily work serves the choices.