Playing to Play
The default posture of most organisations, the mirror image of Playing to Win. Symptoms: - Initiative lists labelled "the strategy" (Strategy Impostors) - Refusal to state what the company will not do - Benchmarking rivals and copying their moves with more effort - Purpose statements floating free of the cascade (Corporate Purpose) - Choosing Where to Play first, then hunting for a How to Win - Mistaking operational improvement for advantage (Operational Excellence Is Not Strategy) The tell: every "choice" fails The Opposite Test.
Symptoms:
- Initiative lists labelled "the strategy" (Strategy Impostors)
- Refusal to state what the company will not do
- Benchmarking rivals and copying their moves with more effort
- Purpose statements floating free of the cascade (Corporate Purpose)
- Choosing Where to Play first, then hunting for a How to Win
- Mistaking operational improvement for advantage (Operational Excellence Is Not Strategy)
The tell: every "choice" fails The Opposite Test. Nothing is genuinely at stake; no option has been closed.
Playing to play feels safe and is fatal slowly. Under Winner-Takes-Most Dynamics, the undifferentiated middle is squeezed by winners compounding above and price competition below.
The exit is not more effort, it is the Strategy Choice Cascade, honestly run, with the discomfort of real trade-offs.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
Turn strategy into executed strategy →