Playing to Play
The default posture of most organisations, and the mirror image of Playing to Win: serve the market, improve steadily, close no options, hope.
The symptoms are recognisable from across the room. Initiative lists labelled "the strategy", the specimens catalogued in Strategy Impostors. A refusal to state what the company will not do. Benchmarking rivals and copying their moves with more effort. Purpose statements floating free of any cascade, the failure examined in Corporate Purpose. Choosing Where to Play first, then hunting for a How to Win. And mistaking operational improvement for advantage, the most expensive way to avoid a choice.
The tell
One test catches the posture every time: every "choice" fails the Opposite Test. Serve customers well, invest in innovation, attract great people: no rival is pursuing the reverse of any of it, so nothing is genuinely at stake and no option has been closed. A strategy in which nothing could be wrong is not a strategy, it is a mood board.
Why it is fatal slowly
Playing to play feels safe, which is its danger: the costs arrive gradually and are booked as market conditions. Under winner-takes-most dynamics, the undifferentiated middle is squeezed from both ends, winners compounding above, price competition below, and the squeeze tightens every year as the economics of winning steepen. The companies it kills rarely notice the cause, because every individual quarter looked like prudent management.
The exit
The exit is not more effort. Effort is what playing to play already runs on. The exit is the Strategy Choice Cascade, honestly run, with the discomfort of real trade-offs: a victory condition, a chosen field, a theory of advantage a rival could sanely reject. Discomfort is the diagnostic; if the cascade session produced no arguments, it produced no strategy either.
How this connects to OKRs
The OKR-shaped version of playing to play is a portfolio made entirely of Operational Excellence OKRs, nothing traced to a How to Win: better numbers, same posture. It is the most common portfolio we are shown, and it is why our methodology insists on asking which strategic choice each OKR serves before asking whether it is well written.
One line to keep: A portfolio of all-operational OKRs is Playing to Play in goal form: better numbers, same posture.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
What is Playing to Play? +
The default posture: serve the market, improve steadily, avoid hard choices, hope. It feels prudent and closes no options, so every “choice” would survive its own reversal. It is the most common strategy in the world, and the most quietly fatal.
How do I spot Playing to Play in our OKRs? +
A portfolio made entirely of operational-excellence goals, none traced to a How to Win: better numbers, same posture. That is why we ask which strategic choice each OKR serves before asking whether it is well written.
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 →