Strategy Cascade

A strategy is five linked choices, and each one has to fit the others. Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley named them the Strategy Cascade in Playing to Win: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, the must-have capabilities, and the enabling management systems. Where to play and how to win are the heart of it. A payments company that chooses to play in small-business invoicing and to win on setup time has made a strategy. One that “aims to be the leading fintech platform” has made a wish. The cascade also nests. The enterprise makes its five choices, each business unit makes its own inside those, and so on down to a single team.

We use the cascade as a completeness check. Hand a leadership team the five boxes and the gaps show up fast. The aspiration is filled in, where to play is a list of every market they touch, and nobody has written down how they win. The cascade also gives iterative strategy development something specific to test, since each iteration puts one of the five choices on trial.

Rumelt’s kernel starts from a diagnosis of the obstacle. The cascade starts from the choices. Run both and they catch different failures. For where-to-play choices, Wardley Mapping shows which parts of the value chain are worth fighting over. A team that can’t name its own where-to-play and how-to-win isn’t executing the strategy. It’s guessing at it.

Resources

• A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, “Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)
• Iterative Strategy Development — run the cascade’s choices as hypotheses and test them in cycles
• Wardley Mapping — map the landscape before you choose where to play
• Change Vision & Strategy — workshop where we set strategy with leadership teams