Playing to Win Strategy Choice Cascade Training Course

Course overview

Strategy teams often produce plans that describe markets, ambitions and initiatives without resolving the choices that determine where the organisation will compete, how it will win, and what capabilities must change. The result is a strategy document that attracts broad agreement but offers little guidance for investment decisions, portfolio trade-offs, operating priorities or frontline action. This course gives leaders a disciplined way to turn strategic debate into an explicit, testable set of choices using the Playing to Win Choice Cascade developed by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin.

Participants learn to frame a winning aspiration, define where-to-play choices, design how-to-win choices, identify essential capabilities, and specify the management systems needed to sustain execution. They use reverse engineering, possibility generation, strategic logic testing and assumption mapping to move beyond annual planning templates. The course also addresses how to connect cascade choices to customer segments, competitor positions, value propositions, resource allocation, KPIs and governance decisions. Participants gain practical skill in distinguishing strategic choices from goals, tactics and operational improvements.

Delivery combines instructor-led explanation, worked business cases, facilitated choice-cascade workshops and peer challenge sessions. Participants apply the method to a live business unit, product line, function or strategic initiative from their own organisation. They leave with a completed first-draft Playing to Win Choice Cascade, a set of strategic assumptions to validate, a capability gap assessment, and a 90-day plan for testing and refining the choices with stakeholders.

The programme is designed for experienced managers and strategy contributors who already work with business plans, market data, investment proposals or transformation programmes and need a stronger method for making defensible strategic choices.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Construct a Playing to Win Choice Cascade for a business unit, product, function or strategic initiative
• Define a winning aspiration that sets a meaningful competitive direction rather than a financial target
• Specify where-to-play choices across customers, channels, geographies, categories and stages of the value chain
• Design how-to-win choices using customer value, relative advantage and competitor trade-off analysis
• Generate and evaluate mutually reinforcing strategic possibilities through reverse-engineering logic
• Map critical assumptions, evidence gaps and tests for validating a proposed strategic choice set
• Assess capability and management-system requirements needed to execute a Choice Cascade
• Present a concise strategy choice narrative that supports executive challenge and resource-allocation decisions

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Strategy Directors and Heads of Strategy — who must convert enterprise ambitions into coherent business-level choices
• Business Unit Leaders — who need to align market priorities, investment decisions and operating action
• Product and Portfolio Leaders — who must choose target segments, offers and sources of competitive advantage
• Transformation and PMO Leaders — who need to connect strategic choices to capability-building roadmaps
• Commercial and Marketing Directors — who shape customer, channel and proposition choices in competitive markets
• Senior Functional Leaders — who need to define how their function enables a business unit's strategic choices

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have experience contributing to annual plans, market assessments, business cases, portfolio reviews or strategic initiatives. They should be comfortable discussing customer segments, competitors, value propositions, operating capabilities, financial priorities and performance measures. Familiarity with SWOT, PESTLE, Porter’s Five Forces or Balanced Scorecard is useful but not essential; the course explains where these tools support, rather than replace, the Choice Cascade. Participants should bring a current strategic challenge and any available market, customer or performance data. No prior Playing to Win training, specialist strategy software or financial-modelling expertise is required.

Training methodology

The five days alternate short instructor-led modules with structured application of the Playing to Win Choice Cascade. Faculty demonstrate each choice through a business case, then participants work in peer challenge groups to draft and stress-test their own choices. Exercises use strategy canvases, evidence tables, competitor comparisons and assumption-test plans rather than abstract discussion. Facilitated review sessions expose inconsistencies between where-to-play, how-to-win, capabilities and management systems. The final day is an application clinic in which each participant refines an executive-ready cascade and 90-day validation plan.

Course outline

Day 1: Strategic Choice and the Playing to Win Logic

• The Playing to Win Choice Cascade and its five interdependent choices
• Distinguishing strategy from vision, goals, plans and operational improvement
• Winning aspiration as a directional competitive statement
• Choice versus consequence in strategic decision-making
• The hierarchy of enterprise, business unit and functional strategy
• Diagnosing vague strategy statements and false consensus
• Introduction to reverse engineering from a desired winning position

Workshop: Participants diagnose a published strategy statement and produce a first draft of a winning aspiration for their own strategic challenge.

Day 2: Where to Play: Defining the Competitive Arena

• Customer segment selection and needs-based market definition
• Geographic, channel and category boundaries for where-to-play choices
• Value-chain position and make-buy-partner implications
• Portfolio scope and the discipline of strategic exclusion
• Market attractiveness and right-to-win screening criteria
• Competitor set definition and strategic group analysis
• Translating market evidence into explicit where-to-play alternatives

Workshop: Participants create a where-to-play map, compare three feasible arenas and document the exclusions required by their preferred choice.

Day 3: How to Win: Building Defensible Advantage

• Customer value propositions and sources of willingness to pay
• Cost, differentiation, access and network-based advantage
• Competitor comparison using relative performance criteria
• Activity-system fit and mutually reinforcing choices
• Trade-off design and the risks of undifferentiated positioning
• Possibility generation for alternative how-to-win models
• Strategic logic tests linking where-to-play and how-to-win

Workshop: Participants develop and peer-test two how-to-win options, producing a competitive advantage statement and supporting activity-system logic.

Day 4: Capabilities, Management Systems and Strategic Validity

• Identifying essential capabilities versus table-stakes capabilities
• Capability gap assessment across people, process, technology and partnerships
• Management systems for metrics, incentives, governance and review cycles
• Resource allocation implications of strategic choices
• Assumption mapping for market, customer, competitor and execution uncertainty
• Designing low-cost tests and learning milestones
• Risk registers for strategic choice failure modes

Workshop: Participants complete a capability and management-system assessment, then produce an assumption test plan for their draft cascade.

Day 5: Integrating, Communicating and Mobilising the Cascade

• Integrating the five choices into a coherent strategic logic
• Stress-testing cascades for consistency, distinctiveness and feasibility
• Executive strategy narrative and one-page cascade communication
• Stakeholder mapping for strategy alignment and challenge
• Linking strategic choices to priorities, initiatives and KPIs
• Ninety-day validation and decision calendar
• Facilitating Choice Cascade workshops within the organisation

Workshop: Participants present an executive-ready Choice Cascade, receive structured challenge feedback, and finalise a 90-day stakeholder validation plan.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Miro, Mural

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions