Craft · Builder
Five questions. One page. Built in your browser.
This builder assembles a one-page strategy brief from A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin's Strategic Choice Cascade — the five-question framework from their book Playing to Win. Type your answers, generate the brief, then print it or export it as text. Nothing you type is sent anywhere; it exists only in this browser tab.
Source: Lafley, A.G. & Martin, R.L., Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.
01 — Before You Type
What you're browsing for vs. what the cascade forces.
Most people come looking for a "strategy template" — something to fill in quickly. What the Strategic Choice Cascade actually gives you is narrower and more useful: a test of whether five specific choices reinforce each other, not just a place to list them.
- Winning Aspiration — what winning specifically looks like, testable, not a mission statement.
- Where to Play — the markets, segments, channels and geographies you compete in — and just as importantly, the ones you don't.
- How to Win — your source of advantage in that chosen arena: cost, differentiation, or a specific capability competitors can't easily match.
- Capabilities — the reinforcing set of activities you must be exceptional at to win where you've chosen to play, this way.
- Management Systems — the structures, measures and processes that support those capabilities and tell you if any answer above has stopped being true.
Lafley and Martin's core argument is that most strategy documents fail because they read like a list of good ideas rather than an integrated cascade — each choice should constrain and reinforce the others, not sit independently on the page.
02 — The Builder
Answer the five questions.
Write in your own words — there's no ideal length. Leave anything blank if you haven't made that choice yet; the brief will say so honestly rather than inventing an answer.
Good aspirations are falsifiable: someone outside the room could look at the result later and agree whether you won or not.
A "where to play" that lists everything is not a choice. The value is in what you rule out.
This should answer directly to the arena in Question 2 — a generic "great service" answer usually means the arena isn't specific enough yet.
A short, specific list beats a long, generic one. If it could describe any competitor too, it isn't a real capability choice yet.
This is the choice people skip. Without it, you won't know your strategy has broken until the results already have.
03 — Stress-Test
Not a score. A question.
A five-line brief can't be graded from the outside — only you know whether your capabilities genuinely support your chosen way to win. What the book itself recommends instead is a reverse-engineering test: for each of your five answers, ask what would have to be true for it to hold.
For each answer above, ask:
- What would have to be true about the market for this to work?
- What would have to be true about our customers' behaviour or preferences?
- What would have to be true about competitors — what they can and can't easily copy?
- What would have to be true about our own capabilities — do we already have them, or are we betting we can build them?
If any required condition is shaky or untested, that's not a reason to abandon the brief — it's the specific thing to go test next, before committing further resources to it.
04 — FAQ
Common questions.
Where does my data go when I click Generate?
Nowhere. Generate, Print and Export all run entirely in your browser with plain JavaScript — nothing you type is sent to a server, logged, or stored anywhere. Refreshing the page clears everything, which is also why Export exists: to save a copy before you close the tab.
Why five questions instead of a longer strategic-planning template?
That's the specific discipline of the Strategic Choice Cascade — Lafley and Martin's argument is that most strategy documents fail not from having too few ideas but from listing too many disconnected priorities. Five integrated choices, each constraining the others, forces the hard trade-offs that a longer list lets you avoid.
Is this the official Playing to Win template?
No. This is an independent, browser-based builder inspired by the published Strategic Choice Cascade framework from Lafley & Martin's book. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sourced from any official Playing to Win toolkit or software product.
What if I can't answer one of the five questions yet?
Leave it blank and generate anyway — the brief will mark it "not yet answered" rather than inventing a placeholder answer for you. An honest gap is more useful than a filled-in box that hides the fact you haven't made that choice yet.
Does this page score or grade my strategy?
No. There's no scoring here, because a five-line brief cannot be graded from the outside — only you know whether your capabilities genuinely support your chosen way to win. Instead, the stress-test section gives you the same reverse-engineering question the book itself recommends: what would have to be true for each answer to hold?
05 — Sources
Where the framework comes from
- Lafley, A.G. & Martin, Roger L. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013 — the original source of the Strategic Choice Cascade and its five questions.rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/playing-to-win · accessed 27 Jul 2026
- Martin, Roger L. — “Strategy,” author's own site, describing the cascade as “five interrelated and powerful choices that position an organization to win.”rogerlmartin.com/thought-pillars/strategy · accessed 27 Jul 2026
- Harvard Business Review — “Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works,” HBR webinar page summarising the book and its authors.hbr.org/webinar/2014/12/playing-to-win-how-strategy-really-works · accessed 27 Jul 2026
About this page: the five questions, their order, and the "what would have to be true" stress-test are drawn from the sources above. This builder is an independent implementation, not an official Playing to Win product, and invents no scoring system of its own.
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