MAGNET LABS
Start a Lab

Conscious LeaderInner Game

Play to Win

from our strategy is to be the best→to here are the five hard choices we made — and the one assumption we’ll test first

The Goal

Move from “strategy as wish list” to an integrated cascade of five choices that uniquely positions you in your market.

Ideal For

Leadership offsites, quarterly strategy resets, market-shift moments, post-funding pivots, and any room where “strategy” means five different things to five different people.

The Shift

From our strategy is to be the best to here are the five hard choices we made — and the one assumption we’ll test first.

The Science

Teams whose leaders agree on priorities tend to perform better, and unclear roles are associated with lower performance. Deciding in advance what you’ll do when a situation arises is associated with markedly better follow-through, and in a randomized trial, founders taught to test their ideas as hypotheses were more likely to drop or change weak ones.

The Choice Cascade, step by step

  1. Bring a challenge (pre-work)One strategic challenge framed as “How might we…?”, plus your private top three Where to Play priorities and one sentence on How to Win.
  2. CascadeGenerate at least two options, then run one through all five choices: winning aspiration, where to play (and where not), how to win, capabilities and management systems, the last two written as if-then rules.
  3. What must be trueFor each choice, ask what must be true for it to succeed, across the spaces, the value to customers, our capabilities and competitor reaction. Rank every assumption from most to least worrisome.
  4. Test the shakiestDesign the cheapest test of the most worrisome assumption.
  5. The barrier testOne assumption, one test, one owner, one date, and the pass-or-fail line agreed now. The owner reports at the next leadership meeting, or within four to six weeks.

The techniques, and why they work

Five integrated choices

Winning aspiration, Where to Play, How to Win, capabilities, management systems: A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin’s Playing to Win cascade. Teams whose leaders agree on priorities tend to perform better, and unclear roles are associated with lower performance.

What would have to be true?

For each choice, ask what must be true for it to succeed, across the spaces, customer value, your capabilities and competitor reaction, then rank the assumptions by worry. The question comes from Lafley, Martin, Rivkin and Siggelkow’s strategic choice-structuring process.

Test the shakiest assumption first

Design the cheapest test of the most worrisome assumption and agree the pass line before anyone sees the result. In a randomized trial, founders taught to treat their ideas as hypotheses to test were more likely to drop or change weak ones.

Selected research

Also runs as a half day · P1.8 HD

Play to Win – Half Day

Half day (3 h 30 min) for a leadership team with a real strategic choice, with an optional 60-minute decision session 4–6 weeks later.

from which option is right?→to what would have to be true — and how will we find out?

The Goal

Turn a live strategic choice into real options, a cascade for each, and the tests that let the evidence choose.

Ideal For

Leadership teams facing a real strategic choice in the next quarter: new markets, portfolio bets, post-funding direction, a strategy that has stalled.

The Science

Teams that agree on priorities tend to perform better, and deciding in advance what you’ll do in a situation is associated with markedly better follow-through. In a randomized trial, founders taught to test their ideas as hypotheses were more likely to drop or change weak ones.

The techniques, and why they work

Real options, one cascade each

Frame the choice as a question, generate genuinely different options, and run each through Playing to Win’s five choices. Teams that agree on priorities tend to perform better.

What would have to be true?

For every option, list the conditions that must hold, then find the barrier conditions the team doubts most. This is the choice-structuring process from Lafley, Martin, Rivkin and Siggelkow (2012).

Let the evidence choose

Design tests for the barrier conditions and agree in advance what result would change the choice. In a randomized trial, founders taught to treat their ideas as hypotheses to test were more likely to drop or change weak ones.

Selected research

Related labs

From the research

The thinking behind this lab, published in full:

Related labs

Run this lab with your team Try it first: 60-Minute Challenge LabBrowse all labs