Take the strategic plan of almost any organization — corporate, government, or not-for-profit — and apply one diagnostic question: does this document articulate a specific, defensible theory of why this organization will create superior value in the territory it has chosen to compete in? Not what it will do. Not what it aspires to be. Why it will win.
The answer, in most cases, is no. The plan describes activities. It lists priorities. It projects timelines and budgets. What it does not contain — what the planning process was not designed to produce — is a compelling answer to the question Roger Martin identifies as the most important in strategy: how will we win against the best available alternative for the people we are trying to serve?
Why the absence of "How to Win" is the norm, not the exception
The executives giving these answers are not describing organizations in crisis. They are describing the global senior leadership population — organizations that have completed strategic planning cycles, published strategic documents, and aligned leadership teams around stated priorities. The planning process happened. The strategic thinking — the specific articulation of competitive advantage — did not.
The reason is structural. Planning processes are designed to produce plans: resource allocations, milestone schedules, priority lists. They are not designed to produce the difficult, uncomfortable conversation about what a specific organization can do that its alternatives cannot, and why anyone should choose it. That conversation requires a different kind of facilitation, a different kind of honesty, and a willingness to name the capabilities the organization does not yet have alongside the ones it does. Most planning processes are not built for it.
What "How to Win" actually requires
Martin's Strategic Choice Cascade asks five questions in sequence: what is our winning aspiration, where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities must we have, and what management systems must support those capabilities? The five questions are interdependent — the answer to each one constrains the answers to the ones that follow. And the "How to Win" question is the one that forces the genuine strategic thinking, because it requires the organization to make a specific claim about competitive advantage that can be tested and falsified.
"We will win through operational excellence" fails the test — operational excellence is an attribute every organization aspires to, not a specific competitive position. "We will win because our facilitation methodology produces execution-ready strategy that expert-delivered consulting cannot" is a claim that is specific enough to be tested, meaningful enough to guide resource allocation, and honest enough to acknowledge what it forecloses. It is also the kind of claim that makes most leadership teams uncomfortable, because it is precise enough to be wrong.
The sector-specific failure modes
The "How to Win" void manifests differently across sectors. In corporate strategy, the most common failure is describing desirable attributes — innovation, customer focus, operational efficiency — as if they were competitive advantages. Any competitor could write the same sentences. The claim is accurate and strategically useless.
In government, the planning process is structurally constrained from producing strategy at all. Agencies operate under mandates that define their "where to play" without choice, and their "How to Win" is structurally replaced by compliance and delivery targets. The language of strategy is adopted, but the substance — the deliberate positioning of limited capability against the most important outcomes — is rarely present.
In not-for-profit organizations, the most consistent failure is conflating "what we do" with "How to Win." A mission statement describes the impact an organization is trying to achieve. It does not articulate a theory of why this organization, using this approach, will achieve that impact more effectively than the alternatives its funders and stakeholders might support instead. The absence of that argument is both a strategic problem and a fundraising one.
The question that reveals whether a strategy exists
Martin's recommended diagnostic is direct: ask every member of the leadership team, independently, "why would a well-informed person choose us over the best available alternative?" Collect the answers before anyone has spoken. If the answers are consistent, specific, and non-generic, a strategy exists. If they are varied, vague, or reducible to statements any competitor in the sector could make, the organization has aspirations but not strategy. The conversation that follows that exercise is often the most important one a leadership team will have.