What is Strategy?

Strategy is the set of choices that turns a vision from a hopeful idea into a tangible path forward. It’s not a slogan, a plan, or a list of goals. It’s a coherent logic that answers how you will win—by being deliberately different, focusing your resources, and making trade-offs you can actually execute.

If vision is the destination, strategy is the route you commit to taking. And importantly: strategy is built from the vision backwards. It clarifies the who, what, where, when, and how of that vision so the organisation can move with alignment instead of wishful thinking.

Below is a practical way to understand strategy through the lens of Roger Martin’s five-stage strategy framework and Blue Ocean Strategy’s differentiation frameworks: create value through differentiation, avoid competing on the same tired dimensions, and make competition less relevant by choosing a distinct playing field.

Stage 1: Define the Winning Aspiration

A strategy starts with a clear aspiration: what does “winning” look like for us?

This is not the same as “growth” or “being the best.” Winning is contextual. It’s a statement of intent that links directly to your vision—what you’re building, why it matters, and what success looks like when you get there.

Blue Ocean thinking strengthens this stage by forcing a sharper question: What would winning look like if we stopped benchmarking competitors and started designing value around unmet needs? In other words, your aspiration should pull you toward a future you’re creating—not a race you’re joining.

Stage 2: Choose Where to Play

Once you know what winning means, you choose where you will compete.

This is the “arena” choice: which customers, which segments, which geographies, which channels, which categories, and which use-cases you will focus on.

The Blue Ocean lens here is simple: don’t try to win everywhere. Look for spaces where customers are underserved, overcharged, oversold, or forced into compromises. Often, the most powerful “where to play” choices are the ones competitors ignore because they don’t fit the industry’s default assumptions.

Where-to-play choices make strategy real because they create focus. Focus creates leverage.

Stage 3: Decide How to Win

Now you define the value proposition that will make you the preferred choice in the arenas you’ve selected.

“How to win” is not a list of activities. It’s the core logic of advantage: why customers will choose you, stay with you, and pay for you.

This is where Blue Ocean themes naturally fit Roger Martin’s framework. “How to win” should be built on meaningful differentiation—ideally by changing the basis of competition.

A useful prompt is: What will we raise, reduce, eliminate, and create to deliver a step-change in value? You’re not just trying to be slightly better; you’re designing a distinct value curve that makes your offering feel like a different category.

Stage 4: Build the Required Capabilities

Strategy fails when it stays conceptual.

Capabilities are the specific things your organisation must be able to do exceptionally well to deliver your “how to win.” They include skills, systems, processes, tools, data, partnerships, governance, and ways of working.

This stage is where strategy becomes tangible:

• If your “how to win” is speed, you need decision-making and delivery capabilities.
• If your “how to win” is trust, you need quality, consistency, and customer experience capabilities.
• If your “how to win” is insight, you need data, research, and interpretation capabilities.

Blue Ocean strategies often require new capabilities because they’re not built to play the old game. That’s the point. But it also means you must be honest about what you can do now, what you must build, and what you should partner for.

Stage 5: Put in Place the Management Systems

The final stage is what makes strategy durable: management systems that keep the organisation aligned to the choices.

This includes:

• Metrics that measure progress toward the aspiration
• Operating rhythms (weekly/monthly/quarterly) that review the right signals
• Incentives that reward strategic behaviour (not just short-term activity)
• Decision rules that prevent constant re-litigation of the strategy
• Feedback loops that support learning without abandoning the core choices

This is also where many strategies quietly die.

Strategies most often fail not because they were bad or flawed, but because those in charge of execution decided to pivot too early. The organisation gets impatient. Early results are mixed (as they usually are). A new idea appears. Someone wants a quick win. And the strategy is “refreshed” before it’s had time to compound.

Strategy Is a Slow-Moving Beast

A good strategy behaves more like going to the gym than launching a campaign.

You don’t get fit after three workouts. You get fit through consistency, progressive improvement, and sticking with the program long enough for the results to show.

Strategy works the same way:

• The early phase often feels slower than expected.
• Capability-building takes time.
• Market perception changes gradually.
• Trust compounds.
• Differentiation becomes clearer with repetition.

In organisations, strategy is frequently a victim of instant-gratification mindsets. Leaders confuse “learning” with “changing direction.” They mistake discomfort for failure. They trade long-term advantage for short-term relief.

The discipline is to separate refinement from abandonment. Great strategy is not rigid, but it is consistent. You can adjust execution while protecting the core choices.

Strategy, Built from the Vision Backwards

When you build strategy from the vision backwards, you create a chain of logic:

• Vision clarifies the future you’re trying to create.
• Aspiration defines what winning looks like in that future.
• Where to play focuses your effort.
• How to win defines your distinct advantage.
• Capabilities make the advantage deliverable.
• Management systems make it repeatable and resilient.

This chain turns what could be a hope and dream into a set of choices the organisation can act on.

What Strategy Is (and Why It Matters)

Strategy is a coherent set of choices that turns a vision into a tangible path to winning. It defines what you will pursue—and what you will not—by clarifying where you’ll play, how you’ll win, the capabilities you must build, and the systems that keep execution aligned.

It’s crucial to organisational success because it creates focus, enables differentiation, and allows results to compound over time. And because strategy is a slow-moving beast, the organisations that win are often the ones with the patience and discipline to stick with their choices long enough for them to work.