Win Strategy Development is a Team Sport

Conventional Win Strategy Development

Win strategy development is an essential business activity, but there is no standard process for how to develop one. Because of this, there’s a lot of opinions floating around about what the best approach is. Each organization’s technique varies and is influenced by their industry, culture, objectives, and experience.

But despite their differences in methodology, organizations generally build their win strategies on, more or less, the same foundational elements. Responsibility for developing the strategy is typically assigned to a capture, business development, or strategy function. They conduct market research, customer research, competitor research, and gather input from across the organization. Then, they’ll build the strategy; usually, taking a “bottom-up” approach, using the organizations capabilities as a foundation and mapping a path to their goal from there.  When this happens, the result is not so much a strategy as a plan to build towards an end state.

The Limits of Functional Ownership

While giving a single function ownership of win strategy development is a very common approach, it’s not the most effective approach. That is not to say that these groups are not good at their jobs. They are excellent at what they have been trained to do. But doing it this way silos the development process from the benefits of organizational knowledge.

Every Function Holds One Facet of the Truth

Developing a winning strategy requires deep functional expertise. And while each function in the company sees their part of the picture in great detail, they see it independently. No one sees the entire field. So, no one’s thinking is wrong, exactly, but everyone’s thinking is incomplete.

Coming at the development process through the lens of a single function introduces the risk of a lopsided product because specialists have a natural tendency to optimize for their area of expertise. But if a win strategy is intended to be the guide for the whole organization, then it only makes sense for every function to be involved.

Some companies try to mitigate this by holding information sharing sessions, like workshops; having each function present and listen to everyone else’s presentations. While it can appear that alignment is happening in these sessions, the event still doesn’t unearth critical assumptions.

The Hidden Cost of Assumptions

Assumptions, in this context, are the beliefs that individuals rely on, when making decisions, before all the facts are known. Some assumptions are explicit, meaning they are openly discussed and agreed upon. Others are implicit, meaning they are never stated but still influence how people think and act.

Implicit assumptions create the greatest risk. Often, team members believe that they are working toward the same goal but are operating from completely different expectations. For example, one person may assume the organization will maintain its current operating model, while another assumes significant changes are acceptable. Both can develop sound plans based on their assumptions, but those plans may conflict in ways that are not discovered until much later. An effective win strategy development must be designed to surface assumptions before decisions are made.

Making Winning Choices™

The alternative is a team-based approach that draws perspectives from every function in the organization. SMA: The Program Lifecycle Company has standardized this approach into a methodology called Making Winning Choices™.

Start with the End in Mind

Because conventional “bottom-up” methods prioritize existing strengths, they result in a preference for familiar past actions. Making Winning Choices™ inverts this formula and builds a win strategy from the top down.

Instead of asking, “What should we do?” the team asks, “What must be true for us to win?”, focusing first on the critical conditions that will determine success and then letting the conditions dictate the actions. By working backward from the desired outcome, organizations can identify the choices and risks that will have the greatest impact.

Focus on What Matters Most

This approach operates on the knowledge that not every task carries the same impact or urgency.

Instead, it separates tasks into three categories:

1. Critical Actions: are high-impact activities that must be completed and have the capability to execute immediately.
2. Critical Risks: are uncertainties that could significantly influence the outcome. These include both “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”, such as changes in customer priorities, competitor actions, or market conditions. Because these risks are not fully understood, teams need to create a plan to run them to ground, determine what is true, or decide how to respond.
3. Below-the-Line Activities: are important initiatives that support long-term success but are not immediate priorities

The tasks are then chunked into sets. Once the first set of priorities is resolved, the team moves to the next set, and so on, through all the necessary steps. This distribution helps leaders focus resources where they will have the greatest effect and ensures that important, but less urgent, work is not forgotten.

Build a Shared Understanding

Implicit assumptions and critical intel are scattered all over the organization. Because of this, no single function can say absolutely which conditions will determine success. The only way to see the complete picture is through a structured, cross-functional effort that brings together the knowledge, perspectives, and expertise of the entire organization.

This is the core of why Making Winning Choices™ is so effective. It is an expert-led, high-touch model that gathers members from every function, in multiple working sessions, to build a shared understanding.

In these sessions, the team works to:

• Define the desired outcome.
• Identify the conditions required for success.
• Surface explicit and implicit assumptions.
• Identify critical actions and critical risks.
• Make informed tradeoffs.
• Test and refine their decisions

The result is a more holistic win strategy built on a shared understanding of necessary conditions for success, how the strategy answers those conditions, and the role each function plays in achieving the desired outcome.

Win Strategy Is a Team Sport

Win strategy development is a team sport because winning depends on seeing the entire field, not just the view from individual positions. The best win strategies are built when the right people are gathered to share their input and move forward together.

Making Winning Choices™ does this. It gets the team together to establish what the priorities are and a system for making better decisions as conditions evolve. Organizational buy-in comes as a natural by-product of the process because every function had a hand in its development and understands the reasoning behind the play. As assumptions change and new information becomes available, the organization remains aligned around the end goal and the conditions that determine success.

---

Making Winning Choices™ has repeatedly proven itself, generating decades of win strategies that are creative in approach, genuine in value proposition, robust under pressure, actionable at every stage, and, above all, compelling.

Contact us to build a Win Strategy that puts you ahead.