Strategy Patterns

Choose where to play and how to win.

Methods for strategy at the level of a company, business unit or single team. The cards help you see where you really stand, choose where to compete and how, pick competitive moves, test whether your strategy is real, write it on one page, set goals that prove it, turn it into work and move people onto the new way of working. For leaders and planners.

56 cards · 8 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

Diagnose7Can you say where you really stand?
Choose7Have you decided where to play and how to win?
Compete7Does your next move fit the market?
Stress-Test7Is the strategy a real choice, not a wish?
On A Page7Could a newcomer act on your strategy?
Set Goals7Is it clear what success looks like?
Make It Happen7Are money and people behind the strategy?
Make Change Stick7Have people actually moved to the new way?

A few cards

Diagnose

Strategy Kernel

A goal is not a strategy until it says what is wrong and what you will do about it.

Compete

Read The Market Stage

Markets age, and the moves that win in a young market can sink you in an old one.

On A Page

Strategy On A Page

One page, three minutes, no slides: the whole strategy where anyone can find it.

One card in full

Make It Happen

Must-Win Battles

Pick the three to five fights the strategy can't succeed without, and stop there.

A strategy with twelve priorities has none. Must-win battles narrow it to the few fights that decide the outcome: lose any one and the strategy fails, whatever else goes well.

How to use it

From the strategy, list everything that has to go right. Expect a long list.
For each, ask: "If we lost this but won everything else, would the strategy still work?" Keep only the items where the answer is no.
Cut to three to five. Merge overlaps and push the rest into normal running.
Write each battle as a fight with a clear win, such as "become the first-choice supplier to the three largest clinics in our region by year-end", not as an activity.
Agree the list as a leadership team and say it the same way every time.

Example

A game studio relaunching an older title names three battles: fix the first hour of play, win back lapsed players with one return event, and keep the servers stable at peak times. Everything else, including a new game mode, is parked.

Watch out

Choosing battles that are really departments ("marketing", "technology"). A real battle crosses team lines.
Adding a sixth because a senior person insists. Each addition weakens the others.

Each battle needs An Owner Per Battle and resources from Move The Money; run a Contradiction Hunt next.

Recipes

Kick The Tyres: Put an existing strategy through six quick tests to see whether it makes real choices, belongs to you, is remembered, rests on sound conditions and has money behind it.
Make It Real: Turn an agreed strategy into a few owned battles, clear away the work that fights it, move the budget and review it every quarter.
Make Your Move: Read your market and your rivals, name the advantage you can build, and finish with a clear choice of where to compete and why customers will pick you.
Set The Course: Set a period's goals around one headline objective, measure outcomes with early signals, label each goal as a promise or a stretch, and trace the path back to this week.
Switch Over: Move people from the old way of working to the new one: find where each group is stuck, start with the willing, copy what already works, and switch the old way off.

Missions

Set quarterly goals: from a long list of hopes for the quarter to one objective, three or four key results with leading signals, each marked committed or aspirational, and the path back to this week.
Write a one-page strategy: from scattered goals, slides and opinions to a one-page strategy with a diagnosis, the choices made and refused, three to five priorities and the measures, readable by an outsider in three minutes.

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