Your leadership team agreed on the strategy. Everyone nodded at the offsite. Then each leader went back to their function and made different choices. Six months later, the budgets show it.
A leadership alignment workshop exists to close that gap. Most of them review the strategy. Very few make the leaders choose.
The Five Choices in Roger Martin's Playing to Win
A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin built the cascade at Procter & Gamble and wrote it up in *Playing to Win*. In their view, a strategy is five linked choices:
1. Winning aspiration. What does winning look like, and for whom? 2. Where to play. Which customers, channels and regions. And where you will not play. 3. How to win. Why those customers pick you. Lower cost, or a real difference. 4. Must-have capabilities. What you have to be great at to win there, in that way. 5. Management systems. The measures and rhythms that build those capabilities and keep them running.
The choices nest. The company makes its five. Each function makes its own five inside the company's "where to play." Each team does the same one level down. For a worked example and a one-page template, see how to cascade strategy without losing meaning.
Martin adds one test. For any choice, ask: what would have to be true for this to work? Then test the shakiest condition first.
Why Filling In the Five Boxes Falls Short
Most teams read *Playing to Win*, like it, and fill in the boxes. The boxes look great. The team is still split.
Three things go wrong.
Leaders write down the choices they already made. The VP of Sales builds "where to play" around this year's quota. Operations builds it around this year's capacity. Nobody gives anything up. The cascade becomes a list of what each function was doing anyway.
"Where not to play" stays blank. It is the hardest choice in the book. It is also the one that frees up budget and people. In a polite room, nobody says it out loud.
Each level gets told instead of choosing. The executive team makes its five choices and hands them down. The next level gets answers and never practices making a choice. Martin's point is that every level chooses. When only the top chooses, you have a memo.
It is the same failure behind the strategy cascade mistake every CEO makes. The plan moves down. Ownership stays at the top.
What a Leadership Alignment Workshop Has to Do
A workshop that works does three things a framework cannot do on paper.
It makes leaders choose under pressure, so the polite answers fall away. It makes "where not to play" cost something real in the room. And it gives every level a turn to make its own five choices and test them against the level above.
So Lead the Endurance starts on the ice, before it touches your strategy.
Where to Play and How to Win, Lived on the Ice
Your leaders become Senior Advisors to Ernest Shackleton. It is 1915. The Endurance is trapped in the Antarctic pack ice, and then the ice crushes her. Twenty-eight crew are camped on a drifting floe, far from any help.
Shackleton's first aspiration was to cross Antarctica on foot. That goal is gone. Participants face the same five choices he faced.
Winning aspiration. Shackleton set a new one: bring every member of the crew home alive. Every later decision had to serve it.
Where to play. Camp on the ice and wait, or march for land. Later, stay on Elephant Island, or send a small boat 800 miles across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia. Each choice closes a door. Participants feel what "where not to play" costs.
How to win. Keep the crew together and keep hope alive, so nobody gives up or breaks away.
Must-have capabilities. Frank Worsley could navigate open ocean with a sextant and almost no sun. Harry McNish, the carpenter, could make a lifeboat fit for the worst sea on earth. Those two skills decided the outcome.
Management systems. Fixed routines on the ice. Fair rations. Shackleton kept the crew most likely to cause trouble in his own tent, close to him.
Participants argue these choices with real consequences for their team. They find out fast when their five choices do not fit together. Then they turn to your company.
Running the Workshop With Your Own Strategy
The rest of the workshop runs your Playing to Win cascade, level by level.
The executive team sets the aspiration. We capture it as the Flag of the Big Picture: one sentence that says where we are going and by when. Below it go the three to five strategic elements that have to be true. Those are your "where to play" and "how to win."
Each function makes its own five choices inside that frame. Each senior leader drafts a page for their function. Where does my function play to make the Flag true? How do we win there? What capability do we need that we do not have yet? The pages go up on the wall side by side. Conflicts show up in the room instead of in next quarter's budget fight.
Every choice gets the test. Pairs swap pages and ask, out loud, "what would have to be true?" The shakiest condition gets an owner and a date.
Leaders practice carrying it down. Each leader rehearses handing the cascade to their own team with the POW framework. They start with the problem in their team's world. They open the opportunity with "what if" questions. Then they ask "what now?" and hand the team the pen. The team then makes its own five choices inside their leader's page.
Each leader writes a personal Flag. It is their own commitment for the next 90 days: the impact they will make, how they will lead their team differently, and how they will show up.
If the strategy is already clear, this runs in one day. If the executive team does not fully agree yet, a two-day offsite gives them a first day to build it together.
What It Looks Like When It Works
At Bell MTS, leaders who built and cascaded their strategy this way helped grow revenue from $800 million to $1.4 billion in one year. The gain came from people in the middle of the company. They knew which choice they owned, and they knew why.
Strategy is only a document until a manager changes a team, a budget or a project to match it. If you already hold an annual leadership offsite, this workshop could be its core. It also fixes the problem in why your leadership offsite energy dies by Monday. Each leader leaves with a choice they made, so there is something to carry into Monday.
For the wider case on cascading strategy versus building it together, see Learn2's guide to cascading strategy. To see the day itself, look at how the experience works.