This is the fourth and final element of the logic flow. The question to address is this: is there some competitive response that could undermine or trump the where-to-play and how-to-win choices?

Inevitably, this is guesswork to some degree; you can’t know for sure what a competitor will or won’t do in the face of your actions. But forming a thoughtful hypothesis is important. It is far better to ask what your competitors will likely do before you proceed than to simply wait and see what happens. Only strategies that provide a sustainable advantage—or a significant lead in developing future advantages—are worth investing in. You don’t want to design and build a strategy that a competitor can copy in a heartbeat, or one that will prove ineffective against a simple defensive maneuver on a competitor’s part.

A strategy that only works if competitors continue to do exactly what they are already doing

is a dangerous strategy indeed.

We all ultimately want to find the strategy that is best for our business. Rather than asking individuals to find that answer for themselves and then fight it out, this approach enables the team to uncover the strongest option together. A standard process is characterized by arguments about what is true. By turning instead to exploring what would have to be true, teams go from battling one another to working together to explore ideas. Rather than attempting to bury real disagreements, this approach surfaces differences and resolves them, resulting in more-robust strategies and stronger commitment to them.

Reverse-engineering strategic options:

(Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.187) “1. Frame the Choice

As a general rule, an issue—for example, declining sales or technology change in the industry—can’t be resolved until it is framed as a choice. Until a real choice (e.g., should the company go in this direction or that one?) is articulated, team members can’t understand cognitively or feel emotionally the consequences of the different ways to resolve the issue. A team could talk endlessly about declining sales, making no progress toward solving the problem...

With Olay, framing the choice was crucial. It made the stakes clear immediately. Rather than agonizing endlessly about what to do with a fading brand, the team framed the choice and provided an impetus to action. The team laid out two possibilities: it could attempt to transform Oil of Olay into a worthy competitor to brands like Lancôme and La Prairie, or it could spend billions of dollars to buy a major existing skin-care brand to compete

instead.” (Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.188-189) “2. Generate Strategic Possibilities

Framing the issue as a choice identifies a preliminary set of options for resolving the problem; the next task is to broaden the list of possibilities. The objective in this step is to be inclusive rather than restrictive of the number and diversity of possibilities on the table. Here is the opportunity to encourage creative and more-unexpected strategies. In this

context, a possibility should be expressed as a narrative or scenario, a happy story that describes a positive outcome. That is why we like to call them possibilities rather than options. Characterizing the possibilities as stories helps ensure that they are not seen negatively as unsubstantiated opinions. No one is yet arguing for a possibility; you and your colleagues are simply envisioning a world in which that story makes good sense...

Culling a possibility about which a particular individual feels strongly may well cause that individual to withdraw, perhaps for the rest of the process. So inclusion, rather than exclusion, is the rule at this stage...

In the end, the P&G beauty team focused on five where-to-play and how- to-win possibilities for skin care. One was to largely give up on Oil of Olay and to acquire a major global skin-care brand. A second was to keep Oil of Olay positioned as an entry-priced, mass-market brand, strengthening its appeal to current consumers by leveraging R&D capabilities to improve wrinkle-fighting performance. A third was to take Oil of Olay up- market into the prestige distribution channel as an upscale brand. A fourth was to reinvent Olay totally—as a prestige-like brand that appealed more broadly to younger women (age thirty-five to fifty), but sold in the traditional mass channels with retail partners that would be willing to create a masstige experience with a special display section in the store. A fifth was to extend the Cover Girl brand from cosmetics into skin care.

That, in sum, is the process for choosing between possibilities for where to play and how to win. First, frame a choice. Second, explore possibilities to broaden the set of mutually exclusive possibilities. Third, for each possibility, ask, what would have to be true for this to be a great idea, using the logic flow framework to structure your thinking. Fourth, determine which of the conditions is the least likely to actually hold true. Fifth, design tests against those crucial barriers to choice. Six, conduct tests. Finally, in light of the outcome of the tests and how those outcomes stack up against predetermined standards of proof, select the best strategic choice possibility. This process broadens the possibilities up front and then systematically narrows the field. It leverages different perspectives to enrich the discussion, rather than bogging it down.

What does this research tell us? First, that we love having options (“Whoa! Twenty-four jams?! Let’s check this out!!”), and, second, that we can’t deal with too many of them (“Um...so many...can’t decide; let’s go get some cheese”). In fact, most minds can choose effectively between only three to five options. If we’re faced with more than that, our ability to make a choice begins to wane—many more than that and our ability to choose completely freezes. It’s just the way our brains are wired. We’re attracted to having alternatives, and our modern culture almost idolizes options for their own sake. Get lots of options! Keep your options open! Don’t get locked in! We hear this sort of thinking all the time, and it seems to make sense, but there absolutely can be too much of this good option thing. When you toss in the Internet and the fact that we can now be made aware of seemingly every idea and activity on the planet after a subsecond Google search, most of us are suffering a pandemic attack of too many options.

The key is to reframe your idea of options by realizing that if you have too many options, you actually have none at all. If you get frozen in front of your daunting list of possibilities, then, in fact, you have no options. Remember that options only actually create value in your life when they are chosen and realized. We often teach our students that when an option grows up it becomes a choice. So, when you’ve got twenty-four jam options, you actually have zero options. Once you understand that, in choice making, twenty-four equals zero (and, boy, is it hard to believe when you love your options and worked so hard to find and come up with them), then you are free to take the next step: narrowing down.