When you confuse strategy with a plan, you get a thick PDF, a long project list, and a team that works hard in different directions—until results flatten and frustration grows. In this article, Jef Menguin explains strategy as a set of choices (not wishes) and why avoiding tradeoffs is the real reason plans don’t change behavior. Practice the shift and share it with your leaders so you stop collecting plans and start making winning choices.
Let’s start with something familiar.
You bring your leaders to a hotel for “strategic planning.” Everyone arrives early. Coffee is good. The room looks serious. There are colored cards, group workshops, and reports on the screen. People share ideas. There is energy in the room.
By the end of the day, you have a thick document or a long PDF. It has goals, timelines, and a long list of projects. People feel tired but proud. You take a group picture. You thank everyone.
Then Monday comes.
People open their laptops, look at their inbox, and go back to the way they’ve always worked. The “strategic plan” becomes a file on the shared drive. You see it again at the next planning session.
Have you seen this happen? Maybe you’ve led that kind of session yourself.
If yes, here’s the hard question:
Did you really build a strategy, or did you just create a plan?
Why a Plan Is Not Automatically a Strategy
Let’s slow down for a moment.
A plan is a list of actions. It tells you what you’ll do, when you’ll do it, and sometimes who will do it. Plans are useful. You need them.
But you can have a very detailed plan and still not have a clear strategy.
You can plan to:
- launch new products,
- open new branches,
- run more campaigns,
- and hire more people…
…and still never answer the real question:
How will we win?
A plan helps you move. A strategy decides where and how you move, so you give your organization the best chance to win.
And when I say “win,” I don’t mean “try to look like the market leader in a brochure.” I mean: be so different and so valuable that the right customers almost beg to work with you.
That kind of winning doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because of choices.
Strategy Is a Set of Choices
I like the way the book Playing to Win defines it:
Strategy is a set of choices about how you will win.
Not a set of wishes. Not a set of activities. A set of choices.
These choices usually answer questions like:
- What does winning mean for us?
- Where will we play?
- How will we win there?
- What must we be really good at?
- What systems will keep these choices alive?
On paper, those questions look simple. A smart person can “answer” them in ten minutes. A tool like ChatGPT can answer them in a few seconds.
But that’s the trap.
Writing answers is easy. Living the answers is the hard part.
The Real Problem: We Avoid Tradeoffs
Let me share a story.
A leadership team once showed me their “strategic plan.” It was impressive. Many slides. Lots of data. Beautiful tables. Every department was represented. Everyone had a project.
I asked them one simple question:
“If you follow this plan, what will you stop doing?”
The room went quiet. People looked at each other. Then someone laughed and said, “Honestly, nothing. We just added more.”
So they didn’t have a strategy. They had a wish list.
No one wanted to let go of their pet project. No one wanted their budget cut. No one wanted their team to feel “less important.”
So instead of making tough choices, they kept everything.
Have you seen this before in your own organization? Maybe you’ve seen it in yourself—pushing to keep your own project alive, even when you know it doesn’t really fit where your organization needs to go.
That is why many “strategic plans” don’t change much in real life. They avoid the very thing that makes strategy powerful: tradeoffs.
A Strategy That Starts to Feel Real
With that same team, we tried again.
This time, we didn’t start with templates. We started with honest conversations.
We asked, “What does winning really mean for us?” They could not say, “Be number one.” That was not allowed. They had to define winning in a way that a new employee could understand.
We asked, “Where will we play?” They were not allowed to say “everyone” and “everywhere.” They had to name the specific customers and markets that would be their main focus.
Then we asked, “How will we win there?” Not “by being the best” (everyone says that), but in what specific way would they be different? Faster? More trusted? Simpler? More caring? More precise?
As these conversations went on, something shifted.
They realized that if everything was a priority, then nothing really was. They saw that some projects needed to be stopped or shrunk. They saw that some units were doing work that did not fit the future they wanted.
You could feel the tension in the room. This was no longer just planning. This was identity work. This was about what kind of organization they wanted to be.
That’s when strategy starts to feel real.
How You Can Tell If You Just Have a Plan
Let me ask you a few questions. Answer them honestly in your head.
If I gave your leadership team ten minutes and asked, “What does winning look like for us?”—would you hear similar answers, or many different ones?
If I asked, “Who are our core customers?”—would you get a clear, specific answer, or something like “anyone who needs our services”?
If I asked, “What have you stopped doing in the last year because it did not fit your strategy?”—could you name something important, or would you struggle?
And if I sat in your regular meetings, would I see your strategy in action? Or would I just see status reports and long lists of activities?
You don’t have to tell me your answers. But your answers tell you whether you have a real strategy—or just a busy plan.
Why I Created the Strategy Audit Tool
Because of all these experiences, I created something very simple: a Strategy Audit Tool.
It’s just 25 yes-or-no statements. No long essays. No trick questions.
But the statements go straight to the heart of it:
- Do you really know what winning means for you?
- Have you truly decided where you will play—and where you will not?
- Are you clearly different in a way customers can feel?
- Have you made real tradeoffs and said no to pet projects?
- Are your capabilities, systems, and meetings aligned with your choices?
- Do your leaders actually live the strategy, or just talk about it once a year?
Most teams can finish it in ten to fifteen minutes. The power is not in the speed. The power is in the honesty.
When leaders see their score—and when they compare answers—they quickly notice something:
“We thought we had a strategy. What we really have is a plan that tries to do everything.”
That moment can be uncomfortable. But it’s also the moment change can begin.
Your Next Step: Use the Strategy Audit Tool
You don’t need a hotel. You don’t need a full-day retreat. You just need a bit of courage and some quiet time.
Here’s what I invite you to do:
- Print the Strategy Audit Tool or open it on your screen.
- Answer the 25 statements with a simple YES or NO. Don’t overthink.
- Count your YES answers and check the interpretation guide.
- If possible, ask your leadership team to do the same—separately—and then discuss.
You might discover you’re still at the “we have a plan, not a strategy” stage. You might find you’re in the middle of the shift. You might even realize you have a solid strategy, but it’s not yet fully lived.
Whatever your score, treat it as a mirror, not a judgment.
The Strategy Audit Tool won’t make the choices for you. But it will show you where you need to start making them.
If you want to move from “strategic plan” to real strategy, this is a simple, honest first step.
If you’d like a copy of the Strategy Audit Tool, you can use it with your team in your next meeting. Answer it, sit with the truth it shows you, and then ask:
“What choices do we need to make now, if we really want to win?”
If you’re building a business and you are playing to win…
Let’s install one shift that moves metrics.
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