Are You Playing the Right Game?

Why Market Leadership Requires Rethinking the Game, Not Just Improving the Play?

For many successful businesses, the pursuit of growth often follows a well-established path. Leaders focus on improving execution, refining products and services, optimizing operations, and driving market share. These efforts typically build on the strengths that made the company successful to begin with.

Yet in markets undergoing fundamental change, an important and often overlooked question emerges: Are we still playing the right game?

The danger is that companies may be executing with great discipline and skill, but in a game that is no longer aligned with how markets create value or where customers are moving.

In today’s environment of accelerating change, exponential technologies, and shifting customer expectations, the game itself can change faster than leadership recognizes. The real risk is not simply falling behind in execution. It is playing harder in a game that no longer matters.

The Shifting Nature of Competitive Games

Every industry operates within an implicit “game”, a set of rules and assumptions about what creates value, how companies compete, what customers expect, and what drives advantage. This game defines how businesses design their offerings, structure their operations, measure performance, and allocate resources.

Historically, these competitive games have evolved gradually. Industry boundaries were relatively stable, customer expectations predictable, and sources of advantage clearly understood. This allowed companies to refine strategies and continuously improve their playbook over time.

But today, the dynamics are different. In many industries, technology, shifting platforms, customer behaviour, and cross-industry convergence are redefining the very nature of competition.

Value is being created in new ways. Business models that once dominated are being replaced by entirely different approaches. Customer expectations are set not just by traditional competitors, but by experiences from other industries.

And increasingly, companies that thrive are those that do not just play the old game better; they redefine the game itself.

The Risk of Legacy Thinking

Ironically, it is often the most successful companies that are most at risk of missing these shifts. Past success builds confidence in current strategies and reinforces the belief that winning requires doing more of what has worked.

Leaders double down on refining execution, scaling proven models, and adding capabilities that improve the playbook. What is less often questioned is whether the playbook itself still matches the game that is emerging.

In fast-moving markets, this creates a dangerous lag. While leadership focuses on doing better within an established frame, the market dynamics may have already shifted. Competitors with different models, unconstrained by legacy thinking, redefine customer expectations and industry boundaries.

By the time it becomes clear that the game has changed, it is often difficult and expensive to catch up.

How to Recognize a Shifting Game

There are signals that leadership can watch for, though they are often subtle:

• Are new entrants competing on fundamentally different value propositions, not just price or efficiency?
• Are customer expectations being shaped by experiences outside our industry?
• Is technology redefining how value is created and delivered in ways that our model does not fully leverage?
• Are adjacent industries or platforms beginning to converge with ours, changing the competitive landscape?
• Are we seeing increasing returns to new models that do not match our traditional success patterns?

These signals often emerge at the edges of the market first. Leadership that actively scans for them and creates the space to question core assumptions is far more likely to adapt in time.

Rethinking Strategy: Moving Beyond the Old Game

The companies that lead in the next decade will be those that are not just operationally excellent, but strategically adaptive.

They will be led by teams that regularly step back to ask:

• What game are we actually playing now and what game will matter most in the markets we want to lead?
• Are our strategies and structures still matched to the realities of the evolving opportunity space?
• What new capabilities must we build to compete in a different kind of game?
• What mental models and legacy assumptions must we challenge to stay relevant?

This is not about abandoning what has worked. It is about consciously evolving the organization’s strategic thinking; ensuring that it remains aligned with where markets, technologies, and customer expectations are going.

In short, it is about having the courage to question not just how we are playing but what we are playing for.

Competing in the Right Game

In times of profound change, execution is necessary but not sufficient. Companies that win are those that periodically reframe the game they are playing, adjust their strategy to match emerging dynamics, and build organizations capable of competing on new terms.

Because in an environment of exponential change, the most dangerous place for any business is not lagging in execution; it is trapped in a game that no longer defines the future.