The best businesses reach a point where growth starts generating itself, where each win creates the conditions for the next one and the whole system runs with less effort than it did previously. Most leadership teams want that kind of flywheel, and most of them try to build it before they’ve done the design work that makes it possible. The momentum they’re after only comes after the prior groundwork is in place, and most teams skip it.
That groundwork is what I call the Four Wins. Any strategy or initiative worth sustaining needs to create simultaneous wins for four parties: the end customer, the brand, the team, and the company (and in that order). The Four Wins is a design question you work through before you build anything. The flywheel is the acceleration effect that follows when that design is working and everyone gets behind it. Confusing the two is where most of the growth that should have been captured gets left behind.
McKinsey’s most recent strategy survey found that only one in five executives believe their strategy is high quality, down 40 percent from 15 years ago. The problem is not that leaders have stopped caring about strategy. It is that most still do not have a design framework that makes alignment possible across all the parties who have to execute it.
How negotiation theory wasn’t enough
I’ve spent more than 25 years building businesses across global markets, founding Digivizer in 2010 and running both a technology platform and an agency through multiple cycles of disruption. The Four Wins didn’t come from a framework I read or a course I took. It came from watching programs stall despite everyone involved believing they were doing the right thing, and spending long enough in that frustration to eventually understand why.
Most people, when they think about strategic alignment, focus on two parties: the brand and the customer. What I kept noticing across every market I operated in was that the people executing the program and whoever else had a meaningful stake in its success were being left out of the design entirely. Nobody was designing alignment for them. The brand can only win sustainably if everyone else is winning too, and building that in from the start changes the outcome entirely.
Just like the most successful negotiations work when all parties win and not win-lose, your strategy must allow for all parties engaged in your strategy to win.
Take a brand running an influencer program. The instinct is to maximize control, brief the influencer tightly, and limit what you give them to keep costs down. When you redesign it so the influencer has everything they need to create authentically to fulfil their goals, something shifts across the whole relationship:
- The end customer gets content from a voice they already trust
- The brand gets material it can amplify at better performance rates
- The agency earns a retainer built on ongoing value, not a one-off brief
Everyone leans in harder, wants to add additional and long term value, and the relationship compounds instead of concluding. That’s the Four Wins working as intended, and the design condition from which a flywheel becomes possible.
The Digivizer proof
At Digivizer, the agency and the platform have fed each other from the beginning. Building the platform made the agency sharper because we had intelligence no one else could access, and running the agency made the platform better because we were pressure-testing it against real problems every day.
When agency partners began introducing the platform to their clients, those clients performed better and recommended it further, and thus so did their agency’s performance, and when people moved to new organizations they brought it with them.
What made that compounding possible was not just the design of the Four Wins but the intelligence the platform generated at every stage, signals that told all parties what was working and which parts of the system were ready to expand.
The signal that shows up before the strategy fails
The signal I pay most attention to is what I think of as the solo win: someone in the system optimizing purely for themselves, without real consideration of whether the others are gaining too. In a leadership team it shows up in resource allocation: whose priorities survive the budget conversation, and which parts of the business are quietly subsidizing another’s wins without any reciprocal gain. When one function is always winning and others are absorbing the cost, the Four Wins haven’t been applied at the top of the house.
Across teams, misalignment shows up as a gap between what people say the strategy is and what they’re actually spending their time on, often not because anyone is being dishonest but because the strategy was never designed in a way that made their personal win clear.
Two questions. Ask them of anyone.
Ask two questions of anyone in your business:
- What is the number one thing your company is trying to win this year?
- What are you working on, and how does it connect to that?
If people can’t answer the first consistently, the strategy hasn’t landed. If they can answer it but struggle to connect their daily work to it, the alignment is surface-level. And even if someone answers both convincingly, the harder discipline is asking whether what they’re doing is the best possible use of your most constrained resources. Deciding what you won’t do is as important as deciding what you will.
A lot of boards have been asking how AI can reduce headcount or cut costs, and that question tells you where the strategic thinking starts and stops. When cost reduction leads the board conversation, someone is optimizing for one party’s advantage and calling it strategy.
The real question is always what you are trying to deliver to your customers, and whether every decision and party involved can win, when it is actually pointed at that.
Where this goes next
When I apply this framework to where Digivizer is heading, the question I come back to is the same one it raises everywhere else: who isn’t yet winning from what we’ve built, and what would it take to change that? I know if I focus on ensuring the win-win-win-win, then we will accelerate our growth in a compounding way.
As a founder who has built through downturns and wholesale industry disruption, I’ve tested this thinking against conditions far less forgiving than a strategy offsite. What it’s taught me is that a strategy sustains itself when everyone in the system has a genuine reason to make it work, and that turns out to be the most reliable way to build something that lasts.
Source: “How Strategy Champions Win: from insight to strategy execution”. Published July 14, 2025. McKinsey Strategy Method Survey of 416 senior executives conducted December 2024 to January 2025.