How do we win this account? Where’s our advantage? How do we tighten our cost structure? Who are we beating?
If you lead an organization, you’ve likely asked some version of these in the past week. They’re good questions. They build companies. And getting good at them is a pleasure of its own.
But for many leaders, at some point the winning stops doing what it used to. The wins feel heavier each time, and the work stops feeding them. And the cause is rarely the workload. It’s the questions. They’ve gotten so good at answering “How do we compete?” that they’ve stopped asking “What do we want to create?”
Those two questions describe something bigger than strategy. They describe two different ways of being a leader.
Competing comes with a map. The rivals are known, the benchmarks exist, and the playbook is written. You can look at any decision in front of you and know where you stand: ahead on price, behind on features, gaining share, or losing it. Even when the game is hard, the map tells you how you’re doing. There’s real comfort in that. You can spend an entire career on the map and be excellent every day.
Creating means standing where the map hasn’t been drawn. The questions change shape entirely. Who isn’t buying from anyone in our industry, and why not? What do all of us take for granted that customers quietly put up with? What would we build if the competitors didn’t exist? These questions have no benchmark. Nothing external tells you you’re right while you’re holding them. And that asks for a different relationship with uncertainty.
The strategy literature has spent twenty years documenting where the outsized returns come from: organizations that stop fighting over existing demand and create demand no one is contesting. What the research says far less about is why so many leaders who believe this still can’t do it.
I work with founders through this shift. One of them competed in an industry that had run on the same few factors for as long as anyone could remember, and no one thought to question them. He started asking about the customers who weren’t buying from anyone: what they needed, and why nothing on the market fit. What he found became an offering his competitors couldn’t respond to, because it didn’t compete on any factor they were watching. The growth that followed came from ground that wasn’t on anyone’s map.
But here’s what the success stories leave out. The external move asks for an internal one, and that’s where it usually fails.
I’ve facilitated meetings where it happens. The direction is new, everyone agrees with it, yet the conversation still drifts back to the competition. They’re not defying the strategy, just reaching for questions they know how to answer. The strategy says create. The reflexes say compete.
The reflexes win because competing questions can be answered. There’s always a benchmark to check, and checking it feels like solid ground. Creating questions have nothing to check against, so under pressure they feel like guessing, and teams reach for what they can answer. It isn’t a failure of nerve. It’s the pull of the answerable.
That’s why this shift is never only a strategy project. The direction changes, and the person deciding it has to change with it. A leader who spent twenty years being right on the map has to stand somewhere the map doesn’t cover and hold the direction without it. Otherwise the organization quietly returns to the game its leader never stopped playing.
None of this is criticism. The competitive identity is earned, and it’s usually the thing that built everything. It’s just built for a game that, at a certain point, stops being the one that matters.
So try this in your next strategy discussion. Keep a quiet tally: how many questions could only be answered by comparing to a competitor, and how many by looking at what doesn’t yet exist. The ratio surprises most teams. The point isn’t to ban the first kind, but to notice how rarely the second survives pressure on its own, and to protect the room where it can be asked.
The questions are the game.