As the business environment continues to become more and more complex, frameworks become more and more useful. A good framework gives leaders and teams a shared way to think, talk, and decide. A good framework also reduces ambiguity, surfaces the real problem faster, and makes it easier to align a team around what matters most.

Perhaps one of the most well-known strategy frameworks is the Strategy House, which is used here at Six06, and also by firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. It’s been around for a while because it does something most strategy documents don’t: it turns ambition into a visible, testable structure your team can actually execute.

What It Is

A Strategy House is a one-page strategy framework that depicts your strategy as a coherent system by linking, from top to bottom:

• a winning aspiration (what you intend to achieve),

• the few strategic choices that define how you will win,

• the strategic initiatives you will execute to prove and deliver those choices,

• and the key enablers (capabilities, resources, governance, talent, technology) required to make execution work.

Its purpose is to surface the logic of the strategy so leaders can align faster, prioritize confidently, and execute without strategy dissolving into a disconnected list of projects.

What It Does

A good Strategy House does two things at once. First, it makes strategy visible—not as vague ambition, but as a clear chain of logic. You can see the outcome you’re driving toward, the few choices that define how you’ll get there, and the initiatives that translate those choices into action.

Second, it makes strategy testable. If an initiative doesn’t reinforce a stated choice, it’s noise. If a choice doesn’t credibly support the outcome, it gets revised. And if an enabler is missing, you’ve likely found the real reason execution is stalling.

The Strategy House also acts as a sort of compression tool. It takes what might have been a 40-slide deck and turns it into a single page that a leadership team can actually use in weekly decision-making.

How It Works

The simplest way to think about it is this: the roof is the outcome you want; the beams are the decisions you’re making to get it; the rooms are the work you’re funding to prove it; the supports are what must be true for that work to succeed. When the house is built correctly, it becomes a filter. New ideas are evaluated with a series of questions. “Does this strengthen one of our choices? Does it advance one of our initiatives? Do we have the enablers to execute it now?” If the answer is no, it’s either a “not yet” or a “not us.”

Most strategic friction isn’t about intelligence. Rather, it’s about alignment. The Strategy House gives you a shared language for alignment that doesn’t require everyone to become a strategist. It makes the strategy explainable to the people who have to implement it, and it gives the leadership team a way to hold the line when the next urgent request tries to hijack priorities.

A Strategy House won’t remove uncertainty, but it will remove confusion. It turns strategy from a collection of opinions into a visible chain of logic your team can challenge, improve, and execute. In environments where urgency constantly threatens focus, that alone is a competitive advantage.