How to know if your campaign is set up to win

Seven simple questions that force clarity before the scramble begins

Welcome to the Power Shifts newsletter. I’m Joseph Lavoie, a partner at Crestview, a global public affairs agency. Each week I share frameworks, playbooks, and case studies on designing effective public affairs strategies. I also explore my longstanding theory that every business is in the business of politics.

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When we face a political or regulatory battle, the instinct is often to mobilize quickly: prepare a briefing, line up allies, schedule meetings. These quick actions build momentum, and momentum feels good. In fact, momentum is a critical “secret ingredient” for every winning campaign. However, momentum can also be distracting and can hide a deeper problem: your team ends up working hard without a shared definition of what winning actually looks like, or what it means.

Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with two frameworks that force slow thinking, early, when we’re developing the right strategy.

The first is the Arena Map, which I shared last week. The Arena Map is a simple way to sketch out the landscape: Where is the decision being made? Who sits at the table? What process governs the outcome? It’s a way of slowing down long enough to orient yourself in a system that is never straightforward.

But orientation alone doesn’t create a path to victory. For that, you need what I’ve started calling a Win Theory — a disciplined exercise in defining, in detail, what success looks like and how you’ll get there. The thinking that goes into developing the Win Theory forces clarity of thought (strategy) before you get to tactics.

For it to be useful, it needs to be simple. So I have seven questions that have been most useful in shaping a Win Theory in my regulatory campaign work:

1. What decision, exactly, by when? Vague aspirations like “get approval” aren’t enough. A precise statement — “The committee votes yes on Amendment 3.2.4 on September 5” — changes the way a team organizes. A timeline makes it real, and provides intense focus.