In this adaptation from the new book, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy (HBR Press, 2015), BCG strategy experts make sense of the all the different, and competing, approaches to strategy: Which strategy is right for your business? When and how should you implement it? The practical tool offered here helps executives answer such questions as: What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? Where can we — and when should we — shape the game to our advantage? How do we simultaneously implement different strategies across different business units?

Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win — or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important to choose the right approach to strategy.

And it has never been more difficult. The number of strategy tools and frameworks that leaders can choose from has grown massively since the birth of business strategy in the early 1960s (see the chart below — and keep scrolling, you’ll get to the end eventually). And far from obvious are the answers to how these approaches relate to one another or when they should and shouldn’t be deployed.

It’s not that we lack powerful ways to approach strategy; it’s that we lack a robust way to select the right ones for the right circumstances. The five forces framework for strategy may be valid in one arena, blue ocean or open innovation in another, but each approach to strategy tends to be presented or perceived as a panacea. Managers and other business leaders face a dilemma: with increasingly diverse environments to manage and rising stakes to get it right, how do they identify the most effective approach to business strategy and marshal the right thinking and behaviors to conceive and execute it, supported by the appropriate frameworks and tools?