ALIGN is a practical framework for helping a business respond to competitive pressure without abandoning its strengths, confusing market signals with strategy, or wasting resources on a reaction that does more harm than good. It includes these five steps: A: Assign the Pressure. Start by naming the force you actually face. Porter's Five Forces gives you five places to look: new entrants, supplier power, buyer power, substitutes, and existing rivals. Locate Your Position. Now take an honest look at where you stand. Porter's three generic strategies give you the lens: cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. Are you truly the lowest-cost producer, or do you just believe you are? Can customers see a difference they will pay a premium for, or have you mistaken baseline features for differentiation? Are you serving a niche on purpose, or did you drift into one? The third element is Identify Your Options. With the orientation from the first two phases, you can explore options that emerged in the “realignment” exercises of the first two stages. No option is a bad option in this phase. Give every idea consideration. Quite often it isn’t a single idea that fits best but a combination of multiple options tweaked in ways that increase their effectiveness. Give this process time to develop and let teammates feel comfortable sharing so you can flush out the surface level ideas. Pressure also tempts companies to chase opportunities that look attractive but have little to do with their strengths. The fourth element is Generate Your Response. Now, with the pressure understood, your position clear, and options identified, it’s time to decide what to do. There are three broad types of responses: Defend: Strengthen barriers, improve your cost structure, deepen customer relationships, and lock in customers by raising switching costs. Attack: Innovate, reposition, enter new markets, or acquire capabilities and competitors. Collaborate: Form alliances, pursue joint ventures, or co-create solutions with customers. The final element is Navigate and Adjust. Launching is not the finish line. Roll out the plan with your structure, culture, and incentives pointed the same way, then track it with Key Performance Indicators and competitive intelligence. Think of a winning basketball team. They show up with a gameplan in mind designed to minimize their opponents strengths and maximize their own, and then the game starts. When matchups aren’t working, offensive schemas don’t lead to points, and unexpected scoring muddies the plan, the best teams adjust their gameplan to steer the game in their favor. This framework first appeared in the book MOAT Stacking by Dave Sattler.