By Pawel Nowak
Strategy is a future-focused discipline that rarely risks being wrong: its explanations are flexible enough to accommodate almost any outcome.
Strategy speaks about the future. It promises direction before the outcome is known and offers frameworks for choosing, positioning, allocating, competing, and adapting under uncertainty.
The deeper I went into the field — as an entrepreneur, coach, and researcher — the more a different question began to bother me: what kind of knowledge is strategy supposed to be?
Strategy explains the past with remarkable confidence, yet rarely makes claims precise enough to be proven wrong. That is where the comparison between astronomy and astrology becomes useful.
A Theory That Cannot Lose
Karl Popper offered one of the most influential answers to a fundamental question: what separates a scientific claim from an explanation that can remain convincing whatever happens?
His answer was falsifiability. Explanatory power alone is not enough. A theory must also expose itself to the possibility of being wrong. There has to be a conceivable observation that would contradict it.
Astronomy accepts that risk. If astronomers calculate where an asteroid will be on a particular date, reality eventually provides an answer. The calculation may survive the encounter, or it may fail. Either way, the claim can be tested.
Astrology works differently. A failed prediction rarely defeats the system. It can be reinterpreted through another planetary influence, another house, another aspect, another reading of the chart. Contradiction does not necessarily end the argument. It produces a new explanation.
That is what makes Popper’s question so useful when looking at strategy. Not whether strategy sounds smart. Not whether frameworks are elegant. Not whether executives use them. But whether they can lose.
Consider how easily opposite outcomes can be absorbed:
- Failure becomes an execution problem.
- Changing direction demonstrates adaptability.
- Staying the course demonstrates focus and consistency.
Diversification works because the businesses reinforce one another. When it fails, the company should have stayed closer to its core. A first mover succeeds because it moved first. Another company succeeds by waiting and becomes evidence of the advantages of being a fast follower.
The problem is not that strategy gets things wrong. Every serious field does. The problem is that strategic explanations are often constructed in ways that protect them from being wrong.
If a theory can accommodate success and failure, focus and diversification, persistence and adaptation, its power to explain should not be confused with an ability to predict.
If a theory cannot lose, what does it mean for the theory to win?
Writing the Future Backward
A second problem appears when we look at where much of strategic knowledge comes from. Strategy is supposed to help us deal with the future, yet its most persuasive stories are usually written after the future has already happened.
We study companies that became successful, identify the decisions that now appear decisive, and reconstruct a logic that makes the outcome look almost inevitable. The winners provide the evidence. The result tells us which parts of their history deserve to be called strategy.
By the time the lesson reaches the reader, uncertainty has disappeared. This is why so many bestselling strategy books are persuasive. Good to Great. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. And countless others. They take us into histories whose endings we already know.
Successful companies become evidence of good strategy. Failed companies become evidence of bad strategy, weak leadership, poor execution, or missed change. Decisions that once competed with dozens of other possibilities are selected, connected, and given meaning because we now know what followed.
We are offered hindsight, polished into a lesson about foresight.
The harder question is what disappears from these stories. For every company whose success can be linked to focus, discipline, culture, bold investment, or a brilliant strategic choice, how many others followed a similar path and failed?
The winners remain visible. The alternatives fade from view.
The people making those decisions were acting with incomplete information, competing interpretations, pressure, commitments, luck, and consequences they could not yet see. Then the future happened. And suddenly the past became strategic.
This is another place where strategy resembles astrology. The pattern becomes visible after the events have occurred. Scattered decisions can be connected into a coherent story, and the story begins to look like a plan. But coherence after the fact is not the same as foresight before the fact.
We are remarkably good at discovering strategy once we know who won. We buy hindsight packaged as foresight.
Everyone Wants a Horoscope
If strategy is so difficult to test and so often reconstructed after the fact, why does it remain so attractive?
Because strategy promises more than analysis. It promises success. The word carries weight. It suggests that uncertainty can be made intelligible, that direction can be found, and that the future can be approached with more confidence.
In that sense, strategy resembles another word with extraordinary appeal: happiness. Everyone wants what it names. Few agree on what it means.
Ask ten leaders what they mean when they say, “We need a strategy,” and the answers quickly diverge. Some mean priorities. Others mean growth. Positioning. A plan. Competitive advantage. Alignment. Confidence. Or simply a clearer sense of what to do next.
The word remains imprecise, yet powerful enough to gather all these desires into one conversation.
This is where the comparison with astrology becomes more revealing. People read horoscopes not only for predictions, but because the message feels personal. My relationships. My fears. My money. My future. The forecast matters less than the feeling that it speaks directly to what matters to me.
Strategy works in much the same way inside organizations. Say, “We need to discuss our processes,” and the room may stay cold. Say, “We need to discuss our strategy,” and suddenly ambition, fear, power, identity, purpose, and the future are all allowed into the conversation.
The prediction may be the excuse. The conversation is the value.
Does Strategy Exist?
There is no distinct activity called strategy. People organize, invest, compete, decide, and act. We call these activities strategic when we want to connect them to long-term consequences.
Strip away the word strategic. Strategic management is still management. Strategic marketing is still marketing. Strategic HR is still HR.
That does not make the word useless. That may explain why we keep returning to it.
What Is Strategy For?
Strategy gives organizations an opportunity to talk about what matters most.
Where are we going? What are we afraid of? What are we willing to sacrifice? What are we pretending not to see? What kind of organization are we becoming?
Perhaps strategy does not need to predict the future. Astronomy can tell us where an object will be. Astrology tells us what a pattern might mean. Strategy has spent too much time borrowing the authority of the first while performing the work of the second.
The value of strategy may lie less in revealing what will happen than in helping people deal with what matters most.
Pawel Nowak
