June 19, 2026

Most strategy starts in the wrong place

Dead reckoning means working forward from your own last known position; a celestial fix means locating yourself against the world. Not dead reckoning, c. 1942. A navigator takes a celestial fix with a sextant, U.S. Navy. — Dead reckoning means working forward from your own last known position; a celestial fix means locating yourself against the world. *Not dead reckoning, c. 1942.* A navigator takes a celestial fix, U.S. Navy.

Almost every strategy process begins the same way: with you. Your position, your customers, your capabilities, your numbers, your appetite for risk. From there you reason outward — what should we do next? It feels rigorous and responsible. In a stable market it mostly works, because the world is holding still long enough that the only real variable is you.

That world is gone.

When the bases of competition are shifting, starting with yourself means starting with the wrong variable. The market is no longer the stable backdrop to your strategy. It is the thing you have to solve for first. Where is it actually heading? Who is winning, and why? What will the structural drivers of success be once it settles? Until you can answer that, every confident plan you build forward from today's company is a well-argued guess about a world that no longer exists.

Working backward inverts the exercise. You start with a clear picture of the market’s end-game and let it tell you what’s required — then you turn to your company and confront the gap, however uncomfortable. It produces the sentence good strategy depends on and bad strategy avoids: if this is where the market is going, then we have to do that — even when you don’t yet know how. Working forward lets you optimize what you already are. Working backward tells you what you need to become.

The catch is that you can't work backward from a market you can't see. The approach depends on a rigorous, current, honest window into where the market is actually going — not last year's research, not your own internal data echoing your past back at you, not a model's confident guess at what real people think. The faster the market moves, the faster that window has to move with it. Most companies don't have one, and instead rely on a quarterly deck and gut instinct.

So before your next planning cycle, ask which direction your strategy actually runs. If every conversation starts with your company and works outward, you're not doing strategy. You're doing autobiography.

Stop asking what your company should do. Start asking what the market will demand.