Both documents take current positions of distant bodies, apply a formal system with internal rules and no external validity, and produce a confident narrative about year four. One is a natal chart. The other is a five-year plan. The resemblance is not a joke about spreadsheets; it is structural. Astrology survives because it delivers something people want, a story in which the future is already shaped, and because its hits are remembered while its misses are forgiven. The five-year plan survives on exactly those terms. Nobody audits slide 40 of the 2021 strategy deck in 2026. If anyone did, the deck would not survive the audit; so the audit is never scheduled.
Ricardo Semler has told it as company policy: Semco ran on six-month budgets, and a five-year plan was treated as a sign of inattention, an announcement that its author had stopped watching the actual business. He has said he built fourteen companies and never planned beyond three years, on the grounds that three years is as far as anyone can genuinely see. The point is not that the future is unknowable in some mystical sense. It is that the marginal year of forecast decays fast, and somewhere around the horizon Semler names, the plan stops describing the world and starts describing its author's need for one.
What fast movers do instead
The empirical literature on decision making in unstable environments is inconveniently clear about where performance comes from. Kathleen Eisenhardt's study of eight firms in the early microcomputer industry, one of the fastest-moving markets ever documented, found the opposite of what the planning ritual assumes. The executives who decided quickly and performed well did not rely on longer-range vision. They consumed more real-time information than their slower rivals, tracked operations continuously rather than through annual reviews, and carried more simultaneous alternatives, not fewer. The slow, deliberate, single-forecast decision makers performed poorly or failed. Prediction was not their edge. Attention was.
Macro evidence rhymes with this. Aghion, Bloom, Sadun, Van Reenen and Lucking studied firms through the Great Recession and found that those that had delegated decision rights to local plant managers before the storm outgrew centralized peers in the hardest-hit sectors. The mechanism they identify is the one the five-year plan is designed to ignore: under turbulence, the value of local, current information rises, and the value of the headquarters forecast falls. The org chart version of astrology is central planning; the org chart version of attention is delegation.
Careers run the same experiment
Individuals rerun this study privately. The five-year career plan is composed by extrapolating today's industry, today's role definitions and today's preferences, all three of which are variables pretending to be constants. Employer surveys such as the World Economic Forum's now routinely project double-digit shares of jobs disrupted within a five-year window; more decisively, the planner changes too, and updates the plan's author without updating the plan. What survives from most five-year plans is the part that was never a forecast: the direction. "Toward work with more autonomy," "toward the sea," "toward teaching" are headings, and headings age well. It is the itinerary, the named employer, the named title, the named city in year four, that turns into horoscope.
The alternative to the five-year plan is not planlessness; it is the shorter, harder document. A direction held loosely. A commitment sized to the visible horizon, one to three years, reviewed on a date already in the calendar. A budget of attention rather than a budget of predictions: what would have to be true for this to still make sense in eighteen months, and what signal would show it first? That document is less flattering to write. It contains no year-four triumph, so it cannot be admired. It can only be used.
The comfort is the product
The lasting insight hiding in the astrology comparison is about demand. People do not buy natal charts for accuracy, and organizations do not buy five-year plans for accuracy either. Both purchase the sensation that the future has been handled. The sensation is real; the handling is not. A person who trades the five-year plan for a three-year cycle and a live dashboard gives up a pleasant fiction and receives, in exchange, the only forecasting advantage that has ever held up in fast weather: noticing things early, with options still open. The stars can keep the rest.
Sources
- Academy of Management Journal / Eisenhardt (1989). Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments. Study of eight microcomputer firms: fast decision makers used more real-time information and more simultaneous alternatives than slow ones, and fast decisions were associated with superior performance. https://acawiki.org/Making_fast_strategic_decisions_in_high-velocity_environments
- American Economic Journal: Applied Economics / Aghion, Bloom, Lucking, Sadun & Van Reenen (2021). Turbulence, Firm Decentralization, and Growth in Bad Times. Firms that delegated decisions to local managers before the Great Recession outperformed centralized peers in the hardest-hit sectors; the mechanism is the rising value of local, current information under turbulence. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fapp.20180752