What Quantum Physics Taught Me About Strategic Planning

By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy

I didn’t come to quantum physics through a textbook. I came to it through frustration and epiphany.

After thirty-plus years of working in and with organizations on all things risk and strategy—tribal governments, publicly traded tech companies, non-profits, federal agencies, Alaska Native Corporations, universities—I kept running into the same wall. The plans looked right. The leadership was competent. The effort was genuine. And still, the strategies failed. Not sometimes. Routinely. Consistently. The commonly cited number is 90%. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a systemic problem.

So, I did what I always do when something fails repeatedly—I stopped looking at the symptoms and started looking at the structure. And what I found led me, unexpectedly, to the same place physicists arrived over a century ago: the universe doesn’t work the way we’ve been treating it.

Neither do organizations.

We’ve Been Running Organizations Like It’s 1911

Here’s the uncomfortable truth most business schools won’t tell you: the management philosophy that still dominates how we organize, lead, and plan is rooted in a Newtonian worldview. A predictable, controllable, machine-like universe where every input produces a known output. Frederick Taylor codified this in the early 1900s—break every process into parts, optimize each one, control the human variable, and the machine runs.

That thinking gave us the org chart. The annual plan. The cascading KPIs. The assumption that if we just get the right strategy on paper and push it through the system, the system will comply.

Except it doesn’t. And it hasn’t for a long time.

We start with vision, mission, and values to guide strategic priorities, which once defined are cascaded through initiatives, goals, and tactics, the success of which come through lagging metrics tied most often to revenue, market share, and overhead rates. Countless methods and tools have been built over the decades to hone competitive market analysis, organize and balance goals, and drive performance through engagement. Most are quite brilliant for the purpose intended. But if we’re doing all those things and still consistently failing overall, then clearly something is missing at the root level.

I am a big-picture systems thinker for whom repetitive failures throw giant red flags—because the very fact that repetitive failure exists means we’ve missed something. And that something is likely so fundamental in mindset that it simply isn’t questioned anymore. That’s how I feel about strategy. It’s a pervasive problem that impacts more than individual organizations. It affects the fabric and functioning of our society. Small business makes up 99.9% of all business in the United States, yet nearly 50% go under in the first five years. The failure rate for new CEOs falls between 40 and 60%. These aren’t just business statistics. They represent real people, real livelihoods, and a dampening of the confidence we need to take risks and inspire innovation.

I set out to answer one question: how do we build strategy in a way that works for every organization—regardless of size, type, or industry?

The Recipe, Not the Flavor

There are so many methods, frameworks, and tools out there, and even more built-for-purpose spinoffs. If you’re a non-profit, you do it this way. A multi-billion-dollar corporation, that way. This industry requires these tools, and that industry requires something completely different.

But here’s the thing—when we talk about strategy at this level of specificity, it’s analogous to flavors of ice cream and the toppings you choose to mix in. You can choose classic vanilla in a cup, or strawberry with hot fudge, toffee bits, and marshmallows in a triple-dipped waffle cone covered in sprinkles. Organization types are simply containers, industries are flavors, complexity is toppings, and size is… well, size is just size.

The problem I wanted to solve rested within the underlying recipe for ice cream—before the flavors were added and the toppings mixed in. It meant going back to the most fundamental understanding and teachings about building strategy, the part that simply wasn’t questioned anymore because it had been around for so long.

Until we solve the strategy equation for everyone, we haven’t solved anything at all.

I focused on defining those things that must exist to ensure long-term success, regardless of organizational structure or characteristics. What I found was this: purpose, growth, and evolution are critical to the success of any organization regardless of what it does, where it does it, or who it does it for. Purpose is what grounds and connects people to the work. Growth is necessary to prevent stagnation. Evolution is how we maintain relevance.

At first, I thought it was too simplistic—a basic and intuitive understanding that every leader certainly possessed. Every time I presented it, most agreed wholeheartedly. But when I applied this framing to the reality of how strategy was being built and executed inside the organizations I worked with, what I found was surprising.

Growth was almost always front and center—often the only thing on the strategic radar. Purpose carried varying degrees of importance, yet even where it was strongly felt, there were significant disconnects between executing the strategy and moving that purpose forward. And evolution? Almost never considered inside of strategy, even when the need for it was clearly visible in the organizational intelligence.

The elements never all showed up together. And when one dominated at the expense of the others, the consequences were predictable: operational focus completely disconnected from vision. Emphasis on growth to the point that internal capacity failed. Loss of consumers and key employees because critically needed change never happened.

Then It Got Personal

When I first started my practice, I was relieved to be done with what I called “people stuff.” My interests ran deep in exploring big concepts, breaking down complex systems, and connecting dots others didn’t see. Purpose, growth, and evolution was the framework I used. It allowed others to see what I saw more intuitively, and we could build strategy that addressed the blind spots and gaps.

But then I started going back to these same clients to refresh and update their plans. What I saw was not what I was hoping for. No matter how well the strategy was built, no matter how intricately woven it was around all the right things, if the team in charge was grappling with trust, confidence, communication, and cohesion, it all fell apart anyway. I found myself counseling CEOs and EDs behind the scenes as much as I was working with teams on their strategic plans.

It was ALL people stuff. Every last bit of it.

That realization sent me back to the drawing board. The basic elements were right, but something in the conversation still wasn’t happening. And then it hit me: purpose, growth, and evolution applied not just to the business, but to teams and individuals as well. The issues I was seeing—lack of personal alignment with corporate vision, lack of personal growth in the work of the organization, failure to evolve as team dynamics shifted—these were all symptoms of PGE out of balance at the human level. Organizations are made up of people, so this foundation needed to exist at all levels and within all layers and systems of the entity.

Fixing strategy meant addressing the holistic nature of the organization, not just what it was trying to accomplish.

What Quantum Physics Actually Told Me

I knew the framework needed to expand to encompass this more holistic perspective. And I wanted deeper validation than my own experience. I found my answers in quantum and complexity science, with a door opened wide by the work of Dr. Danah Zohar in Quantum Management Theory and others in parallel fields.

What I learned wasn’t abstract philosophy.

It was confirmation of everything I’d been seeing in practice.

Quantum science proved that the atom is not the smallest building block of the universe—subatomic particles are, and they’re made of energy. Quantum physics proved that the universe is not as predictable as Newton theorized. Particles move constantly, showing up when observed and disappearing when we look away. Both positive and negative energy exist, and together they make up the total energy of any system.

Everything is energy. Everything is connected. And everything moves in response to everything else.

When you take this understanding and apply it to how we create the strategies that run our organizations, you see why big, complex strategic plans become obsolete before the ink has even dried. You also see why an active mechanism for navigation and adaptation within the strategy framework is necessary.

Complexity science takes it further, applying quantum principles to the natural world. What we know is that organizations are Complex Adaptive Systems—they self-organize, learn, remember, adapt, and evolve based on internal relationships and in response to changes in the external environment. A perfect understanding of the individual parts does not automatically give you a perfect understanding of the whole. These systems are dynamic and unpredictable, thriving best when they can learn, adapt, and evolve organically.

Think about what traditional strategic planning asks you to do: predict outcomes three to five years out, lock them into a document, cascade them through a hierarchy, and measure progress against static targets. You are applying a mechanical process to a living system. The system will win that argument every time.

From Physics to Framework

Just as Taylorism created the machine-organization mindset based on Newton’s predictable universe, quantum and complexity science offer an evolution. Organizations are not machines. They are living complex adaptive systems that behave according to the laws of nature. If we refuse to evolve the way we organize, lead, and enrich them, they simply will not survive to fulfill their purpose.

This became the scientific grounding for what I now call the Essential Strategy Formula—Purpose, Growth, and Evolution managed in dynamic Equilibrium. Four rules guide the framework and give leaders a practical way to apply these principles:

Purpose must be internally compelling and externally valuable in its contribution. Growth is intentional, matched by adaptive learning and expansion of capabilities to sustain both speed and scale. Evolution actively anticipates the changing needs and wants of all those who serve and who are served by the organization. And Equilibrium is the mechanism that weaves the first three together—not a concept, but a catalyst for making better strategic decisions. This is the PGEE formula.

PGEE reflects the quantum reality we live in and the dynamic nature of the organization as a living system. It provides the context that’s been missing between vision and strategic priorities—a framing mechanism that surfaces the questions traditional planning never asks. Are we building internal capacity to match external ambition? Is our purpose connected to how we spend our time and resources? Are we anticipating evolution or just reacting to it?

When a new opportunity arises, when a crisis hits, when resources are tight and priorities compete, the Equilibrium lens asks: does this decision maintain balance across purpose, growth, and evolution? Or does it throw us dangerously out of alignment?

That question alone has changed the quality of strategic conversations I’ve seen leadership teams have. I’ve used this foundation with tribal governments, native corporations, publicly traded companies, government agencies at the state and federal levels, universities, churches, and non-profits. The nuances differ. The foundation holds.

Why This Matters Now More Than Ever

We are in a moment of extraordinary complexity. AI is reshaping what work looks like. Economic volatility is constant. Workforce expectations have shifted in ways that aren’t shifting back. Many leaders are defaulting to caution and incremental thinking—understandable, but dangerous.

At the same time, organizations are stuck on what Harvard Business Review aptly called the “transformation treadmill”—bold restructurings meant to fix deep problems that instead sap morale, unsettle customers and investors, and consume leadership energy. Then the next cycle starts. And the next.

Meanwhile, consider that 85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy. That’s not a time management failure. That’s a signal. The plan doesn’t feel alive to them because it isn’t. It was built as a static artifact in a dynamic system, and the system moved on without it.

A static plan built on linear thinking, optimized for a predictable world, cannot navigate an environment defined by interconnection and constant motion. But a living strategy—one grounded in purpose, growing with intention, evolving by design, and held in balance through conscious decision-making—that’s built for exactly this moment.

The Shift That Changes Everything

I call this way of thinking Quantum Intelligence—the awareness of the quantum reality we live in, together with the capacity to apply that understanding within the realm of business. It’s not about abandoning everything you know. The tools and frameworks you’re using aren’t wrong. The traditional model is simply missing a critical piece of the puzzle.

What quantum physics taught me is that strategy isn’t something you build once and execute. It’s a thinking discipline—a way of seeing the organization, the market, and the relationships between them as a living, breathing whole that requires ongoing attention, balance, and conscious navigation.

Strategic thinking discipline over static plan-building.

That’s the goal.

And it starts with accepting a truth that’s been staring us in the face since quantum mechanics first upended everything we thought we knew about how the world works: you cannot control a living system. But you can learn to move with it.

That’s not philosophy. It’s physics.

And it’s the most practical thing I’ve ever applied to strategy.

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Erin Sedor is an executive advisor and strategic performance expert with 30+ years helping organizations build strategy that actually works. She is the creator of Essential Strategy and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.