Strategy is a Hypothesis II

Similarly, we test a new strategic insight against well-established knowledge about the business.

In science, you first test a new conjecture against known laws and experience.  Is the new hypothesis contradicted by basic principles or by the results of past experiments?  If the hypothesis survives that test, the scientist has to devise a real-world test -- an experiment-- to see how well the hypothesis stands up.

Similarly, we test a new strategic insight against well-established knowledge about the business.  if it passes those hurdles, we are faced with trying it out and seeing what happens.  Given that we are working on the edge, asking for a strategy that is guaranteed to work is like asking a scientist for a hypothesis that is guaranteed to be true--it is a dumb request.  The problem of coming up with a good strategy has the same logical structure as the problem of coming up with a good scientific hypothesis.  The key differences are that most scientific knowledge is broadly shared, whereas you are working with accumulated wisdom about your business and your industry that is unlike anyone else's. 

ACTION POINT: A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work.  Not a wild theory, but an educated judgment.