Understanding Emergent Strategy in Organizations

For years, traditional strategy models have told us: 📍 First, figure out exactly where you are. 🎯Then, set a clear vision for where you want to be. 🗺️Finally, map out the best path and execute. Sounds logical right? Except, this never worked for many companies. If it were true, it would mean the clearer you are about your destination and the path and the more rigidly you execute, the more likely you would be to succeed. Yet, this approach didn’t work out so well for Kodak, who was determined to dominate the photo film industry. The fundamental truth about why a learning/emergent strategy is the better option lies in how the brain learns and adapts. Our brains don’t work by setting rigid plans. They are prediction machines, constantly making guesses about what will happen next. This is how our brains work: 🫧They start with an initial best guess (or a prior belief). 📡Gather real-world feedback (evidence from the external environment). 🔁Continuously update their understanding (Bayesian learning). This fortuitously means we don’t need perfect information to act. We can take action, learn from the results, and refine our approach. A learning/emergent strategy matches our brain's prediction models. Instead of setting a fictional goal or vision, companies that follow this approach: 🔎 Start with an observation and form a hypothesis. (No need for certainty. All that's required is curiosity and involvement of people from throughout the organisation.) 🔬 Run small experiments to test what works. (This can be done alongside exploiting the core competencies). 🔁Continuously update their strategy based on what they learn. Some examples: 1️⃣ Amazon didn’t start as a cloud computing giant. It started as an online bookstore and evolved based on real-world signals. 2️⃣ Netflix didn’t know it was going to deliver videos via streaming or compete with Hollywood. It adjusted as technology and user behaviour changed. In contrast, companies that rigidly stick to a long-term plan, even when reality changes, often fail to adapt in time. So here is to learning. 🥂   The best strategy isn’t the one with the most detail. It’s the one that has the best brains connected and loops through learning cycles faster than the competition. #Strategy #EmergentStrategy #BayesianThinking Henry Mintzberg Peter Compo On a sidenote, I founded We Are Strategists, because I believe the best strategies emerge when employees are equipped with the right tools and skills to think strategically, adapt, and create their own strategies. If this sounds of interest, get in touch.

Think of Transformation as a CAPABILITY - NOT a PROCESS Most best practice descriptions of ‘transformation” (whether digital or otherwise) describe it as a project or process - usually with an end point or a feedback loop. This is usually based on the “unfreezing” of old practices and processes, and the subsequent “refreezing” of the new. Contrast this with the understanding of organisational resilience which is characterised as the ability of organisations to learn from change, disruption and uncertainty - and then to innovate and adapt. My previous work has depicted this as a series of both organisational and leadership practices (see https://bit.ly/3vdqoiF and https://bit.ly/3VkGwJF). I propose a new term - “Resilient Transformation”. Resilient transformation is the development of the capability for ongoing learning to enable innovation and adaptation in order to prepare for the evolving future. The key characteristics of Resilient Transformation capability are: > Psychological safety to empower key people and teams to innovate and experiment  > People with skin in the game involved the development of the strategy > Understanding that strategy is emergent - and will evolve as we engage with the environment > Strategy is the development of capability for adapt to a changing future, rather than about “closing a gap” in performance > Recognition of the organisation’s strategic posture - what and how the organisation seeks to achieve. (I have previously described strategic posture in other posts, see https://bit.ly/3PsW9v3). The key enablers of Resilient Transformation include: > Separating the strategy (learning) process from the planning (objectives, KPIs) process to enable reflection and innovation before settling an action plan > Avoiding the excessive drive for efficiency and resource leveraging which can reduce the ability of the organisation to effectively respond to change and disruption (greater fragility) > Practicing liminality in strategic decisions to avoid the premature selection of “silver bullet” solutions >Focusing on the “job to be done” for customers rather than an obsession with your product > Integrating critical uncertainties and risks into the strategy process to prepare for the future. The understanding of Resilient Transformation has the ability to shift our understanding and approach for the critical task of organisational transformation.

This diagram is floating all over LinkedIn at the moment. A diagram like this is useful because it challenges the lazy assumption that strategy is a slogan, a 100-page deck, or an ambition such as “we want to be number one.” That critique is fair. Michael Porter (1996) made much the same point when he argued that strategy is not operational effectiveness, nor a collection of managerial aspirations, but the disciplined choice of a unique position sustained through trade-offs. In that sense, the diagram gets an important part of the story right: strategy is as much about what an organisation chooses not to do as what it chooses to do. But from a more academic strategy perspective, the picture is still a little too neat. Alfred Chandler (1962) reminds us that strategy also involves determining long-term goals and allocating the resources required to pursue them. So goals and plans are not irrelevant; they simply do not, on their own, amount to strategy. Likewise, Henry Mintzberg (1978; 1994) cautioned against reducing strategy to a purely deliberate top-down design exercise. Strategy is not only intended; it is often emergent, revealed over time in patterns of action, learning, and adaptation. The diagram also blends several different layers of analysis. Trade-offs and coherent choices are at the core of strategy. Capabilities, incentives, and culture are critical, but they speak more to execution, alignment, and the organisational conditions that make strategy viable. That distinction matters. So, while this is a strong visual for provoking managerial reflection, the more complete view is this: 𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒈𝒚 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒂 𝒔𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒂𝒏, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒏𝒆𝒊𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒕 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒂 𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒄𝒉𝒐𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒐𝒘 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒆. 𝑰𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒆𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈-𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒎 𝒅𝒊𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒄𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕, 𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝒇𝒊𝒕, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒅𝒂𝒑𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒍𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆. In other words, 1️⃣ Porter helps us see why strategy demands trade-offs; 2️⃣ Chandler reminds us that goals and resource allocation remain central; and 3️⃣ Mintzberg warns us that real strategy often emerges in practice, not only in plans. That is why strategy remains difficult: it is not merely about being the best. It is about being distinctive, coherent, and adaptable in a changing competitive environment. #strategy #strategicmanagement #porter #mintzberg #chandler #competitiveadvantage #leadership #managementthought

Groups are profoundly creative – But it’s not about “managing creatives” Far too often we have found that an organization's view of organizational creativity is almost exclusively framed in terms of supporting creative individuals to be more of themselves. There are a number of problems with this: 1. Groups are not simply a collection of individuals following a collective plan or goal. As individuals sync up in coordinated practices, new group capacities (affordances), behaviors and outcomes emerge that are irreducible to any individual's contributions. 2. These group capacities have emergent novel propensities that give the group a direction that is irreducible to the goals or outlook of any of the participants. 3. These emergent group capacities and behaviors have the ability to directly transform the individual members. This system causation transformatively shapes the individuals that gave rise to the system. Thus distinct individual behaviors now originate as an outcome of group effects. 4. Much of the synchronization of groups happens at an embodied level – it does not rise to the level of being explicitly recognizable or conceptualizable. 5. Cognition (thinking) is distributed across people, equipment and environments. This means that the thinking is not found inside any one individual. It has to be understood at other levels in relation to emergent outcomes of distributed coordinated embedded practices. 6. We need to understand what constitutes a group to include more than human agents: it necessarily includes tools, environments, rituals, rules, histories, etc. – and that are all active participants in groups and their outcomes (in ways that go far beyond scaffolding or support). 7. Groups are both dynamic and multiple – coming in and out of synchronization at multiple scales and forms of nesting. And this is not meant a complete list – rather it is deliberately a short list to help make it clear: If we keep making the logic of (fictional) discrete individual human behavior the paradigmatic exemplar for creativity – we will never get close to actually engaging with the logics of creative processes in organizations. And “organizations” here should be both understood broadly – all human life is organized, intra-dependent, and collective. And also “organizations” should also be understood narrowly as well – most of the creative processes we are interested in catalyzing are in the context of some form of organization… Organizational creative processes are not about managing individual creatives. It is about how dynamic ecosystems lead to novel outcomes – and that is an entirely different problem… Curious about more? This week Jason Frasca 🐦⬛ and I are writing about this topic in our free weekly newsletter. Link in comments below.

From Harvard to Keerai Kadai: Strategy Lessons for Founders During my time at Harvard University, while pursuing the Disruptive Strategy course, I came across a concept that truly reflected the journey of Keerai Kadai. It’s about “Two Processes of Strategy Formulation”, and I believe it’s something every startup founder can relate to. Let me break it down and share how it shaped our story. 1️⃣ Deliberate Strategies: These are the plans we meticulously design—based on market research, customer needs, competitor analysis, and growth projections. At Keerai Kadai, we had deliberate strategies for building innovative products like Dip Soups, herbal teas, and health drinks targeted at specific health needs. Example: Our focus on offering greens as easy-to-consume, value-added products for busy lifestyles was deliberate, informed by market trends and customer preferences. 2️⃣ Emergent Strategies: Here’s where it gets interesting. Not everything at Keerai Kadai was part of a grand plan. In fact, we began selling fresh greens directly to customers without any clear roadmap. The demand and customer feedback shaped the next steps of our journey, leading us to innovate products like Moringa Dip Soup and expand into wellness drinks and teas. Example: When customers started asking for healthier, more convenient options, we pivoted to offer greens in sachets and soups, which eventually became our core business model. 💡 Key Insight from Harvard: Your actual strategy is often a blend of deliberate and emergent approaches. This balance allows startups to stay focused while being flexible enough to capitalize on unexpected opportunities. 3️⃣ The Keerai Kadai Story: What began as a small initiative to supply fresh greens directly from farms evolved into a full-fledged agritech venture with value-added products. This wasn’t part of a detailed, deliberate plan—it was an emergent strategy. By listening to our customers, adapting to market needs, and staying flexible, we grew into the brand we are today. One of my favorite examples from the course: Sam Walton’s decision to open Wal-Mart’s second store in a small town wasn’t part of a grand strategy, but it eventually shaped the company’s iconic model of focusing on smaller towns. Similarly, Keerai Kadai’s initial focus on fresh greens opened doors to our innovative products that were shaped by emergent strategies. 📌 My Advice to Founders: • Start with a vision but stay open to change. • Pay close attention to what your customers are telling you—they often hold the key to your next big move. For me, this Harvard course validated our approach at Keerai Kadai and reinforced the importance of balancing planning with adaptability. Let’s keep sharing, learning, and growing together! #Strategy #Leadership #KeeraiKadai #Startups #EmergentStrategy #HarvardLearnings #DisruptiveStrategy Padmini Sekar Bargav R Mohan K Mohan LKN Manju Riya Palanisamy SATHISHKUMAR T M.K. Elango Hussain Ahmed - Cheran Academy

"Emergence" is a powerful yet poorly understood idea at the heart of complexity theory that reframes our thinking about how change occurs within complex systems. From this perspective, systems innovation is not about duplicating or expanding components but rather about realizing the emergence of new patterns of organization through integration. Our traditional approach to scaling is to try to find something that works and inject resources into it to duplicate its operations and scale its production. You see this approach in Silicon Valley, and it works in some respects. However, this is not a good approach to changing systems. The Silicon Valley approach works on scaling the system's parts - finding the best organization or solution and then growing it. We traditionally drive every organization to scale, though systems change is not about scaling an organization; it is about scaling a network and its capacities. Scaling systems innovation requires asking: "How do we scale the outcomes not by growing one organization or program but by connecting it with others so that together they can form a new, more functional pattern?". Systems change is a lot about unlocking everyone's collective genius. That is why systems-changing innovations are best looked at as movements. Movements start with stories and culture that bring different actors together within a new paradigm and values set. When scaling an ecosystem by creating connections, we do not need to create the connections ourselves; we need to create the right conditions for others. We create a context within which people can connect and the local incentives that drive its expansion through network effects. The Internet is a paragon of a systems innovation approach to scaling through network effects. Arguably, the most radical force re-patterning social and economic organization around the world is the Internet, which is essentially just a set of protocols that connect computers and people. Everything else was created by the system users, individuals, and organizations, empowering them in new ways. Text taken from the SI Guide to Scaling Systems Innovation: https://lnkd.in/es9Nxkkx

Organisation development, at its heart, is about making our organisations effective – not just bigger, not just busier but genuinely capable of delivering the future we’re aiming for....Growth exposes whether that effectiveness is really there Growth shows you where the organisation works, but more importantly, where it only appears to work – the hidden assumptions, informal norms, uneven capabilities and daily interactions that don’t show up on an org chart but shape everything That’s why OD is intentional work, but not in the sense of designing a machine. Organisations don’t behave like machines because people don’t respond predictably. Effectiveness emerges from interaction, not just structure. It’s about setting enough direction to give coherence, while leaving room for things to evolve, adapt and surprise you The balance between the planned and the emergent is where most growing organisations either thrive or stall A few areas matter disproportionately: 1. Designing the senior team deliberately – and letting it evolve You need core capability and shared standards early, but you also need the humility to adjust as the organisation learns what it actually needs. Small probes and safe-to-try experiments often reveal more about team dynamics than any amount of planning Feedback loops matter: the leadership team must keep learning from the system they’re trying to lead. 2. Being thoughtful about how you shape culture – without pretending you can engineer it Culture isn’t something you “build”; it’s something that emerges from routines, constraints, expectations and experience. You can influence it through the signals leaders send, the behaviours they reward, and the choices they make under pressure. Nudges, patterns and small shifts in interaction often do more than a perfectly worded values statement. 3. Creating an operating rhythm that provides focus – and tolerates uncertainty Rhythm matters: Effective meetings, clear priorities, structured decision-making But rigidity kills learning. A good operating rhythm creates enough stability for people to align, while leaving space for adaptation and course-correction. It’s the place where learning loops live – where teams can see patterns emerging and respond early rather than late. When we approach OD like this – intentional but not overdefined; structured but adaptive; directional yet open to emergence – growth becomes something the organisation can genuinely absorb And this is exactly how we work. We work closely with senior leaders, taking a pragmatic, grounded approach to developing their organisations. We don’t sell a neat five-step methodology, because that isn’t how organisations actually work Real OD is a partnership – making sense of what’s happening together and shaping the conditions for effectiveness Where does your organisation need a more deliberate approach – and where would a bit more flexibility improve how the work gets done?

The rise of ‘Innovation Manager’ job titles is both a step forward and a common misunderstanding. A step forward because organizations are finally taking innovation seriously. They are hiring people trained in entrepreneurship and innovation. A misunderstanding, because you can’t actually manage innovation. Why? Because innovation is not a controlled process. It emerges at the intersection of strategy, market forces, and execution. The market and not your title determines whether something is truly innovative. The problem runs deeper. We are still trapped in management thinking, in the illusion of control that we apply to every aspect of an organization. Sure, we have more control over some areas like accounting, finance, or quarterly reports. Other areas are emergent, like strategy, innovation, culture, and art. You cannot manage what must emerge. You can only control the conditions that might allow it to happen. So make sure you differentiate between aspects you can control and aspects that are emergent. Even though Innovation itself is largely emergent, there are lots of aspects you can control and manage: Resources. No budget, no results. A portfolio that only invests in incremental improvements will stagnate. Focus. Innovation is not a part-time job. It needs dedicated professionals, not just a workshop now and then. Discipline. Ensure incremental and radical innovations have their place and don’t compete for resources. Balancing short-term wins with long-term bets is key. Experimentation. Not all ideas should be tested the same way. Some need rapid iteration. Others need time to mature. A well-structured portfolio acknowledges different innovation speeds. Market Orientation. Innovation is not a post-it exercise. It must be tied to strategy, shaped by market dynamics, and connected to real-world positioning. Otherwise, it is just theater. Strategic Alignment. Innovation and strategy should work together. You don’t just chase the next big thing. You build a deliberate, evolving portfolio where innovation and market positioning reinforce each other. You don’t manage innovation. But you can manage organizational structures so that innovation has a fair chance to happen. Follow me 🔔 we are going off the beaten track. Along the way, I will share resources, tools, and insights you will not find in any playbook.

"RETROSPECTIVE FICTION: WHY WE MISTAKE A WELL TOLD PAST FOR AN ACTIONABLE FUTURE, AND THE CONSEQUENCES" Clayton Williams’s essay is a timely reminder that too much of what passes for strategy is really retrospective fiction. As he puts it: “Stop rehearsing the past; rehearse the future.” His central point is vital: “Models are provisional; reality is unruly; luck will continue her caprices. But a method that commits in advance, tests under uncertainty, and learns without alibi is morally superior to one that explains beautifully after the fact. It allocates capital more justly, treats subordinates less cynically, and produces institutions that bend rather than break when the world moves.” This aligns with my own view that strategy is not simply “a pattern in a stream of actions” (as Mintzberg suggested), nor is it rigidly planned. It is the practice of intentionally influencing patterns as they unfold. Progress is always oblique and iterative, as John Kay argued in Obliquity. In recent interviews with both Mintzberg and Kay, I explored this same theme: strategy as disciplined experimentation—committing in advance, learning honestly, and adapting in real time. Williams’s critique matters because it calls out the ethical failure of hindsight-driven strategy and demands a practice that genuinely builds resilience and fairness into our institutions. #strategy #Strategicmanagement #HenryMintzberg #JohnKay #EmergentStrategy #StrategicPlanning #Enterprise #EnlightenedEnterprise #EnlightenedEnterpriseAcademy #EEA Clayton Williams