Emergent strategy: why a delivered plan is not enough

In the video, in Italian, I say that strategy is neither a product nor a service to be delivered, but a path taken together, and I quote Henry Mintzberg. Here I tell the story that made his idea of emergent strategy famous, Honda’s motorcycles in Los Angeles, and what it means for the people who run a company.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

Many people think strategy is a product.

Or that it is just a service.

But strategy is neither one nor the other.

It is a path.

And a path is taken together.

The client is not a spectator waiting for a result. The client is an active part of the process. They have to believe in it. They have to invest time, attention, a constant presence.

Henry Mintzberg, one of the fathers of management theory, showed this in decades of research: strategies that work do not come from a delivered plan, but from a continuous dialogue between those who lead and those who build. No strategy survives the absence of the people who wanted it.

And that means results are not measured the next day. You read them in the trajectory. They reveal themselves looking back, after months of shared work, adjustments, choices made together.

Someone said you cannot step into the same river twice. Strategy is that river: it moves, changes shape, and asks whoever crosses it to move with it.

The motorcycles Honda did not expect to sell

In June 1959 Honda opened its American subsidiary in Los Angeles with a clear plan: win over the United States with the motorcycles it was proudest of, the 250 cc and 305 cc Dream. On long American roads, though, those bikes began to leak oil and burn out their clutches, and Honda had to recall them. Success came from elsewhere, from a small 50 cc motorbike nobody had seen as the lead: the Super Cub.

Strategy is not a product to be delivered: it is a path that the people who run the company take together with the strategist.

Honda’s executives told the story years later to Richard Pascale, who published it in 1984. The little Super Cubs they rode around town drew an interest the big bikes had not found, and opened a market nobody had foreseen: people who did not think of themselves as motorcyclists. In 1963 came the campaign that made it famous, You meet the nicest people on a Honda.

Some details of that account have been disputed, and a few do not match the records. The substance holds, though, and Henry Mintzberg discussed it at length with Pascale and other scholars: the strategy that brought Honda success in the United States was not the one it had started with.

Deliberate and emergent: what Mintzberg and Waters observed

In 1985, in the Strategic Management Journal, Mintzberg and James A. Waters proposed a distinction that still underpins much of the thinking on strategy. Deliberate strategies are those realized as they were intended. Emergent strategies are patterns of behavior that form anyway, despite intentions or in their absence.

In reality the two forms mix. A purely deliberate strategy would require foreseeing everything, and a purely emergent one would mean having no intentions: Mintzberg and Waters saw them as two extremes, each as rare as the other. The strategies companies actually realize lie in between, with a decided direction and a path discovered along the way.

In the video I say Mintzberg proved it. More precisely, he showed it through years of studies of real organizations, reconstructing after the fact the strategies they had actually followed, which were often different from those written in their plans.

The potter: the one who thinks the strategy and the one who makes it are the same hand

Two years later, in 1987, Mintzberg wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called Crafting Strategy. It opens with two images. In the first, someone plans strategy: an executive, or a group, shut in an office deciding on actions everyone else will carry out on schedule. In the second, someone crafts it, like an artisan.

The artisan he had in mind was a potter, his wife, who had worked with ceramics since 1967 and whose production Mintzberg had studied the way one studies a company’s. At the wheel, the person who thinks the form and the person who makes it are the same: the potter learns from the pot just made, and the next one grows partly out of it. “Managers are craftsmen and strategy is their clay,” Mintzberg writes.

Many Italian small and mid-sized companies know stories like Honda’s, even if no one ever called them emergent strategy. The product created at a single customer’s request that becomes the most profitable line; the foreign market opened through a chance contact at a trade fair; the service offered as a courtesy that customers end up paying for. In all these cases the strategy that was realized was born by doing, and someone, at some point, had the clarity to recognize it and choose it.

A delivered plan separates the two hands by contract. Someone thinks, someone else somewhere executes, and what is learned in executing does not get back to whoever did the thinking.

Why the client has to be there

This is the least obvious reason why, as I say in the video, the client cannot be a spectator. Emergent strategy comes from action, and action happens inside the company: in the small decisions of departments, in customers who respond in unexpected ways, in the Super Cub that people like more than the Dream. Whoever is not there loses more than information: they lose the part of the strategy that forms while the work is being done.

If the people who run the company do not take part, the emergent part of the strategy forms anyway, but without anyone choosing it.

That is why I ask for regular meetings and for the owners to be present, as I explain to those who ask whether they can get a finished plan, and that is why a strategy engagement usually lasts a year. It takes time to see what emerges, and to decide together what to keep.

A strategy’s results are read in the trajectory of months, not the day after the plan is delivered.

The river stays the same because the water flows

That leaves the river from the video. The line we all remember, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” is how Plato, in the Cratylus, summed up the thought of Heraclitus. The fragment scholars consider authentic says something else: on those who step into the same rivers, ever different waters flow.

The difference is valuable for anyone who works on strategy. In the authentic fragment the river stays the same river precisely because the water flows, and its identity lies in its course, not in the water. A strategy works the same way: the direction stays, and it can stay because the path changes. That is the point of my answer to those who ask whether the strategy changes during the work.

Here also lies the limit of all this talk of emergence. A strategy that merely emerges is drift, and Mintzberg knew it well: that is why he spoke of a balance between the two forms and not of one replacing the other. Shared work serves to hold together a direction decided by the people who run the company and a willingness to learn from the road, which is the heart of the work on direction and priorities and the very meaning of business strategy.

What to do and what not to do

• Decide the direction and the criteria for choosing, and let the path take shape as you work.
• Set regular moments to look at what is emerging and decide what to keep.
• Stay present in the decisions that matter, even when the work is entrusted to someone from outside.
• Do not ask for a closed plan to carry out for a year without touching it.
• Do not mistake everything that happens for strategy: what emerges has to be chosen, or it is drift.

Sources

• Henry Mintzberg, James A. Waters, “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” Strategic Management Journal, 6 (3), 1985, pp. 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250060306
• Henry Mintzberg, “Crafting Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 1987, pp. 66–75. https://hbr.org/1987/07/crafting-strategy
• Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Free Press, 1994.
• Richard T. Pascale, “Perspectives on Strategy: The Real Story Behind Honda’s Success,” California Management Review, 26 (3), 1984, pp. 47–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165080
• Henry Mintzberg, Richard T. Pascale, Michael Goold, Richard P. Rumelt, “CMR Forum: The ‘Honda Effect’ Revisited,” California Management Review, 38 (4), 1996, pp. 77–117. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165855
• Daniel W. Graham, “Heraclitus,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023 revision (fragments B12 and B91; Plato, Cratylus, 402a). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/