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Why the Strategy a Firm Executes Is Rarely the Strategy It Planned
Honda entered the American motorcycle market in 1959 with a plan to sell large-engine machines to existing US enthusiasts. By 1966, it dominated the market with a small 50cc Super Cub that had not been part of the plan at all. The case has been used for sixty years to argue about what strategy really is — whether it is something a firm decides in advance or something a firm discovers by operating.
Henry Mintzberg and James Waters introduced the distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy in their 1978 paper “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” published in Strategic Management Journal. Mintzberg developed it further in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994) and, with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel, in Strategy Safari (1998). His argument was that most strategies are a blend of what leadership intended and what the organisation learned by acting. The realised strategy that a firm actually pursues is neither of these alone.
I want to examine how the two forms of strategy interact, why the reconciliation matters, and what firms should do about it. My analysis runs through four chapters:
- Mintzberg’s deliberate and emergent distinction — the original framework and what it means
- Realised strategy and the strategy continuum — how the two extremes connect
- The learning school of strategy formation — the theoretical tradition the framework belongs to
- Reconciling the two in practice — what firms actually do when the plan meets reality
My approach is comparative. I read the Honda case through Mintzberg’s framework, and I test the framework against a modern firm operating in conditions the twentieth-century strategy canon never anticipated — Safaricom in Kenya, whose market has never allowed multi-year plans to hold. The two cases sit at opposite ends of the deliberate-emergent spectrum, and reading them together shows what the framework explains and where it falls short.
Mintzberg's Deliberate and Emergent Distinction
Definition
Henry Mintzberg and James Waters introduced the deliberate-emergent distinction in their 1978 paper “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” published in Strategic Management Journal. They defined deliberate strategy as the pattern of decisions that follows from prior intention — the plan being executed. Emergent strategy is the pattern that forms in the absence of intention — decisions made in response to circumstance as it arises. Realised strategy, the pattern that actually appears in the firm’s behaviour, is a blend of the two.
The framework rests on three concepts:
- Deliberate strategy — the plan, executed as designed
- Emergent strategy — the pattern that forms from unplanned decisions
- Realised strategy — the combination of both, visible only in retrospect
I want you to notice why this distinction matters more than it first appears. Most managers are trained to treat strategy as the first category alone. The plan is made, resources are committed, execution is measured against the plan. That model works as long as the environment confirms the plan’s assumptions. Where it breaks down — and it eventually does — the firm has no vocabulary for recognising the emergent pattern forming underneath it. Mintzberg’s contribution was to give that pattern a name and to legitimise it as a form of strategy rather than a deviation from strategy. That is a bigger shift than it sounds. Once you accept that emergent decisions can constitute strategy, the entire question of who is authorised to make strategy changes.
In practice, real strategies sit somewhere between the two extremes:
- Planned strategy — the intended direction, documented and resourced
- Deliberate strategy — the portion of the plan that is actually realised
- Unrealised strategy — the portion of the plan that is abandoned or never executed
- Emergent strategy — the pattern that formed without being planned
- Realised strategy — the actual behaviour of the firm, blending the two
I will put the framework’s deeper point plainly. Strategy is not what a firm decides. It is what a firm does. A firm can produce immaculate strategy documents and still have no strategy in the realised sense if behaviour does not follow. And a firm can have no formal strategy process at all and still exhibit a coherent realised strategy, because decisions made on the ground form a pattern outsiders can identify. What matters for the analyst is the pattern, not the paperwork.
Realised Strategy and the Strategy Continuum
Definition
Realised strategy is the actual pattern of decisions a firm makes over time, visible in retrospect and independent of what it intended. Mintzberg argued that every realised strategy sits somewhere on a continuum between fully deliberate and fully emergent — and that the position on that continuum is more useful for analysis than a categorical label. Andrew Pettigrew’s research on strategy process at Warwick Business School reinforced this point by showing that realised strategy is shaped as much by internal politics and timing as by the plan itself.
Realised strategy is the product of four inputs:
- Intended strategy — the plan as documented
- Deliberate strategy — the portion of the plan that survives contact with the market
- Unrealised strategy — the portion of the plan that is abandoned
- Emergent strategy — the new pattern that forms as the firm adapts
I want you to see why the continuum is more useful than a binary classification. A firm at the fully deliberate end can execute large-scale investments with confidence, but it can be caught out badly when the environment shifts faster than the planning cycle. A firm at the fully emergent end can adapt quickly, but it struggles to build durable capabilities or sustain a coherent position across years. Most successful strategies sit somewhere in the middle, and the position shifts over the firm’s life — more deliberate in stable periods, more emergent in transition periods. Where a firm sits on the continuum is not a matter of philosophy. It is a matter of what its market will allow.
The continuum has five broadly recognisable positions:
- Fully deliberate — the plan is executed as designed; used in stable, predictable markets
- Largely deliberate — the plan is executed with minor adaptations; the norm in mature industries
- Mixed — the plan provides direction but is significantly reshaped by market feedback
- Largely emergent — the firm operates without a formal plan and relies on pattern recognition
- Fully emergent — the firm’s behaviour is the product of uncoordinated local decisions
I will say this plainly: positioning a firm on the continuum is not a judgement of quality. A fully deliberate strategy executed in the right conditions produces better outcomes than a mixed strategy executed in the wrong ones. What matters is whether the firm’s position matches the volatility of its environment. Mismatches — deliberate in a volatile market, emergent in a stable one — are where strategy failure usually lives. I return to this point in the conclusion, because it is the thread that connects everything else in the post.
The Learning School of Strategy Formation
Definition
The learning school of strategy treats strategy as a process of collective learning rather than a single decision made by top management. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel classified it as one of ten schools in Strategy Safari (1998). The learning school holds that strategies emerge from the accumulation of small decisions and experiments, and that the role of leadership is to recognise and codify the patterns that form, not to dictate them in advance.
The learning school is built on three claims:
- Strategy is process — it emerges over time, not as a single plan
- Learning is distributed — the people closest to the market see shifts first
- Leadership codifies — the executive’s job is to recognise and legitimise emerging patterns
I want you to understand why the learning school matters here, because it is easy to treat the deliberate-emergent distinction as a standalone idea. It is not. It belongs to a broader argument Mintzberg was making: that strategy is something organisations learn, not something leaders design. The Honda case is the standard illustration. The American team discovered that the Super Cub sold, escalated that information upward, and the company legitimised the pattern by committing to it. Leadership’s role was not to have predicted the outcome but to have permitted the organisation to notice it. That is a much harder discipline than it sounds, because it requires leadership to accept that the correction will come from the front line rather than from the planning office.
The tradition carries five practical implications:
- Experimentation matters — firms need to try small things before committing to large ones
- Escalation matters — the organisation must be able to surface information that contradicts the plan
- Leadership attention matters — the executive team must be able to recognise patterns in front-line decisions
- Codification matters — once a pattern is recognised, it must be legitimised so the organisation can commit to it
- Humility matters — leaders must accept the plan will be wrong somewhere, and that the correction will not come from the planning office
I will not pretend the learning school is uncontested. Igor Ansoff argued that it understates the value of analytical planning and overstates the capacity of organisations to learn from the front line. The critique has force. But the school’s central claim — that strategy forms as much from action as from analysis — has proved durable in the decades since, particularly in fast-moving markets where no plan can anticipate the relevant changes.
Reconciling the Two in Practice
Definition
Reconciliation, in the deliberate-emergent framework, means designing an organisation that can hold both forms of strategy at once — committing resources to a plan while remaining capable of revising the plan when the market provides evidence it should. Rita McGrath’s The End of Competitive Advantage (2013) argued that reconciliation is now a permanent operating requirement rather than a periodic adjustment, because competitive positions decay faster than they did in the twentieth century.
I want to make the reconciliation concrete, because it is easy to agree with in principle and hard to implement. Firms reconcile the two forms through a small set of practices. Some are structural — how planning is sequenced, how experiments are funded, how feedback is escalated. Others are cultural — whether front-line managers feel safe reporting the plan is wrong, and whether leadership treats such reports as useful information or as disloyalty. The practices matter more than the labels. A firm can call itself learning-oriented and still punish the behaviours learning requires. That is the trap.
The reconciliation in practice rests on five practices:
- Stable intent, flexible tactics — long-term strategic intent that survives planning cycles, paired with short-term tactics that can change quickly
- Structured experimentation — small, funded experiments that test strategic assumptions before they become commitments
- Escalation channels — explicit ways for front-line information to reach leadership without being filtered by the planning process
- Review cadence — regular checkpoints at which the plan’s assumptions are tested against current evidence
- Legitimisation — leadership publicly committing to emergent patterns once they are recognised, so the organisation can execute against them
I will put the stakes directly. Firms that achieve this reconciliation do not have to choose between planning and adaptiveness. They get both. Firms that do not are caught on one side or the other: too rigid to move, or too scattered to build. The Honda case is an example of the first failure being avoided — the plan was abandoned before it became an anchor. Safaricom, in a market that has never allowed multi-year plans to hold, is an example of the reconciliation becoming routine rather than occasional.
Case Study
Honda’s entry into the American motorcycle market in 1959 is the case that has framed the deliberate-emergent debate for sixty years. Honda entered with a plan to sell large-engine motorcycles to existing US enthusiasts. What actually drove its success was a small 50cc Super Cub the company had not intended to sell in America at all.
The account is documented in Richard Pascale’s 1984 paper in the California Management Review, based on interviews with the Honda executives who ran the American operation. The original plan targeted 250cc and 305cc machines through established motorcycle dealers. Two problems emerged: the larger machines developed mechanical issues at sustained highway speeds, and the dealer network was reluctant to take on a Japanese brand so soon after the Second World War. Meanwhile, the small Super Cub — brought in for the American team’s personal use — drew attention from buyers, particularly through a distribution deal with Sears. The American team shifted priorities, built a network through sporting goods retailers rather than motorcycle dealers, and by 1966 Honda held a majority of the US motorcycle market.
I want you to see what the case actually shows, because it is often misread as a story about a lucky accident. The case matters not because Honda succeeded but because the deliberate plan failed and the emergent strategy worked. The realised strategy — the pattern of decisions that produced the outcome — bore almost no resemblance to the plan signed off in Tokyo. The American team did not abandon the plan to chase opportunity; they let the plan run long enough to learn that it was wrong, and they had the standing to act on what they learned. That is the discipline the framework describes, and it is harder than it looks from the outside.
Conclusion
The Honda case and the Mintzberg framework together establish a plain proposition: what a firm intends and what it actually does are rarely the same thing. The gap is not a failure of discipline. It is the normal condition of operating in an environment the plan cannot fully anticipate.
My detailed conclusion is this. The deliberate-emergent distinction is best read as a description of how strategy forms, not a prescription for how it should be made. Deliberate strategy exists to give the firm a foothold — a market presence, a set of resources committed, a reason to be operating at all. Emergent strategy exists because reality will correct the plan in ways no planning process can predict, and firms that cannot see the correction lose the foothold before they can exploit it. What the framework asks of you is not that you abandon planning, but that you hold plans with the right degree of conviction — firm enough to commit resources, loose enough to revise when evidence demands. The framework’s strength is that it names a phenomenon most managers experience but rarely articulate, and that it legitimises the front-line learning that planning processes tend to filter out. Its weakness is that it can be read as an excuse for weak planning, and it offers little guidance on how a firm should decide when to hold and when to revise. The Honda case suggests the correct application is procedural rather than philosophical: build the plan, run it long enough to learn from it, keep the escalation channel open, and treat every committed resource as a resource that can be redeployed. Mintzberg’s own position — that strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions — points to the same discipline. Ansoff’s counterargument has force too, particularly in capital-intensive industries where the cost of abandoning a plan mid-cycle exceeds the cost of executing it. Neither thinker is fully right in all contexts, and the honest conclusion is that the correct position on the continuum depends on the volatility of the market the firm operates in, not on which theorist the firm agrees with.
My recommendations follow from that conclusion. First, treat every strategic plan as a hypothesis with a defined review window — twelve to twenty-four months, not five years. Second, build explicit checkpoints into the plan where the firm asks whether the assumptions still hold before the plan is fully executed. Third, protect the managers closest to the market from pressure to defend the plan when the evidence contradicts it; the Honda outcome depended on the American team being able to escalate information that undercut Tokyo’s original strategy. Fourth, distinguish between strategic intent — which should stay stable across planning cycles — and the tactics used to pursue that intent, which should change as evidence accumulates. Fifth, do not let the vocabulary of emergent strategy become an excuse for avoiding the discipline of planning altogether. Emergence without intent produces drift, not strategy.
The final argument of this post is that strategy is not what a firm plans. It is what a firm does — and what it does is always a negotiation between what it intended and what the world allowed.
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Written by Kateule Sydney — Researcher and Writer
Kat-Syd Resources Hub — Educational case studies and analytical reference