Mintzberg & Waters "Of strategies, deliberate and emergent" part1

Today I have been...

Reading this post's titular article (p17 reader)

Why?

Required reading.

So What?

In their introduction, the authors talk about how strategies form in organisations. Formation of strategy tended to be thought of as an analytic process for establishing long-range tools & action plans. Formulation->Implementation. They argue that this is a limited view and a wider perspective is needed.

Early articles by Mintzberg consider strategy as

a pattern in a stream of decisions

This was a way of treating the concept of strategy as an operation, to make it tangible. This makes it possible to consider the origins of strategies, looking at the relationship between what was planned and what actually happened. One was "intended" strategy, the other was "realised" strategy.

• Deliberate strategies - realised as intended
• Emergent strategies - realised despite of or in the absence of intention

Another definition:-

• Organisation - a collection of people joined together to pursue some mission in common

Questions:-

• What does it mean for an organisation to act deliberately?
• What does it mean for a strategy to emerge in an organisation not guided by intentions?

OK, so it's not really nowhere as a concept, but rather outside of the "intended strategy to realised strategy" system (if we consider the move from intended strategy to realised strategy as a system).

So looking at the diagram you can see that for an intended strategy to be realised exactly as unintended, then the intentions must be precise, collective across organisation (because it is a collective as defined above) and realised collectively. This means that the environment must have either been perfectly predictable or totally controllable. The chances of all these factors being in place are low so perfectly deliberate strategies are almost non-existent.

So depending on the relationship between intended strategy and realised strategy, different forms of strategy can develop.


cont...