The Emergent Way: How to Achieve Meaningful Growth in an Era of Flat Growth

While there is much to be said for being proactive, the best strategy for today's slow-growth, volatile environment may be one that is essentially reactive, a strategy in which CEOs, like some great athletes, allow the game - in this case, events  - to "come to them." This is emergent strategy, one that in a certain manner is formed on the fly, constantly reacting to events and fast-changing reality. This author makes a strong case for why an emergent strategy is the right strategy for a slow-growth business environment.

Much of Europe is in a mess. The U.S. appears, at best, to be stuck in neutral at least until the Presidential elections of 2012.  There is still growth in Asia but there are early signs that its growth is slowing as U.S. and EU issues impact even the enviable Asian growth engine.

What's an executive to do?

First, for most firms in most industries I believe that adopting what is known as an emergent strategy approach versus the deliberate strategy approach of Michael Porter is an excellent starting point. "Emergent" is a strategy first suggested by my colleague, Henry Mintzberg. Instead of the deliberate approach, the emergent approach is the view that strategy emerges over time as intentions collide with, and accommodate, a changing reality. It is a more grass roots, front-line oriented approach where solving real business problems leads to new strategies

The world of deliberate strategy is one that I remember well from my days as a corporate manager at IBM and then as an executive education teacher at Oxford and the London Business School. It was a world of strategy planning weekends at posh hotels in the English countryside, where we sat in rooms discussing the 5 Forces in our particular industry and what would we change in the model if we had a fairy's magic wand. The output was 3-ring binders in North America and 2-ring binders in Europe. This worked well in its day, back in the 80s and part of the 90s, which were wonderful times now looking back on it, and a time when the past was quite helpful in predicting the future.

However, today's more volatile world no longer lends itself to this type of deliberate strategy, especially when you've got to be faster and more agile than competitors.  In such a world, and in these times, emergent strategy seems to be a better fit.

Emergent strategy is the view that strategy emerges over time as intentions collide with, and accommodate, a changing reality.  According to Henry Mintzberg, emergent strategy is a set of actions, or behavior, consistent over time, "a realized pattern [that] was not expressly intended" in the original planning of strategy. The term "emergent strategy" implies that an organization is learning what works in practice. Given today's world, I think emergent strategy is on the upswing, and below, I explain why I believe this is the case.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that I have worked closely with Henry Mintzberg, co-directing and co-teaching Leadership Programs at McGill, where we have been on the faculty for more than a decade.   On numerous occasions, I have presented key parts of Porter's ideas on strategy for a couple of hours and then Henry would present his ideas as a contrast to Michael's.   We started doing this tag team effort about 11 years ago and almost always the executives in the class have agreed with Henry)...

-Article by Karl Moore

Read full article: Ivey Business Journal, November / December 2011