Hello Innovator!

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Your strategy is your business plan. And planning is great. You can plan all day when you know what to expect. But when your well laid plans meet the real world, everything changes.

This week we’ll explore deliberate vs. emergent strategies as a means to innovation.

Here’s what you’ll find:

• This Week’s Article: Strategy vs. Reality

• Share This: When to utilize deliberate vs. emergent strategies.

• Case Study: How Honda’s U.S. expansion pivoted from a deliberate approach to a market-led strategy.

Strategy vs. Reality

What They Teach You vs. What Actually Works

In business school, strategy sounds clean.

Write the plan.
Forecast the growth.
Execute with precision.

We call this deliberate strategy. It’s logical, structured, and very good at making you sound smart in a boardroom.

But out in the real world? That plan rarely survives first contact.

Markets shift.
Customers behave in weird ways.
Tech breaks.
Teams change.
And the perfectly built plan starts to fall apart.

Deliberate strategy isn’t wrong, but it does have clear-cut requirements. For a deliberate strategy to work, you need: reliable data, a stable environment, and you need to be solving a known problem for a known customer in a known way.

In other words, deliberate strategy works best when you’re optimizing what already exists. That’s why big companies love it. It fits neatly into operating rhythms. It’s great for efficiency. And it gives stakeholders the illusion of control.

Enter Emergent Strategy

Emergent strategy doesn’t come from a whiteboard.
It comes from shipping something, watching what happens, and adjusting.
It’s learning in motion.

Emergent strategy thrives in the unknown. It’s what startup founders, internal venture teams, and product builders live in every day.

It supports innovation because it begins with the assumption that you don’t know everything yet. (A truth most innovators are too scared to admit out loud.) Emergent strategy gives you room to explore before you commit. That’s why it pairs so well with disruptive work.

So why don’t they teach emergent strategy in B-school?

Because it’s messy.
Because it doesn’t always come with a case study and clean outcomes.
Because it requires embracing uncertainty.

And uncertainty is difficult to put on the final.

When the Real World Forces the Shift

You can see that a team is shifting from deliberate to emergent when:

• Their roadmap blows up because customer needs shifted mid-cycle.

• They can’t answer basic questions with data, so they’re forced to run scrappy tests.

• A new competitor drops into the market with a completely different model, shaking up current beliefs about what works.

• Leadership changes and the new guard isn’t sold on the old strategy.

This shift isn’t always graceful.
Teams panic.
Confidence dips.
It feels like you’re losing control.

But it’s not a breakdown, it’s a breakthrough. (If you know how to use it.)

Strategy Lives in What You Fund

Emergent strategy often bubbles up quietly.
A team finds traction and proves a signal.
Suddenly leadership starts shifting real resources toward it.

That is the turning point.
Not when someone declares “this is the new strategy!”
When resourcing decisions start backing it up.

If you’re not assigning people, allocating resources, or clearing roadblocks for an initiative, it’s not actually a strategy. It’s noise.

You can call something a priority all day, but if there’s no headcount, no budget, and no time carved out, it’s just a press release. Strategy is revealed by what actually gets funded, resourced, and protected when things get tight.

Want to know your company's real strategy?
Don’t read the deck.
Follow the money. Follow the people. Follow the calendar.

Resource allocation is the pressure test for any strategy.

Writing the vision is easy.
Backing it with people and budget when the outcome’s unclear?
That’s the difference between planning and action.

So When Do You Use Each?

Here’s the catch: most corporate teams default to deliberate too early. They plan, assign, and budget before anyone knows what the hell is going on. And then they wonder why their innovation efforts stall out.

If you’re not sure which strategy you’re running? Look at your resourcing decisions. They’ll tell you.

Final Word: Switch Gears, Don’t Pick a Side

You don’t need to pick a favorite.
You need to know when to change gears.

Start by focusing on an emergent strategy.
Early on, you’re guessing, testing, learning.

Once you’ve found what works?
Bolster it with a deliberate strategy.
Build the machine and scale it.

The best teams don’t stick to one playbook. They shift with intent, using the right approach at the right time. Emergent first, to learn. Deliberate second, to scale.