What is an Emergent Strategy?

There’s a lot of talk about emergence and emergent.
As the Wikipedia entry signals, these words are connected to multiple fields:

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.

What about emergent strategy?

In the simplest way, I describe emergent strategy as the actual way forward in an uncertain context.

Why?
There are two drawings that illustrate what emergent strategy is 💡

First, there’s the idea of structural couplings:

Structural couplings happen between two entities when both:

• Entity 1 influences the evolution of Entity 2
• Entity 2 influences the evolution of Entity 1

“Entity” is an abstraction that can refer to both living things (animals, people, families, teams, organizations, societies etc.) and non-living things.

A key reflection related to Personal Strategy is:

What are the other entities that I’m structurally coupled with?

There is a rich variety of entities that influence us and are influenced by us. You can think of some examples mentioned in the Environment area: our family, our teams, our friend circles, our organizations, our communities, our cities, the market(s) in which we provide value, our countries, our planet etc.

Next, there’s the idea of emergent strategy as the product of all these couplings:

In the example above, you can see the illustration of the emergent strategy for navigating an uncertain social context.

Emergent strategy, seen through this lens, is the resultant force based on all the pull/push/equilibrium (react/shape/co-evolve) interactions.

What I find most interesting about strategy is that, even though you can be intentional about how you navigate an uncertain context, there is no way you can know for sure how things will play out.

Even though you can be intentional about how you deal with specific relationships with other entities around you, you cannot know precisely what the resultant force will look like, especially when you consider that the entities that you are structurally coupled with are coupled with many other entities different than you.

That’s why you need to constantly adjust your deliberate personal strategy based on your actual way forward in a specific context aka your emergent personal strategy.

Your turn:

• What’s your take about emergent strategies?
• What’s their role in your life?

Enjoy your adventures,
Bülent

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