Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 6, 257-272 (1985)
Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent
HENRY MINTZBERG
Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec,
Canada
JAMES A. WATERS
Faculty of Administrative Studies, York University, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada
Summary
Deliberate and emergent strategies may be conceived as two ends of
a continuum along which real-world strategies lie. This paper seeks
to develop this notion, and some basic issues related to strategic
choice, by elaborating along this continuum various types of
strategies uncovered in research. These include strategies labelled
planned, entrepreneurial, ideological, umbrella, process,
unconnected, consensus and imposed.
How do strategies form in organizations? Research into the question is necessarily shaped
by the underlying conception of the term. Since strategy has almost inevitably been
conceived in terms of what the leaders of an organization ’plan’ to do in the future, strategy
formation has, not surprisingly, tended to be treated as an analytic process for establishing
long-range goals and action plans for an organization; that is, as one of formulation
followed by implementation. As important as this emphasis may be, we would argue that it
is seriously limited, that the process needs to be viewed from a wider perspective so that the
variety of ways in which strategies actually take shape can be considered.
For over 10 years now, we have been researching the process of strategy formation based
on the definition of strategy as ’a pattern in a stream of decisions’ (Mintzberg, 1972, 1978;
Mintzberg and Waters, 1982, 1984; Mintzberg et al., 1986, Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985;
Brunet, Mintzberg and Waters, 1986). This definition was developed to ’operationalize’ the
concept of strategy, namely to provide a tangible basis on which to conduct research into
how it forms in organizations. Streams of behaviour could be isolated and strategies
identified as patterns or consistencies in such streams. The origins of these strategies could
then be investigated, with particular attention paid to exploring the relationship between
leadership plans and intentions and what the organizations actually did. Using the label
strategy for both of these phenomena one called intended, the other realized Qucomeiged
that exploration. (Indeed, by this same logic, and because of practical necessity, we have
been drawn into studying strategies as patterns in streams of actions, not decisions, since the
latter represent intentions, too. A paper explaining this shift more fully is available from the
authors.)
Comparing intended strategy with realized strategy, as shown in Figure 1, has allowed us
to distinguish deliberate strategies realized as intended from emergent strategies-
patterns or consistencies realized despite, or in the absence of, intentions. These two
concepts, and especially their interplay, have become the central themes in our research,
which has involved 11 intensive studies (as well as a larger number of smaller ones),
0143-2095/85/030257-16$01.60 Received 28 March 1983
' 1985 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Revised 4 June 1984

258 Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters
INTENDED \ =-. ^It^.ill^.
STRATEGY ^ N^ j^ STRATEGY
^
DELIBERATE /"^-
STRATEGY /
UNREALIZED EMERGENT
STRATEGY STRATEGY
Figure 1. Types of strategies
including a food retailer, a manufacturer of women’s undergarments, a magazine, a
newspaper, an airline, an automobile firm, a mining company, a university, an architectural
firm, a public film agency and a government fighting a foreign war.
This paper sets out to explore the complexity and variety of strategy formation processes
by refining and elaborating the concepts of deliberate and emergent strategy. We begin by
specifying more precisely what pure deliberate and pure emergent strategies might mean in
the context of organization, describing the conditions under which each can be said to exist.
What does it mean for an ’organization’ a collection of people joined together to pursue
some mission in common to act deliberately? What does it mean for a strategy to emerge
in an organization, not guided by intentions? We then identify various types of strategies
that have appeared in our empirical studies, each embodying differing degrees of what
might be called deliberateness or emergentness. The paper concludes with a discussion of
the implications of this perspective on strategy formation for research and practice.
PURE DELIBERATE AND PURE EMERGENT STRATEGIES
For a strategy to be perfectly deliberate that is, for the realized strategy (pattern in actions)
to form exactly as intended at least three conditions would seem to have to be satisfied.
First, there must have existed precise intentions in the organization, articulated in a
relatively concrete level of detail, so that there can be no doubt about what was desired
before any actions were taken. Secondly, because organization means collective action, to
dispel any possible doubt about whether or not the intentions were organizational, they
must have been common to virtually all the actors: either shared as their own or else
accepted from leaders, probably in response to some sort of controls. Thirdly, these
collective intentions must have been realized exactly as intended, which means that no
external force (market, technological, political, etc.) could have interfered with them. The
environment, in other words, must have been either perfectly predictable, totally benign, or
else under the full control of the organization. These three conditions constitute a tall order,
so that we are unlikely to find any perfectly deliberate strategies in organizations.
Nevertheless, some strategies do come rather close, in some dimensions if not all.
For a strategy to be perfectly emergent, there must be order consistency in action over
time in the absence of intention about it. (No consistency means no strategy or at least
unrealized strategy intentions not met.) It is difficult to imagine action in the total absence
of intention in some pocket of the organization if not from the leadership itself such that
we would expect the purely emergent strategy to be as rare as the purely deliberate one. But
again, our research suggests that some patterns come rather close, as when an environment
directly imposes a pattern of action on an organization.
Thus, we would expect to find tendencies in the directions of deliberate and emergent
strategies rather than perfect forms of either. In effect, these two form the poles of a