Emergent Strategy development powers agile technology delivery
In today's fast-paced business environment, rigid strategies often struggle to keep up with rapid technological advancements and shifting customer expectations. Business leaders must embrace a more flexible, dynamic approach.
What is an Emergent Strategy?
Unlike traditional top-down planning, Emergent Strategy develops organically as businesses respond to challenges, opportunities, and real-world feedback. Instead of predicting the future, companies observe, experiment, and iterate to align strategies with market realities.
An Emergent Strategy is like sailing - you set a direction but continuously adjust based on conditions. It thrives on adaptability, decentralised decision-making, and a willingness to experiment.
The Vision sets the direction of travel and the organisation's goals. It's 'just enough' planning to provide the Business and IT leaders with a clear guide to formulate a credible business-technology Solution. This focuses on required customer benefits and desired business objectives accompanied by an initial business value case. Initiatives are designed to achieve the business objectives.
The overall strategy is not set in stone. While the Vision rarely changes, the Solutions can evolve based on learnings from the Initiative's market tests. It is easy to pivot into new ideas and terminate failing ones.
Emergent strategies are often smaller in scope, time and scale, enabling quicker execution and value to be realised earlier.
Implementing Emergent Strategy
1. Align leadership with adaptive thinking
Leaders must shift from rigid control to guiding strategic direction while allowing flexibility. Focus on defining, incentivising and rewarding the business value creation and optimisation rather than tasking people to blindly execute a delegated plan.
2. Enable real-time feedback loops
Invest in analytics, feedback mechanisms and real-time monitoring to identify value opportunities. Ensure that key decision-makers across all levels have access.
3. Shift to value-driven funding
Move away from inflexible annual budget cycles. Treat initiatives as investment portfolios, scaling successful efforts while discontinuing those that fail to generate measurable value.
4. Shared decision-making
Empower managers, product owners, and frontline employees to make strategic decisions within their scope and react swiftly to learning.
5. Build a chain of accountability
Executives are responsible for financial performance. Business & IT leaders and Product Owners are accountable for the key business metrics and the Product Team for the Initiative's Key Performance Indicators. Each measure feeds into and off the other.
Emergent Strategy example
Vision - understand the company's current position and aspirations:
Executions: 'In the next three years, we must grow our life and home insurance business by X% and Y%. Initial analysis shows there is an opportunity for first-time buyer property proposition.'
Solution - understand the marketing and how to seize opportunities
Business & IT Leaders: 'To attract first-time buyers, we need an easy and convenient online service providing mortgages, life and home insurance and include and add in our property surveying service. To profitably realise our vision, we must achieve X, Y and Z business objectives. We will start by building a mortgage offering and here is an outline plan for subsequent activity.'
Initiatives - understand product design and technology to realise the opportunities
Product Team: 'We have identified several ways to provide an excellent online mortgage experience using mortgage provider APIs for instant quotes, online ID and credit checks and affordability calculators for an easy and quick application process. We will start with X and Y initiatives and measure these KPIs to determine how each performs towards achieving the business objectives.'
Conclusion
In an era of disruptive innovation and uncertain, static strategies frustrate the discovery and optimisation of business value. Emergent Strategy isn't about abandoning structure—it's about making structure flexible.
For organisations that have invested in agile but are not seeing the business benefits, Emergent Strategy provides a complementary framework for aligning strategy development and an adaptive execution model.
Are you ready to rethink how your business approaches strategy? Let's start the conversation.
