A company sets out a clear plan for the coming years: expand into a new market, launch specific products, and direct its resources toward carefully chosen goals.

Then events unfold.

An unforeseen opportunity arises, the company faces a resource shortage, or market conditions change. Two years later, it looks at what it has actually done and finds that its course has diverged from the original plan.

Does that mean the strategy has failed?

Not necessarily.

One concept covered in the strategic management course taught by Dr. @Mahran Hafiz Allah at Al Yamamah University is the distinction between intended strategy and realized strategy—that is, between what an organization plans to do based on analysis and prior decisions, and what it ultimately ends up doing.

The plan starts on paper… but the market doesn’t stand still

The problem isn’t planning itself, but the fact that companies plan for a future whose details they can’t fully know.

Strategic management concepts explain that intended strategies don’t always unfold as originally conceived; what happens in practice can be affected by unexpected environmental developments, resource constraints, or shifts in management’s preferences.

Suppose a company plans to expand by opening new branches.

During implementation, it discovers that its customers’ behavior is changing and that another channel for reaching them has become more important. It may then redirect some of its resources and adjust the plan.

What happened wasn’t part of the original vision, but it became part of the realized strategy.

This is also where the concept of emergent strategy comes in: decisions or directions that take shape during implementation in response to developments that weren’t part of the original plan.

This distinction is associated with the work of Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters, who studied how strategies take shape within organizations and distinguished between deliberate strategy, which unfolds as intended, and emergent strategy, which takes shape despite the absence of certain prior intentions or apart from them. They presented this framework in their 1985 study, Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent, published in the Strategic Management Journal.

Changing the plan doesn’t always mean abandoning it

There’s a difference between a company that changes direction whenever it encounters a problem and one that revisits its assumptions when circumstances change.

The first may lack a clear direction. The second may simply be responding to the fact that the plan was drawn up using the information available at the time, while implementation takes place in a world that keeps changing.

That’s why the value of a strategy lies not only in writing a good plan, but also in knowing what to preserve and what needs to be changed.

The strategy a company starts with isn’t always the same one it ends up with.

Sometimes a strategy’s quality is revealed not by how closely a company follows the plan to the letter, but by its ability to adapt when reality changes.

Theoretical reference:
https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.4250060306

Disclaimer: This material was prepared under the supervision of a “Yamama Insights” editor with the assistance of AI tools for financial education purposes. It is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, and it reflects the views of its authors, not those of the platform.