I find strategy most useful when it stays in contact with the people doing the work. They encounter the awkward details, find the useful shortcuts, and discover possibilities that were difficult to see from a planning meeting.
Guided Emergence is how I try to keep that contact alive. Set a direction and make the important boundaries clear. Give people room, authority and resources to explore. Pay attention to what happens. Then use what you learn to decide what deserves more support, what needs changing and what should stop.
Strategy, implementation and adoption belong in that same conversation. Each gives the others something to work with.
Imagine a team preparing for customer conversations. Information is scattered, and someone suggests an AI assistant. First agree what better preparation would mean: useful questions, fewer missed commitments, less hunting for information. Decide what the assistant can access and how the team will notice a poor result.
Give a few people time to try it on real work. Perhaps it produces a useful briefing. Perhaps it reveals that nobody agrees which records are current. Either finding can change the next move: extend the experiment, improve the information or stop. This is a hypothetical example, not a claim about a client result.
The practical test is whether learning can influence decisions. There should be a route from an experiment to a change in direction, resources or working practice.
Put it to work
Guiding principles
Establish direction and boundaries that help people make decisions without scripting every action.
Experimentation
Make room to try something on real work and learn from what happens.
Decentralized decisions
Give people meaningful authority close to the work.
Feedback and learning
Listen to colleagues, customers and users, then let their experience change the next move.
Resources for exploration
Reserve actual time and support for exploration.
Scaling what works
Look for evidence before helping more people adopt a promising practice.
Adaptive strategy
Revisit direction, commitments and priorities as understanding improves.
Cross-functional collaboration
Bring together people who see different parts of the problem.
Enabling technology
Use tools to make the work, evidence and collaboration easier.
Where this comes from
JJ's formulation, developed in 2023 and informed by Henry Mintzberg's Crafting Strategy. This account does not claim exclusive coinage of the term.
Editorial explanation · AI + JJ