GSLKThe club library

Mintzberg: a plan is not a strategy

The strategic plan sits on a drive while the club lives a different life. The real strategy is wherever the money and the hours actually went.

← The whole library

Henry Mintzberg (b. 1939) · 1994

How it works

A club's real strategy lives in the stream of actions — the pattern you recognise only looking back was assembled from many separate decisions nobody lined up in advance.

Deliberate strategyWhat you planned and then carried out as planned.

Emergent strategyWhat the club consistently actually does.

A document written during one term of officeWhere the money and the hours go each year
Direction devised by people cut off from the workThe information that matters is soft and only available on the spot
A procedure stands in for thinkingAnalysis is not synthesis

You get language for the gap between the paper and the reality, and a test: if the direction changes every month and nobody writes it down, that is not emergent strategy but the absence of strategy.

What you do first

Without opening the plan, write down the five biggest lines of money and time from the last year. Then open the plan and mark what matches. If it is under half, one of the two lists has to change — make that choice deliberately.

Who thought of it