Strategic planning is the process of reviewing where one is, identifying where one wants to go, and developing plans to get from the current to the future state. Hopefully most business professionals and organizations know and do this.

However, there’s another aspect of strategy, emergent planning, that needs to be leveraged. Emergent planning is paying attention to what the market is telling you, regardless of whether it supports or is different from your strategic plan.

Why is both strategic and emergent planning necessary or useful? Because strategic planning gives us a vision and roadmap … a way to guide our day-to-day behavior towards the future. However, emergent planning is the process of recognizing that our business world (and the society within which we live our personal life) is a complex adaptive system.

Here’s an example. As a consultant I develop an annual strategic plan, identifying which products/services I would like to provide to which market niches, and lay out activities to develop, market and deliver according to these plans. However, often the marketplace has come to me and asked me for something I hadn’t planned to offer. In nearly every case this new opportunity has turned out to create a dramatic growth in my business.

You might wonder, then, why bother with strategic planning. Why not just wait till you get one of those emergent gifts? One obvious reason is that you never know whether or when they’ll come along. For another, because the strategic planning process helps you identify/clarify your core competencies, and when an emergent opportunity arises, it’s much easier to know whether or not you should consider it.

In effect, it’s all about being clear about what you want, but being flexible for what the universe brings you. Who knows, it may be much more than what you expected!