In the previous chapter we showed how methodological individualism can create paradoxical and contradictory situations because of a lack of system wisdom. From the perspective of system wisdom, agents are construed not as isolated or isolatable entities but as unique accumulations of interactions; here the agent is assumed to be a thoroughly socialized being, able to demonstrate awareness not just of his or her own conscious purpose but of wider system influences, by which his or her life might be enriched and enhanced as well as threatened. This chapter, therefore, continues with this discussion of how the dominant view of human agency becomes complicated by the inevitable presence and persistence of organized and organizing systems, into which an agent is born, lives and dies and which are not of her own making. This redirecting of attention away from individual agency towards an awareness of the relational complicity implied in everyday social practice enables us to see how the complexities of our social world may be made more explainable through recourse to the practice of everyday coping actions and interactions. As advocates of this system wisdom, we argue for what might be called a weak methodological individualism: an interactively constituted ‘self’ that is associated with phronesis (practical wisdom) and with praxis as a self-cultivating rather than a productive activity.

Throughout this book we have endeavoured to become what Elias Canetti calls writers – Dichter – whose role it is to explore and comment upon experience without fixation. The writer does not collect or build things, but tries to encounter and absorb them as they are, in all their inconsistency and contradiction, and all their latency and potential. The writer is not someone who propounds models if by such are meant institutional designs and outcomes that are deemed desirable irrespective of circumstance. This is the impetus behind our advocacy of strategy without design, a deliberately tense title – unattainable, of course. We all use designs all the time. This book is designed using chapter structures and attributions; it recommends states of affairs; it uses structured arguments to attempt to elicit sympathy. Being without design acts as an impetus, however; it encourages endeavour by those for whom it resonates to strive towards it, ways of thought without the prospect of an end point, or even a resolution. It is in the striving that we experience plenitude, that new qualities arise. For the economist Thorstein Veblen, something akin to this striving, this resistance to fixed goals and ideals, was expressed in his oft-used phrase ‘Whatever is, is wrong’. The more entrenched, orthodox and generally established an idea was the greater the likelihood of its being wrong, because, whilst its appropriateness was always an upshot of our future-oriented activity, its formal or accepted sense languished in unexamined academic and commercial habit.

We argued in the last chapter that the uncertainties and complexities of life as are experienced by strategic actors are not containable in the way that economic theory and strategy design theory suppose. Even with ceteris paribus conditions in place, the choice sets, judgements and outcomes presented as being logical for the individual rational human agent or collective are riven with empirical exceptions, unseen ecological influences and communally felt limitations. Any theoretical understanding entails recognition of how we repress, discount or ignore elements of experience in order to attain, sustain or restore a sense of coherence. The distinctions we made between strong and weak individualism, between technē and phronesis, and between purposeful and purposive action push us towards recognizing that acting strategically is as much an instinctual, habitual and unthought response to experience as it is a deliberate, planned effort. In understanding economic activities such as trade and entities such as markets and prices, therefore, we ought to recognize them as socially organized, complex and open-ended institutional facts. Within such an environment, strategic action is not about an observer gathering information concerning an external environment in order to manage resources so as to occupy an advantageous position (a niche market, a rare capability, a competitive opportunity) but about attaining and sustaining a set of organized relationships nested within wider systems in order to experience the possibility of doing things differently and, potentially, better.

In the last chapter we argued that wayfinding provided a different and almost counter-intuitive take on what it means to act strategically. The underlying spirit of wayfinding is a sense of the positivity of incompleteness: one is under way, and in being under way the ends of one's actions emerge as one goes along. We only know as we go. Contrary to the navigational mindset, this openness and absence is not something to lament or correct; indeed, it is not a limitation at all, but a part-expression of our natural condition of dwelling that has steadily been hidden from us as we have become more and more technologically advanced. As the examples of Graeme Obree and Google show, the existence of an as yet indefinable space (something that is yet to be ordered technologically) constitutes a realm of potentiality that allows wayfinders to establish an authentic imprint on unfolding situations and, in so doing, to unexpectedly effect a dramatic change in the course of events through their ingenuity and local coping actions.

In this chapter, we return to our initial observation that somehow, paradoxically, it is these locally initiated spontaneous responses, the ad hoc ‘making dos’, that often, surprisingly, generate longer-term sustainable outcomes than more deliberate and direct forms of intervention.

This book arose out of a vague suspicion that much of what we call ‘strategy’ involves retrospective sense-making: that there is a tendency to impute purposefulness design and deliberate forethought to what are often locally embedded coping initiatives in which the primary concern is the alleviation of immediate pressing problems, with little thought about broader eventual outcomes. The tendency is rife. Strategy-making is typically assumed to be a deliberate, planned and purposeful activity. Conscious choice, instrumental rationality and goal-directed behaviour are supposed to underpin strategic action. Successful outcomes are attributed to the systematic carrying out of a pre-thought programme of actions while failure is, conversely, attributed to the lack of proper planning. Clearly, this view of strategy as being something consciously designed prior to practical engagement with the world helps to explain many instances of individual and organizational success, particularly under stable, predictable conditions and in the short term. Nonetheless, the possibility that successful strategies may also emerge inadvertently as unintended consequences of human action and interaction remains. In what is now considered a seminal contribution to the strategy debate, Henry Mintzberg and James Waters distinguish between deliberate and emergent strategies and maintain that, in the case of the latter, an ‘unintended’ strategic order may arise even in the clear absence of deliberate planning and design. Mintzberg and Waters, however, do not go on to explore or elaborate on how it might be that, notwithstanding such lack of intention, strategy could still emerge spontaneously in practice.

In this introductory chapter we document several instances of successful accomplishments in a number of business and social spheres and show how we recognize the emergence of a coherent strategy even though the people involved may not have deliberately intended it to be so. This leads us to justify our belief in the plausibility of what we call here ‘strategy without design’, in which invisible coordinating forces appear to work to bring together fruitful outcomes indirectly and circuitously through a plethora of local coping actions. We also show that, conversely, when well-intentioned attempts to deliberately design and engineer a desired strategic outcome dominate concerns they are frequently ineffective and at times may even unexpectedly produce disastrous consequences. Paradoxically, the more direct and deliberate the effort applied the less sustainable the eventual outcome. Conversely, systematic, sustainable, longer-term accomplishments are often a consequence of attending to small, seemingly insignificant details through local, everyday coping actions.

Reaching for the ground

In 1974 the country of Bangladesh experienced a severe famine that threatened the livelihood of thousands in the rural villages. Amidst this chaos and human catastrophe, a Bangladeshi professor at the University of Chittagong was so touched by the plight of the families affected by the famine that he decided to make a small personal loan of US$27 to a group of forty-two local households so that they could begin the process of self-help by producing small items for sale, hence earning much-needed income without the burdens associated with predatory lending.

In chapter 1 we showed how the idea of spontaneous order can account for the emergence of coherent patterns of behaviour as well as centralized planning and design. We traced this idea of spontaneous emergence to the thoughts of ancient philosophers and discussed how subsequent important writers from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines have taken up this argument and elaborated upon it. This eschewal of the necessity for deliberate intention and pre-planning to account for the emergence of social and strategic orders opens up a new and difficult conceptual territory, however, for those looking to explain how it is that we as human beings can come to know about and influence our world under such conditions of uncertainty. If strategy amounts to anything, it is predicated upon a sense of being able to do something, of intervening deliberately to change the course of events in one's favour. If the conditions in which agents act are themselves inherently unstable, however, then there seems little to distinguish between strategic activity and chance and serendipity. This chapter is devoted to the further exploration of this question.

We consider the strategic dangers in deferring to a view of the world in which the individual is construed as an isolate, detached entity who engages with and seeks to control the world around him-/herself – an epistemological stance of methodological individualism.

In the previous chapter we showed how research on strategy, and in particular the recent strategy-as-practice movement, retains affiliations with a strong methodological individualism. We then moved on to show how the practice turn in social theory offers an alternative way of understanding strategy-in-practice in terms that are compatible with a weakened notion of human agency and with the kind of non-deliberate purposive action that we associate here with undesigned strategy. In this chapter, therefore, we draw from Martin Heidegger and the Heideggerian commentator Hubert Dreyfus, as well as sociologists and social anthropologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Tim Ingold, to identify two distinct modes of engaging with the world strategically that, following Heidegger, we term the ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’. Although Heidegger conceives of these modes as being naturally sympathetic, he suggests that modern life, and notably the rise and spread of technological sophistication, has wrested them apart, making them almost antithetical. The building mode is exemplified by the agent-strategist consciously constructing mental representations and models of the world and only then acting upon them. Therefore those studying strategy in this vein presume action to be deliberate, purposeful and goal-directed: agent intentions, meanings and interpretations feature prominently in explaining strategic behaviour. It presumes that actions taken are instrumentally motivated and outcome-oriented (poiēsis); they are synonymous with making.

In the previous chapter we identified two distinct modes of engaging with the world strategically, which we termed building and dwelling. In the building mode the agent-strategist is presumed to construct mental representations of the world prior to any practical engagement with it. The dwelling mode of engagement, on the other hand, consists of local adaptations and ingenuity in everyday practical coping, which constitute the kind of micro-strategizing associated with the practice approach to strategy. In acting strategically on an everyday basis, therefore, an agent is acting purposively to deal with immediate concerns at hand but doing so in habituated ways that are consistent with and reinforcing his or her own sense of identity. He or she is also aware, potentially, of the limits of this pragmatic engagement, and of how things might be encountered other than simply as equipment for human ends.

Whereas in the next chapter we develop the sense of strategic limit brought about by dwelling amid things phronetically, in this chapter we begin to develop the dwelling approach by introducing the notion of strategy as a process of wayfinding, in contrast to the conventional idea of strategy-making as a navigational process.

In the introduction we entered a world of counter-intuitive, paradoxical and even ironic experiences in which human assumptions regarding the orderliness of the world, and their control over that world, have both been shown to be wanting. Of course, there are many instances when what was designed and intended have predictably come to pass. Individuals have found status, battles have been won, firms have earned profits and even souls have been saved. It is also clear, however, that there are numerous instances when very productive orders, patterns of regularities, and consistencies in behaviour have emerged quite non-deliberately. What we investigate in this chapter is just how such strategic ordering may arise spontaneously through social interactions without any singular agency intending for it to be so. What we call ‘strategy’ is so intimately linked to intentionality, purposefulness and goal orientation that assumptions we make about the world around us remain essentially unquestioned; assumptions regarding regularity, separability and malleability, in which a mute and mutable world is slowly harnessed and transformed through human endeavour into a vast and silent warehouse of well-ordered productive resources and outcomes.