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.