Strategic organisational improvising: Designing flexibility through planned incompleteness

Abstract

Traditional perspectives on strategic planning are often grounded in relatively static, overly detailed assumptions and frameworks about futures. Strategic organisational improvising is a critical process for organisations charting a way through complex, rapidly changing environments. We propose that organisations can achieve greater flexibility without sacrificing coherence by deliberately incorporating incompleteness into strategic design. Deliberate incompleteness combines stable strategic anchors with selectively under‐specified elements, creating space for action to unfold through real‐time interaction aligned with organisational visions. Strategic organisational improvising is sustained through short‐ and long‐term learning spirals that support real‐time adaptation and the consolidation of strategic knowledge over time in an approach that inscribes adaptability within the strategic process, rather than treating it as a response to exogenous environmental events.