In the world of corporate leadership, there is a pervasive illusion about success. We often imagine that industry giants reached their peak through a stroke of singular genius: a CEO locks themselves in a room, drafts a flawless 20-year master plan, and the organisation simply executes it to perfection.
However, at Lighthouse Advisory, we know that reality is far messier and far more interesting.
True strategic success is rarely the result of rigid foresight regarding the path. Instead, it is the product of emergent strategy: the ability to plant the flag at a clear destination but allow the “how” to evolve through trial, error, and reaction to crisis.
There is no better case study for this than IKEA. While it is now the world leader in home furnishings, its dominance was not premeditated. It was built on accidents, constraints, and a leadership style that knew when to be stubborn about the goal and flexible about the journey.
The fallacy of the "Master Plan"
If you look at IKEA today, its success rests on four distinct pillars: self-assembly flat-pack furniture, distinct Scandinavian design, low-cost global outsourcing, and the massive showroom-warehouse store model.
It is tempting to believe founder Ingvar Kamprad envisioned this ecosystem from day one. He did not. In fact, almost every competitive advantage IKEA holds today emerged as a desperate response to a problem.
The Flat-Pack Revolution: This was not a sleek design choice; it was a logistics fix. In the early days, insurance companies complained about the high damage rates of furniture during shipping. To keep freight costs and insurance premiums down, the team began taking legs off tables to make them “knockdown”. A cost-saving measure accidentally birthed a global logistical superpower.
The Polish Pivot: Perhaps the most defining moment in the history of the company was a boycott. The Swedish furniture cartel, threatened by the low prices at IKEA, stopped suppliers from selling to them. Forced into a corner, IKEA had to look beyond Scandinavia. They turned to Poland (then a communist country) as a desperate measure. They discovered that Polish suppliers charged half as much as the Swedes, inadvertently handing IKEA an insurmountable cost advantage that defined their business model.
The Warehouse Experience: Even the famous self-service warehouse concept was an accident. During a massive customer rush in the 1960s, the staff could not keep up. To avoid a riot, the warehouse manager opened the gates and let customers pick the goods themselves. It worked, and it became the standard.
Deliberate vs Emergent Strategy
What does this mean for your business? It highlights the critical distinction between deliberate strategy and emergent strategy.
A deliberate strategy is top-down: management formulates a plan, and the organisation implements it. An emergent strategy is constructed progressively, influenced by decisions made on the front lines in response to real-world friction.
The history of IKEA suggests that the most robust organisations do not choose one or the other; they reconcile them.
Research by Torben Andersen, who studied 185 industrial companies, reveals a fascinating correlation. He found that the highest-performing companies combine strategic planning with distributed decision-making.
In other words:
Top Management plants the flag. They set the “North Star”, the overriding goal. (For Kamprad, this was simply “sell a wide range of good furniture at prices so low that as many people as possible can afford them”.)
Lower Management navigates the route. They are given the autonomy to find the path. They are free to experiment, react to supply chain shocks, and solve customer problems without checking with HQ for every move.
Andersen’s study notably found that in faster-changing, uncertain environments, this combination becomes even more critical. The more chaotic the market, the more you need a general aim from the top, but the more you must rely on the autonomy of the people on the ground to navigate it.
How to Cultivate "Planned Emergence"
At Lighthouse Advisory, we believe that modern strategy requires a shift in mindset. You cannot plan the route to the nth degree, but you can plan the conditions that allow your teams to find it.
Here are three takeaways for leaders looking to build a more resilient strategy:
1. Define the Destination, Not the Route Your strategic plan should focus on the “What” and the “Why”, not the “How”. Kamprad’s vision was about accessibility and price. He did not mandate how that price would be achieved. When the Swedish boycott hit, the “how” shifted to Poland. Because the flag was planted firmly, the pivot in the route was possible. If the strategy had been rigidly defined as “Sell Swedish furniture”, the company would have died.
2. Turn Threats into Opportunities When a competitor undercuts you, or a supplier drops you, do not view it solely as a crisis. View it as a constraint that forces innovation. The “trial and error” method, keeping what works (like mail-order sales) and dropping what fails (like TV manufacturing, which IKEA briefly tried), is the engine of growth.
3. Distribute Decision-Making The most dangerous combination, according to the research, is strategic planning mixed with “participatory” decision-making where everyone talks but no one moves. Instead, aim for distributed decision-making. Give your managers the authority to execute. Those closest to the problem are usually the first to spot the changes in the environment that trigger the next great strategic leap.
The Bottom Line
Innovation does not require you to invent everything from scratch; IKEA did not invent self-assembly, they just executed it better than anyone else because their back was against the wall.
Successful strategy is not about predicting the future. It is about preparing your organisation to exploit the unforeseen. It requires a general aim, a willingness to experiment, and the courage to let the path reveal itself one step at a time.
Lighthouse Advisory helps leaders navigate uncertainty by balancing clear vision with agile execution. Are you ready to stop planning for a perfect world and start building a resilient one?