The Superhero Executive: Strategy Planning Through Adhocracy

An adhocratic approach to strategy planning is informal, unstructured, and emergent, and embraces experimentation and improvisation. The adhocratic strategy planning approach is popular with many startups and owner-operated small businesses. An adhocratic strategy process is founded on the notion that the routineness of the emergent implementation tasks and day-to-day implementation activities provide a stable, consistent, and repeatable framework for identifying and meeting strategic goals. Results from multiple peer-reviewed studies and original research show that adhocracies can tilt a company’s strategy toward unending experimentation and improvisation at the expense of creating predictability, stable systems, and internal processes that cater to systematically meeting the important needs of its customers. Therefore, an adhocratic strategy planning processes which tends to tilt heavily in favor of innovation, technology, product development, flexibility, and adaptability often tilts the company away from customers—with such companies satisfying only 2%–6% of their customers’ needs.