Preface ix-xii

ix 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... In this book, we propose to investigate how it is that collective social good and organizational accomplishments may result from local actions and adaptations without the oversight or pre-authored design of 'big' strategists. Many established social phenomena and institutions... have all emerged unplanned and undirected.

x in seeking to explain individual, corporate and societal accomplishments there is no need to invoke deliberate intention, conscious choice and purposeful intervention. Collective success need not be attributable to the pre-existence of a deliberate planned strategy. Rather, such success may be traced indirectly as the cumulative effect of a whole plethora of coping actions initiated by a multitude of individuals, all seeking merely to respond constructively to the predicaments they find themselves in.

x action that is oblique or deemed peripheral in relation to specified ends can often produce more dramatic and lasting effects than direct, focused action.

xi As we shall show, the 'entire realm of strategy is pervaded by a paradoxical logic', which requires 'an entirely different mode of comprehension and engagement from that of linear instrumental rationality'.
 This different mode of engagement is the corollary of designed intervention. It is less spectacular, more understated and oblique strategic approach that appears to be more compatible with the attainment of longer-lasting success - one in which seemingly insignificant small gestures, which often go unnoticed, are recognized for the overall effect they eventually produce. In other words, there may be greater wisdom in approaching a strategic situation more modestly and elliptically and allowing strategic priorities to emerge spontaneously through local ingenuity and adaptive action taken in situ. Here, strategy... emerges organically, takes shape and infuses itself into the everyday actions of individuals and institutions. Understood thus, strategy is not so much about the act of navigation as it is about a process of wayfinding. We only know as we go.

xi It is, we suspect, time for strategy without design.

Introduction 1-24

p.5 The key point we wish to make here is that strategy and consistency of action can emerge non-deliberately through a profusion of local interventions directed towards dealing with immediate concerns. These local coping actions may actually give rise to a strategic consistency even in the absence of prior specified goals. In other words, attending to and dealing with the problems, obstacles and concerns confronted in the here and now may actually serve to clarify and shape the initially vague and inarticulate aspirations behind such coping actions with sufficient consistency that, in retrospect, they may appear to constitute a recognizable 'strategy'... strategy may evolve from knowing what we do not want or what not to do rather than what we want or what to do; a 'negative' or latent form of coping strategy may exist without us being ever conscious of it. In this sense, strategy does not necessarily imply something deliberately planned or pre-thought. Indeed, strategically favourable outcomes may even emerge serendipitously as a consequence of an individual's actions or the actions of a small group of individuals, who unintentionally trigger a movement or trend shift through their choices and interests where no overall coordinated initiative is involved.

p.8-9 highly favourable outcomes may emerge and evolve quite spontaneously through local perturbations and interaction without there being any need for planned and coordinated strategic action.

p.9 in order to appreciate and explain strategic success fully, we must begin to acknowledge the prior existence of a latent strategic impulse, which provides the momentum and direction of development such that spectacular success may actually be attained without there being any deliberate intention involved on the part of actors.

p.11 Indirectly attending to the small, seemingly marginal and insignificant aspects of a situation can often lead to surprisingly wider ramifications... As Magora Maruyama shows in his seminal contribution to American Scientist entitled 'The second cybernetics'... what Gunn is showing is an awareness of 'deviation-amplifying' processes that have the potential to generate strategically beneficial changes... Seemingly mundane, small and repetitive activities can produce dramatic transformations over a period of time.

p.21 The world is not all nice, and attempts to make it nicer often result in its becoming more nasty.

p.23 an emergent strategy is actively materialized through each instance of seemingly insignificant and mundane practical coping action... every adaptive action taken in the course of coping with exigencies instantiates the actualizing of this latent strategy.

p.24 This is what we mean by 'strategy without design': a latent and retrospectively identifiable consistency in the pattern of actions taken that produces desirable outcomes even though no one had intended or deliberately planned for it to be so.

1: Spontaneous order: the roots of strategy emergence 25-56

p.25 Every step and every movement of the multitudes... are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p.122

p.31 This idea that social patterns and institutional order emerge spontaneously without the deliberate intentions of any singular agency or authority preoccupied eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. Adam Ferguson is today perhaps the least known and appreciated of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers but it is to him that we owe the first explicit articulation of the possibility of spontaneous ordering as a basis for explaining the emergence of social institutions. For Ferguson,

[m]ankind... in striving to remove inconveniences, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate... Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightenment ages, are made with equal blindness to the future, and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

p.40 Hayek argued that virtually all forms of social practices and institutions, such as language, customs, traditions, rules and exchange relationships, have evolved and developed without any conscious design guiding them. This, in turn, means that any advanced, civilized society must of necessity be a 'planless' society where no single mind or group of minds controls or directs it. Civilization, as such and by necessity, advances through a spontaneous order.

p.42 we are thrown into the world and by our actions we constantly strive to make sense of our condition; our acts are attempts to intervene and to clarify the ambiguous situations we naturally find ourselves in.

p.43 What governs strategic judgement is not the likelihood of each [JLJ - plausible scenarios] (within each class they are indistinguishable, because uncertainty prevails) but their desirability (a ranking from bad to good - for example, the expected level of profitability). It is value, not truth, that enlivens strategic debate; the heated faculty of imagined gain and threat rather than the cool temper of reason predominates.

p.46 what is of importance for continued survival is not so much that what is anticipated is exact, or even a good approximation of what comes to pass, but that as an anticipation it is more effective than the anticipations made by others. [JLJ - perhaps more adaptive capacity or requisite variety]

p.51 The recognition of organized forms characterized by an apparently contradictory organized spontaneity is increasingly shared across academic disciplines; it is a characteristic of all life and of all knowledge of that life, no matter how abstract.

p.51 The science of complexity thus brings a new and radical challenge to the traditional reductionist view that a system can be understood by breaking it down (hence analysis) and studying each component part in isolation from the rest of the system. Instead, it is now well appreciated that 'the interaction of components on one scale can lead to complex global behaviour on a large scale that in general cannot be deduced from knowledge of the individual components'. Indeed, attributing any cause and effect relationship becomes difficult, because there is no way of isolating events and entities in such a way as to trace a cause and effect connection [JLJ - yes, and the whole point of constructing scenarios]

p.55 Emergence, as Stacey puts it, means that 'there is no blueprint, plan or programme for the whole system... In other words, the whole cannot be designed by any of the agents comprising it because they collectively produce it as participants in it.'

p.55 'Dynamic' does not refer to a complex relational exchange of complex entities but an inherently contradictory system of irresolvable forces... the job of strategic management is to recognize processes of evolution into which temporary structured activities can be productively inserted.

2: Economic agency and steps to ecological awareness 57-90

p.57 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. [JLJ - I disagree, strategy might instead involve waiting, i.e., doing nothing. Strategy always involves a configuration of resources to confront an environment. We typically make strategic changes to our plans, projects and systems as we move through life, but we equally can do nothing if this is deemed the most strategic way to enter the future. ]

p.59 What distinguishes human agency is not bodily action but the prior capacity to notice, choose, opt, judge, and so on.

p.61 the social anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed that man 'is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun'.

p.61 As [JLJ - architect] Joseph Rykwert puts it: 'Unlike even the most elaborate animal construction, human building involves decision and choice, always and inevitably; it therefore involves a project.'

3: Reconceptualizing agency, self-interest and purposive action 91-111

p.92 [Hambrick and Fredrickson] what strategy really is: intentional (conscious, deliberate), informed (internal and external scanning) and integrated (concerning the whole business) judgment on how a firm... engages with its environment. [JLJ - we can replace 'a firm' with 'an entity']

p.92 [Hambrick and Fredrickson] what remains distinctive about strategy is its being the art of bringing elements into a comprehensive and coherent whole. The cohering elements they identify as arenas... vehicles... differentiators... staging... and, finally, economic logic... Strategy describes a practice whose exponents consider and align all five elements, purposefully and with a mind for conscious investment in their pursuit and how other firm elements... are sustained and sustain them.

p.94 Strategy, as Clausewitz understood, is always and only ever an enduring assessment and reassessment of the whole.

p.96-97 The criteria for what becomes useful knowledge are entirely functional, or pragmatic... satisfactory accounts of the world (legitimate knowledge claims) are presented in terms of observed relationships between objects rather than simply as the objects as they appear in themselves

p.97 In recognizing things as being significant (counting things or events as of interest), human agents were not guided simply by an immediate stimulus response but by a concern with the possible relationships between things.

p.105 Our actions are oriented to an expected future of how things are; we take the next step knowing that we will find a sure footing rather than be engulfed by blackness.

p.108 By and large, however, agents act from within their own absorbed circumstances without necessarily knowing all the eventual ramifications and consequences that will ensue from such actions.

p.109 Purposive action is phronetic action emanating from the internalized tendencies and dispositions of an individual as a thoroughly engaged being; a modus operandi acquired through the process of socialization and maturation... Purposive action constitutes the kind of praxis associated with phronesis that realizes itself 'only in situations that draw the self into action'.

p.110 In purposive acts, however, there is no predefined 'endpurpose' in mind. Action emanates spontaneously from the internalized disposition of the individual; it is an act of disclosure more than an act of production... Purposive acts issue from an internalized modus operandi - so much so that we do not have full and conscious control over what we do.

p.111 local absorbed purposive actions may often give rise unexpectedly to more systemic outcomes that were never intended on the part of the actors themselves.

4: The 'practice turn' in strategy research 112-132

p.116 In addition to using the intellect, argues Bergson, we need to understand reality as intensive, where change is understood not as the speed and trajectory (moving between points) of unchanging entities but as a direct, self-sustained modification of being itself; an evolutionary becoming involving change without external cause.

p.116 [Bergson] Reality is global and undivided growth, progressive invention, duration: it resembles a gradually expanding rubber balloon assuming at each moment unexpected forms. But our intelligence imagines its origin and evolution as an arrangement and rearrangement of parts which supposedly merely shift from one place to another; in theory therefore, it should be able to foresee any one state of the whole: by positing a definite number of stable elements one has, predetermined, all their possible combinations. That is not all. Reality, as immediately perceived, is fullness constantly swelling out, to which emptiness is unknown. It has extension just as it has duration; but this concrete extent is not the infinite and infinitely divisible space that intellect takes as a place in which to build. Concrete space has been extracted from things. They are not in it; it is space which is in them. Only, as soon as our thought reasons about reality, it makes space a receptacle. As it has the habit of assembling parts in a relative vacuum, it imagines that reality fills up some absolute kind of vacuum. [JLJ - small corrections: text from Henri Bergson: Key Writings]

p.117 the future is real as a potential, but only the future present is actual, an ever renewed moment of becoming in which past experiences are selected and arranged and future events anticipated (more or less habitually) within immanent fields of action.

p.118 The intellect works by using concepts and theories to represent the world in models, images, hypotheses and propositions

p.118-119 Perhaps out of a growing awareness that there is more to strategic activity than the stipulation of purposes and the construction of formalized spaces to organize the fulfilment of these purposes, strategy researchers have in recent years become interested in getting into the 'bowels' of strategy-making.

p.123 What is often overlooked... is how strategy may emerge inadvertently and unintentionally from socialized practices engaged in by people who do not identify themselves as strategists.

p.126 The true, according to William James, does not copy something which has been or which is: it announces what will be, or rather it prepares our action upon what is going to be... for James it [truth] looks ahead. [JLJ - They'll laugh as they watch us fall, The lucky don't care at all, No chance for fate, It's unnatural selection, I want the truth!]

p.126 What counts as knowledge, therefore, is governed by the systems of enquiry in use; the manner in which we affirm phenomena through a sense of expectancy... Humans... create truths through an intentional engagement with the world. It is how we look for and establish truth that governs the necessary conditions and it is the rules governing such a search that assist us in determining the legitimacy of knowledge claims. Truth is not a representation of reality but the manner by which we go about inserting ourselves into reality; of creating pathways and finding our way around... the paths we trace through reality... Some are very dependent on where we focus our attention or which mode of utility concerns us

p.128 To investigate a phenomenon such as the practice of strategy is to understand how it is that the lineament of actions, symbols, tools and agents conspire in stances of what Heidegger calls a 'coming toward' things. For Heidegger it is the future that is the generative condition of human life, because human actions carry meaning insofar as they demand something of us; they orient us towards an unfolding of who we are, our potential.

p.128 It is not the agents him- or herself that gives meaning to his or her activities but the fact of each agent always being under way, a duration expressed in projects enlivened by relational concerns with other things, other people, and the settling of these relations in ways that endure... We might not be consciously aware of these projects... Understanding actions and practices in this way casts the knowledge-in-practice of the phronetic kind that we have identified in Aristotle's works [JLJ - application here for a machine playing a game.]

p.129 Practices are patterns of saying and doing that... are expressions of a shared know-how and... acquired discrimination that... orient and educate our attention, and shape our dispositions and tendencies, thereby affecting the way we 'choose' to act.

p.129-130 the term 'habitus'... Bourdieu likens it to a style of engagement: a generic 'strategy' that expresses itself in the many different activities and thoughts that make up an agent's life.

p.130 It is by acquiring habitus that we are able to get an intimate, unspoken feel for the variety of moves and thoughts that we might make as agents; it offers us a sense of the potential of life by exposing us to an unquestioned background set of dispositions from which to explore that life.

p.130 Practices... form the background of skilled coping capabilities that enable us to act appropriately, but not necessarily consciously, in specific cultural contexts. Most human action takes place through this form of thoughtless practical coping, and it is only when a breakdown of coping occurs that we then become aware of the cognitive boundaries between the actor and the object of action. [JLJ - obvious implications for a machine playing a game. We need to understand the subconscious coping process]

p.130-131 Becoming skilled in a practice, therefore, is not simply a question of deliberately acquiring a set of generalized capabilities that can be transmitted from one individual to another. Rather, skills are 'regrown... incorporated into the modus operandi of the developing organism through training and experience in the performance of particular tasks'. As a result, the study of practice demands a perspective that situates the agent, right from the start, in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of his or her surroundings.

p.131 Because of the necessarily embedded nature of an internalized skill, having expertise in a particular field of activity in no way presupposes the ability to articulate what it is that one is actually able to do... neither interviewing strategy practitioners about the meaning and reasons for their actions nor asking them to reflect on their actions, as with the use of diaries, can give us assurance of the actual character of strategy-in-practice.

p.132 the 'ability-to-be' under way on projects.

5: Building and dwelling: two ways of understanding 133-158

p.133 In the dwelling mode of engagement, on the other hand, it is local adaptations and ingenuity in everyday practical coping that are of particular interest: the world is deemed to emerge with all its attendant properties alongside the emergence of the perceiver

p.137 We design and create a building using architecture and construction in order that we might dwell in it. For Heidegger... 'Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.' ...To dwell is to preserve and to make space for life itself.

p.141 what preoccupies him or her [JLJ - from p.140, the practitioner] is how to respond in situ to the changing relationships he or she encounters in a manner that ensures the smooth and productive functioning of his or her everyday world. This is what begins to characterize a dwelling mode of engagement, a mode that generates what Bourdieu calls an internal logic of practice that is effectively incompatible with a world of intellect intent on seeking neat, logically coherent and comprehensive explanations. Intellectual approaches common to strategy and academic research cannot grasp 'the principles of practical logic without forcibly changing their nature'. This is because, within the dwelling mode, the logic of practice exists only to facilitate effective action, not explanation or justification. Purposive action emanates as a modus operandi from one's cultivated dispositions for dealing with familiar situations in a relatively predictable and socially acceptable manner. It results from habitus: a predisposed style or habit of engagement that is acquired through the process of socialization. As such, this habitus, or dispositional tendency, serves as the unthinking source of a 'series of moves which are... organized as strategies without being the product of a genuine strategic intention'. Strategies can emerge without there being any deliberate strategic intent. For us to truly understand strategy practices, therefore, we need to 'return to practice, the site of the dialectic of the opus operatum and the modus operandi... the incorporated products of historical practice', which produce systems of durable transposable dispositions that unfold through our patterns of responses.

p.142-143 many... successful business practitioners... do not generally rely on the kind of formalized planning, organizing and decision-making taught in the business school curriculum to guide their actions and decisions. Rather, they feel their way through the world, unconsciously acquiring social and managerial coping skills that are 'passed... through individuals without necessarily passing through consciousness'. 'Decisions' and 'actions' arise from within the habitus of established social practices, occurring sponte sua in response to events in situ. Here, the efficacy of action in achieving successful outcomes does not depend upon some predesigned plan of action, nor does it even rely on the deliberate intention of a singular individual, but, rather, it results from her internalized phronetic capacity to continuously make timely and ongoing adjustments and adaptations to local circumstances.

p.143 The involved strategy practitioner... is more like a skilled blind person attempting to negotiate her way around an unfamiliar room. He or she does not need to have a 'bird's-eye' view of the room to cope with his or her predicament successfully. Instead, with the aid of a walking stick... he or she is able to find a way around successfully, relying on tacit knowledge and coping capabilities acquired through continuing immersion in his or her life world. Similarly, the strategy practitioner develops the local insider's 'feel' for the problem situation he or she finds him- or herself in and responds accordingly... one that begins where detached seeing and contemplation give way to a locally sensitive, immersed, guileful and opportunistic form of doing; it recurs to the heightened sensibility, alertness and resourcefulness that Aristotle associated with phronesis and praxis. [JLJ - great example. Note how the blind person will act first - moving the walking stick first in one direction and then another, and then form a working hypothesis about the objects encountered, perhaps even backtracking if an inspired guess was plausible but, for whatever reason, wrong.]

p.150 Embracing a dwelling world view... implies looking at the overlooked; sifting through the fragments, cracks, variations and inconsistencies beneath the superficial gloss and appreciating how these surface appearances of coherence and unity belie a deeper, messier and at times logically incoherent strategic reality. It is only through this painstaking attention to the irregularities and non-conformity of the detailed and the mundane that we will be able to truly follow the actual goings-on in the world of business strategizing.

6: Strategy as 'wayfinding' 159-185

p.159 strategy as a process of wayfinding... treats the agent as intimately immersed in and inextricable from contexts, and, as such, his or her actions emanate from within the constantly evolving circumstance. Here strategy-making is about reaching out into the unknown and developing an incomplete but practically sufficient comprehension of the situation in order to cope effectively with it... strategy is continuously clarified through each iterative action and adjustment and not through any predetermined agenda.

p.161 Tim Ingold, citing the work of Edwin Hutchins, suggests that navigation 'is a collection of techniques for answering a small number of questions, perhaps the most central of which is "Where am I?"'.

p.164 wayfinding involves knowing as we go: an 'ambulatory' form of knowing.

p.166 Unlike the act of navigation, wayfinding implies progressing tentatively and incrementally reaching out from one's situated circumstance, using oneself... as the basis of reference.

p.167 The central point we wish to make here is that without first engaging in wayfinding, without the painstaking task of noting, internalizing and memorizing each little success in wayfinding... no map could possibly exist and navigation as map-using would not be possible; the dwelling world view has to precede a building world view. The activity of wayfinding precedes both map-making and map-using. This is because the wayfinder's understanding unfolds over time through the accretion of many different experiences

p.167 For Ingold, mapping is a physical activity... 'The traveller or storyteller who knows as he goes is neither making a map nor using one. He is, quite simply, mapping.'

p.168 For Ingold, the wayfarer literally 'knows as he goes'; there is no distinction between movement and cognition, and, whereas the navigator goes across a territory from one isolated point to another, the wayfarer builds up understanding from an irreversible array of wandering experiences.

p.170, 171 For [ecological psychologist J.J.] Gibson, perception is a form of practical action and not a passive cognitive activity involving the mere registration of sensation. To perceive something is to actively create a distinction through the bounding of phenomenal experience without thereby presuming oneself separate from the other systems by which that experience is sustained... the environment is progressively disclosed to the moving observer, who knows as she goes.

p.171-172 Bricoleurs are people for whom life is not something that can be forced into their own system demands, or those of any other system, but that instead is an experience of coping across the demands made... Bricoleurs accept their condition without trying to impose an alternative condition from outside, as it were. Rather, they use what they find as vistas and transitions arise; there is no planning because there is no way of knowing what will become ready to hand, and what will break down. They are not constrained in these actions, however; they instil in the wider systems a sense of personal spirit; they enliven them by finding opportunities for expression where others simply find waste and frustration.

p.172-173 Wayfinding is about the experience of living in an organizational territory and apprehending situations in terms of their potential rather than their positions... Wayfinding routines are appreciative; they encourage mapping, a widening of awareness of events, and in doing so expose strategy practitioners to the potential of being under way that is the lifeblood of any organization. The strategy impress is not about a narrowing focus but a widening reach, a creative willingness to tolerate ambiguity and to cope with the frustrations of not being in full control... wayfaring initiatives are animated by an ever open environmental sensitivity that allows for detours, lingerings and directional changes. This is the strategic skill of the bricoleur.

p.178 Unlike navigation, a wayfinding orientation captures the richness and quality of lived experiences that are inevitably missed out on with any form of cognitive mapping activity... however refined the grid may be, it is incapable of capturing the movement involved in wayfinding, where the world comes into being only through our engagement with it.

p.179 Wayfinding, unlike navigation, depends upon the attunement of the wayfinder and his or her response to the movements he or she observes in his or her specific surroundings. He or she grows and reaches out into the environment along the paths he or she makes, advancing along a line of growth whose future configuration can never be fully known or understood. Here strategy, like perception and mapping, is an active and exploratory process of information pick-up and passing away that extends well beyond the mental

p.182-183 Innovation... is a wayfinding attitude to a life of infinite flexibility

7: The silent efficacy of indirect action 186-208

p.191 from a transformation point of view, the objective is deconstruction, the gradual reconfiguration and open integration of multiple potential lines of conflict... the efficacy of silent transformation, because it is slow, indirect and almost unnoticed, becomes progressively irresistible, and ultimately it is absorbed into a way of life.

p.195 Metistic beings operate in a world of becoming, coping with whatever arises immediately, and without qualm or resentment, but decidedly, where decision is not a choice amongst a known set of options but the capacity to judge in the future using figments of their imagination... Metistic knowledge is an economy of force, an ability to use the presence of what exists (including the powers of others) to ensure and enhance one's own persisting presence as what exists unfolds. This enhancement is not necessarily visible; where others look to perform on the surface of events, to gild their world with success, the metistic value the persistence of life itself, not things that persist.

p.195 Metis is something all of us can learn, because it is in us all, lurking beneath the architecture of human rationality, and even our customs of reasonableness. As biological organisms, humans have unconsciously acquired, through the evolutionary process, this survivalist instinct involving a 'mindless' practical coping, which has remained theoretically unexamined since the time of the ancient Greeks.

p.197 Throughout we have suggested that obliquity is the very atmosphere of doing strategy. Reading feint messages [JLJ - the Schoemaker and Day article that Chia and Holt cite speaks of "faint stirrings", and not "feint messages", a possibly unfortunate but important typo], being curious and remaining alive to diverse perspectives and second-order effects are the very stuff of what George Day and Paul Schoemaker identify as a basic strategic virtue, namely vigilance. To be vigilant is to remain alive to vague and diverse and seemingly minor occurrences... all of this is metis.

p.201 being exploited... the potential projects of... others

p.201 What, therefore, besides the negative approach of harrying, opportunism and avoidance, one might ask, is the real alternative to spectacular strategic intervention? The answer, Francois Jullien suggests, is a certain strategic blandness; a strategy-less strategy, in which indirectness, phronesis, metis, complexity, curiosity and spontaneity persist without any one dominating.

p.207 Such an awareness of the bland is what Heidegger was reaching after with dwelling; an awareness that the knowledge we use to guide our projects and activity is not confined by already visible end points. A bland strategy is one infused with the kind of knowledge that looks ahead to that which is still invisible and which might be brought into visibility through our projects.

p.208 The overt designs of strategists manifest in targets, positions, goals and the like are tempered with an understanding of belonging in which what is being made present is always something coming to fruition, whose limits are not well-defined end points but a bringing into being something that has not yet appeared, and that might be held together, amid other things also holding themselves together.

Epilogue: Negative capability 209-212

p.210 Strategy without design is about embracing the uncertain, the ambiguous and the unknown as a pervasive human condition without persistently hankering for clarity and certainty

p.211 Strategy without design is about making room, the limits of which are not boundaries, but the edges where things begin their essential unfolding. Strategy without design is building for the dwelling of things, notably our self amidst other selves and other things.

Notes

p.232 no one thing can exist in isolation; things are primarily centres of action... Perception and feeling are intimately bound up with the plural conditions of existence in which a living mind/body finds itself

p.232 We are thinking especially of Karl Weick's view that better theorizing focuses on projects rather than 'fixed' entities (curiously called variables) as units of analysis, displays a ready-to-hand awareness of how people themselves engage in practices such as strategy in a ready-to-hand way, and that recognizes how concepts and activities are inseparably woven (see 'Faith, evidence, and action: better guesses in an unknowable world', Organization Studies, 2006, 27(11),pp.1723-1736).

p.233 Charles Guigon talks of Heidegger's future-oriented characterization of agency in terms of projects as an 'ability-to-be' that can find expression only in the possibilities made available by existing practices in our ordinary world.

p.238 Jacques Derrida describes a bricoleur as 'someone who uses the "means at hand", that is the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which by trial and error one tries to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and origin are heterogeneous.' (Writing and Difference, 1978 [1967], London: Routledge,p.33).