In his book “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning”, Mintzberg argues that there are two types of strategy: Deliberate and Emergent. When a deliberate strategy is realised, the result matches the intended course of action. An emergent strategy is more fluid, and implies that a company learns from experience. It’s a strategy well suited to many, especially high tech organisations operating at breakneck speed.

Mintzberg suggests “Organisations … [may] pursue … umbrella strategies: the broad outlines are deliberate while the details are allowed to emerge within them”

The problem with this theory is that till recently, there has been no mechanism to facilitate the information sharing necessary for emergent strategy to be effective. If a company learns by doing, it’s important to share the lessons learned, from the bottom up, as well as vice-versa.

Now, with tools such as blogs, wikis and peer-to-peer social networks, the possibilities for organisations are immense. Employee knowledge is the greatest resource of most companies, but it’s rare that knowledge is shared beyond departments, and is often lost when an employee moves on.

Multi-nationals like IBM, Sun and Microsoft already use social software as part of their knowledge management programmes. Notice anything? So far, use of these tools is more or less confined to the IT industry.

But I don’t think it’ll take long for the excitement around Web 2.0 to grow beyond the 53,651 (rather geeky) TechCrunch readers. The benefits are too great.

For example, imagine a tightly regulated pharmaceutical company with thousands of “Best practice” documents from manufacturing sites around the world. Sure, the documents are online, or in a database, but how do users have any way of knowing if they’re any good? Imagine a tool like digg, which employees use to flag the usefulness and relevance of those documents.

Just one example and of course there’s some way to go. Nonetheless, I think social software might just empower companies to employ Emergent strategy (which, to my mind encourages creativity) more than they do today.