Despite how much is written about strategy and how much money is spent on it, chronic failures persist. Two causes of failure are that strategy is still not fully defined, and strategy practice is still largely based on a planned view of the world. Change and innovation are not wholly planned but emerge from the myriad interactions of the players involved—some by design, many not. This science of complex adaptive systems must be the bedrock on which strategy is built. While many authors have shown the link between strategy and complex adaptive systems, The Emergent Approach is the first book to derive the definition of strategy and a theory of how strategy works from a model of complex adaptive systems.