An industrial SME launches a new product in a saturated market. The strategic plan is validated, budgets allocated, teams briefed. Six months later, the results are below expectations. The plan existed, but the strategy was not limited to the plan. It is precisely this gap that Mintzberg’s 5P framework helps to diagnose.
Field Diagnosis with Mintzberg’s 5P: Going Beyond the Simple Written Plan
On the ground, we often observe the same pattern: management writes a strategic document, disseminates it to managers, and then expects execution to follow. The problem is that the actual strategy of a company almost never matches the stated plan. Mintzberg formalized this intuition by proposing five complementary dimensions to analyze what is really happening.
The Plan refers to the deliberate direction, the intention formulated before action. The Ploy encompasses tactical maneuvers aimed at destabilizing a competitor or protecting a position. The Pattern captures recurring behaviors, including those that were never planned. The Position refers to the place occupied in a market or ecosystem. The Perspective reflects the internal culture, the way the organization perceives its own role.
We can delve deeper into Mintzberg’s 5P in corporate strategy to grasp the nuances between these dimensions, but their strength lies in the cross-use during a concrete diagnosis.
Pattern and Ploy: The Two Dimensions Teams Overlook
When facilitating a strategic workshop in a company, the discussion almost always revolves around the plan and the position. These are the two most visible dimensions, the ones that appear in PowerPoint presentations. The other three are often overlooked, even though they frequently explain why a strategy fails or succeeds despite itself.
The Pattern, Revealer of Emerging Strategy
The pattern is what we discover when looking in the rearview mirror. A company that, year after year, launches premium products without anyone formally deciding to do so is following a pattern. Identifying a pattern allows us to name a strategy that already exists in practice, even if it has never been written down.
In concrete terms, we spot a pattern by listing the decisions made over the last two or three years: recruitments, investments, partnerships, renunciations. If a guiding principle emerges, that’s a pattern. If nothing coherent comes to light, it’s a warning signal about the dispersion of efforts.
The Ploy, Underestimated Field Weapon
The ploy is the least taught dimension, yet the most common in competitive sectors. Announcing an aggressive price on a loss leader to block a competitor’s entry, filing a defensive patent without the intention of exploiting the technology, launching a targeted communication campaign just before a rival’s offer: these are ploys.
The distinction from the plan is clear: a ploy aims to provoke a reaction from the opponent, not to structure internal action. Failing to recognize it as such risks confusing a one-off maneuver with a sustainable orientation.
Using the 5P as an Operational Diagnostic Framework
Recent research on organizational design recommends starting from the strategic context, regulatory constraints, and pace of innovation to choose an appropriate configuration, rather than treating the 5P as a purely theoretical framework. This evolution transforms the model into an operational diagnostic tool.
Here’s how we can structure a diagnosis using the five dimensions:
- Confront the written plan with the decisions actually made over the recent period to measure the gap between intention and execution
- List the tactical maneuvers (ploys) engaged against the competition and check if they serve the intended position or if they disperse resources
- Formulate the organization’s perspective in one sentence: how do teams spontaneously describe what the company does, and does this description coincide with the official plan
This type of exercise takes half a day with a management committee. It often highlights inconsistencies between the claimed position and the actual pattern of decisions.
Corporate Strategy and Execution: Where the Model Makes a Difference
The 5P framework is often presented as a tool for strategic definition. In practice, its true value emerges at the moment of execution. When a strategic project stalls, we can use the five dimensions to locate the blockage.
If the plan exists but the pattern of actions goes in another direction, it’s a problem of managerial translation. If the position is clear but the internal perspective does not follow (teams do not understand why we are targeting this segment), it’s a cultural issue. If the ploys consume more resources than expected, it’s a trade-off to reconsider between tactics and strategy.
Feedback varies on this point depending on the size of the organization: in a structure of fewer than fifty people, the perspective often merges with the leader’s vision, simplifying alignment. In a larger organization, the gap between the official perspective and local perspectives becomes a major friction factor.
- A plan without a coherent pattern signals a failure in execution or an unacknowledged change of direction
- A market position without a shared perspective weakens the coherence of decentralized decisions
- Frequent ploys without a master plan indicate reactive management, not strategic
The model does not prescribe a good strategy; it makes visible the contradictions between what is said, what is done, and what is believed to be done. For a leadership team, naming these contradictions is already a concrete lever for action.
Mintzberg himself has always insisted that strategy is not an exercise in top-down planning. The 5P formalizes this conviction by providing practitioners with a common vocabulary to talk about what is really happening in their organization, not just what should happen.