This work is inscribed in one of the major fields of organization studies: the strategy. The classical perspective of this field promoted the idea that projecting the organization to the future involves designing a plan (i.e. a series of deliberate actions). Further developments showed that strategy could be understood in other ways. However, the field’s evolution has favored in some degree the classic conception, for example by establishing multiple models to 'formulate' a strategy, but leaving in a second place the way in which this can 'emerge'. The aim of this research is to contribute to the current level of understanding concerning emerging strategies in organizations. In order to do so, an opposite—although complementary—concept to 'planning' and, in fact, very close in its nature to such type of strategies, was considered: improvisation. Since this concept has been nourished by valuable contributions from the world of music, we utilized the knowledge of this domain, by using the 'metaphor' as a theoretical resource to understand it and in order to achieve the proposed objective. The results show that 1) deliberate and emerging strategies coexist and are complementary, 2) improvisation is always present in organizational context, 3) there is a greater intensity of improvisation in the “how” than in the “what” of strategy and, as opposed to the conventional idea about it, 4) to improvise adequately some preparation is required.
