This post offers a simple methodology that you can use to help your team learn from emergent tactics. By following these instructions, you can reduce your chances of making the same mistakes twice, and never again misjudge your customers’ love for Bootsy Collins. The secret is to document and learn from your emergent tactics.

Emergent tactics are the actions that you take on a day to day basis to give your business an edge. I call them emergent because they often arise through a process of experimentation. You learn from your experiments and your experiences, and this learning can become intellectual capital that will benefit your entire organization. This intellectual capital will empower your team to make stronger assumptions, and reduce your exposure to unproductive risks.

Emergent tactics may come to you through trial and error, a good blog post, divine inspiration, or plain luck. Whatever their source, you can be sure that some ideas will succeed, and others will fail. Recording these successes and failures will make your business more intelligent in the future.

We’ll assume that you’ve recently decided to stage an email promotional campaign to the some of the members of your mailing list. Bootsy Collins is presenting at the upcoming Funk Soul Expo in Cincinnati, and you’ve bought a bunch of tickets to give to your loyal customers.

Where did you get this idea? Who knows — maybe from some wiseass management consultant. Will it work? Let’s document the process and try to learn why or why not.

Step 1: Find a good place to store marketing strategy information. This could be a three ring binder, a folder in your marketing directory, or a wiki that you and your team can use as a living document.

Step 2: Write down one or two sentences about the need you’re trying to address. Example, “My most funky customers would love to meet Bootsy Collins and partake is his dropping of science. Therefore, these customers need to know about the free tickets I’m giving away to the Funk Soul Expo.”

Step 3: Next, document exactly how you plan to contact your most funky customers. You’re not going to email everyone in your customer list, because you don’t have enough tickets for everyone! Rather you’re going to funkify the lives of five of your customers in the Cincinnati area. So you make a note that reads: “We’re going to email fifteen loyal (and funky) customers in the Cincinnati area, one at a time, and offer them free tickets to the Bootsy workshop at the Soul Funk Expo.”

Step 4: Send the emails and track the results. You’ll add to your previous notes by reporting on the success of the tactic. In this case only three people responded to your email campaign, the others ignored you. Only one customer chose to attend the Bootsy workshop, leaving you with four pairs of tickets that you later dumped at half face on Craigslist. Sorry.

Step 5: Analyze the results of your emergent tactic, and draw some conclusions. Here’s where things can be pretty complex, but only if you let them, and in my experience you should let them. Acknowledging and managing complexity is a positive thing.

Complexity is good? Yes. Complexity is unavoidable, so you might as well do your best to manage it.

The complexity in this case stems mostly from the fact that you really have no idea why only 3 out of the 15 people responded to your offer. Cincinnati is the birth place of some serious funk… What went wrong?

Maybe the message was wrong. Maybe people would rather see Bootsy perform with his band than lecture at a trade show. Maybe the weather was wrong. Maybe your email client uses a type of encoding that caused the message to be filtered as spam. Maybe you misoverestimated your clients’ funkin Bootsyliciousness. Maybe 12 out of the 15 contacts in your customer database have moved on to different jobs within their company. Maybe they have a policy against receiving gifts from vendors. Maybe you accidentally sent the same message 6 times to the recipients, and they were annoyed, so they ignored your offer.

It would be nice to know what the real reasons were, and in this case, it would be strange and inappropriate for you to ask.

You’re left to draw your own conclusions, and this is why it’s important to acknowledge the complexity of the situation. Don’t just blame it on the first excuse you can think of. Use your intution and powers of perception to jot down some of the potential sources of failure. Later you may come across further information that will enable you to draw an insightful conclusion.

The conclusions you come up with may possibly make a huge difference in your next campaign. And that’s the point — define your emergent tactics and you’ll create a better understanding of your marketing strategy. Document your experiments and you (and others in your business!) can learn from the results.

Step 6: Return to step one and make any revisions needed. That’s it.