Organizational Ambidexterity (OA)–the ability to simultaneously pursue exploration and exploitation–is increasingly being advocated as a way to gain competitive advantage. Most of the work on OA has focused on large, multi-divisional organizations, resulting in frameworks and prescriptions that have little utility for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With this in mind, we report on the first year of an exploratory, quasi-experimental study of ambidexterity within six small-to-medium manufacturing enterprises in Sweden. The research is characterized by an emic, ‘invented here’ approach, where companies closely examine their current exploration and exploitation practices, use their findings to formulate more advanced OA approaches uniquely suited to their values and circumstances, and iteratively apply and refine these over a four year period. It appears that the construct of ‘unplanned’ and associated sub-constructs such as ‘disturbance, crashes, and interruption’ could be an important key to framing and improving OA within these SMEs and perhaps more generally.