Generally, the concept of work indicates ‘actors engaged in a purposeful effort’(Phillips and Lawrence, 2012, p. 224) to manipulate some socialsymbolic facets of the context in which they operate. Particularly, the notion of institutional work designates the purposeful effort to manipulate institutions by creating, disrupting or maintaining them (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). This is a term that focuses on efforts rather than on accomplishments (Lawrence et al., 2009). And yet, much of social actors’ efforts go in the direction of coping with what they perceive as consequences of their institutional work. The reflexive or skilled actors (Fligstein, 2001) monitor the effects and changing conditions of their activities. This mundane but essential fact about institutional work, and about any purposive activity for that matter, led to the focus on coping with the unintended in the present chapter. The problem of indirect and surprising outcomes of individual purposeful actions is usually traced to Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith (Schneider, 1990). In sociology, the essence of this phenomenon was beautifully captured in Weber’s formula (1964, 1968; see also Cherkaoui, 2007; Swedberg, 2007) of the ‘paradox of [unintended] consequences of action’and it has continued to fascinate scholars ever since (see Merton, 1936; Mica et al., 2011). From the vast range of problems that this generic phenomenon implies, we speak to the issue of coping with the unintended in institutional work. We proceed in an exploratory manner and put in order our findings regarding the unintended in new institutionalism theory. We develop the discussion by introducing examples from planned organizational change and public policy that seem promising and relevant for this research problem.