It frequently occurs that organisations deviate from their original policies when carrying them out, because of, for example, new information and insights, demands of stakeholders or problems arisen during further implementation. Based on case studies at four housing associations in the Netherlands, this paper will deal with the difficulties on daily decisions that are made during the implementation process. The paper will present a conceptual model in which the relation between embedding and deviation is shown. Then the paper will go into a number of measures that can be taken by housing association to assure that policies are embedded. After that, the paper will shift focus to deviations of policy. I will present a conceptual model that makes housing associations more conscious of their actions and helps them to balance between embedding and deviation.