The changing nature of strategy work in organisations

And this has been commonly referred to as open strategy or the opening of strategy in the strategy research field. So it's really posing the question “who is a strategist these days”, or perhaps even “is everybody now a strategists in organizations?”. So Krsto, I know this is a real area of interest for you, and you've been active in this area for a few years now. What's from your experience has been the key ways in which strategy work is changing in organizations.

So many other people are involved and this is driven by, you know, two trends. The first one that external environment is more and more complex. So I think that you have to bring more people together in order to get relevant insights about the strategically important trends. And the other, the other trend is digitalization itself because it now enables, it gives us the tools and techniques or technology for different people to be involved in relevant, strategic conversations. These conversations do not necessary now just contained within the, within the kind of borders of, you know, a small group of senior strategists.

So I think that if I summarize this, then yes. If we have situation that the trends are much more complex, where there are social market, technological trends, we need to get more people to get relevant insights. And that technology enables to actually open the strategy to many more people as, before. This kind of leads me to a question for you, George, because you looked much more, much more into the technology itself.

So can you tell a little bit, like, what is the role of digital technology exactly in opening the strategy work?

And of course, part of that is still face-to-face, but we're seeing things like social media platforms, for example, Twitter being used. We're seeing enterprise social platforms in organizations such as Yammer being used as well. But these are being used not only amongst managers or senior managers or top management teams, but they're also being used to cross across the organization, ideate more with members of staff at different levels, but also outside the organization as well.

So in some of my own research with colleagues at Loughborough university and at the university in the USA, we've looked at this and kind of turn this digital strategy work or the digital work of strategists. So as two quick examples, we looked at how a large professional association in the UK use these different techniques.

They use various forms of freely available, social media, such as Twitter. And this was driven by the CEO of the organization. And they use these platforms to try and capture the view of their members of this professional association, because they’re the key stakeholders who of course pay their membership.

And the process basically follows that there's a bit of ideation between people. Then there's a bit of refinement of these ideas. And then at the end top managers, look at these ideas and go away and consider whether they should form parts of the strategy of the organization or inform some strategy processes.

But then over time, they've also marketed them externally and helped other organizations, their clients to open strategize to through this kind of jamming process that takes place on various forms of digital technology. Krsto - I know you've worked for a number of years now with Ericsson, so obviously a huge multinational organization. And part of this was focused on the strategy professionals about how their work is changing, particularly through, I believe, an online open strategy community. Can you tell us a bit more about the key insights from that research project?

There are some questions here that are interesting. To what extent you want to involve senior managers in this community? Or do you want to kind of have them a little bit a part of the community? The other question that they were dealing with is who exactly in what kind of role in this community? Do you really want to have a free-flowing discussion that everybody can contribute? Or this discussion is then steered a little bit if you want to have particular people more involved in this conversation in order to increase the credibility of the outcome. And at the end of the day, question about what exactly is going to be discussed, because maybe you don't really want to have a totally open discussion in the sense that every topic can be addressed.

With organizations, perhaps in the public sector or the third sector, it might be more possible to kind of change the culture in that way and be more open. I know there's been examples in the literature on this idea of open strategy and digital strategy with Wikimedia and how they defined a new strategy with their community, who of course, a key part of the organization and that they contribute all of the knowledge to the Wikipedia platform.

So I think going forward, at least from my perspective, a key future avenue for research is to look at the different types of organizations and how this idea of kind of digital strategy or open strategy kind of looks differently in different cases, across different sectors and this idea of control of top managers and what their role is, whether it's more facilitating ideation or is kind of fostering a culture of decision-making perhaps in strategy processes too, because they, I don't know if you have any thoughts yourself in terms of future directions.