Unpacking the effectivity paradox of strategy workshops: do strategy workshops produce strategic change?

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe recent turn of strategy research toward practice-based theorising Johnson et al. 2003Johnson et al. , 2007Whittington 1996 Whittington , 2006 has increased interest in the everyday micro-activities of strategy practitioners. Strategy, it is argued, is better conceptualised as something people do rather than something that firms in their markets have. The interest in what managers actually do has a long tradition in the field of strategy process, starting with the seminal studies of Mintzberg (1973). Yet, in contrast to earlier research on organisational practices (Dalton 1959;Kotter 1982;Mintzberg, 1973), which emphasised the informal side of managerial work, the strategy-as-practice approach -whilst acknowledging the importance of emergence -calls for a reappreciation of the role of formal strategic practices. As Whittington (2003, p. 118) argued, formal practices deserve our particular attention for two reasons: not only are they pervasive phenomena in organisational life -a large part of organisational activity is in some way concerned with formal practices -but they also inflict considerable costs More recently, attention has begun to centre on the role of strategy workshops as a particular formal strategic practice. Strategy workshops can be defined as specific events which take place outside the normal schedule of business meetings in an organisation and which focus explicitly on strategy. A survey of 1300 UK managers 2 established that strategy workshops were a common occurrence in modern organisational life (Hodgkinson et al. 2006). The survey indicated that some 90 percent of such workshops last two days or less and that 73 percent take place away from the organisation"s premises. Hendry and Seidl (2003) argued that the separation between workshop activity and the usual day-to-day activities enables the participants to step out of their established routines and mindsets in order to reflect critically on the organisation"s strategic orientations.Various studies have drawn on Doz and Prahalad"s observation that organisational transformation "usually requires stepping out of the existing management processsince these processes are set to sustain the "old" cognitive perspective" (1987, p 75) In one sense then, strategy workshops might actually inhibit strategic change. Johnson and his colleagues use a vignette of a single strategy workshop to illustrate the point that, despite the explicit intention to follow through the actions agreed at an off-site strategy workshop, in fact, little happened after the workshop. This finding, however, is in contrast to the results of a study by Schwarz and Balogun (2007), who reported on workshops that had substantial effects on the strategic directions of the organisations involved. Thus, it appears that some strategy workshops get around the effectivity paradox.A potential explanation for this difference emerges from a closer examination of these two studies. While Johnson and his colleagues refer to one-off workshops, the study by Balogun and Schwa...

Off to Plan or Out to Lunch? Relationships between Design Characteristics and Outcomes of Strategy Workshops

“…Workshops are often criticized because of a basic confusion about what these events are trying to achieve (Johnson et al ., ; MacIntosh, MacLean and Seidl, ). In this section, we posit that workshop outcomes fall into the three types enumerated above.…”

“…Hitherto, no study has examined comprehensively how basic design features relate to workshop outcomes, although there have been calls for such work (Hendry and Seidl, ; Jarzabkowski and Spee, ). Studies that have looked explicitly at design issues have focused on a limited set of features (Johnson et al ., ; MacIntosh, MacLean and Seidl, ). Extending this line of inquiry, we adopt a design science approach to develop and test a series of hypotheses that link systematically a range of workshop design characteristics (e.g.…”

“…In response to calls to reinvigorate research into the activities and practices of contemporary strategy making of all forms (Jarzabkowski, ; Jarzabkowski and Balogun, ; Johnson, Melin and Whittington, ; Johnson et al ., ; Whittington, ), workshops are receiving increased attention from management scholars (Jarratt and Stiles, ; Jarzabkowski and Spee, ; Jarzabkowski, Balogun and Seidl, ; Johnson et al ., ; MacIntosh, MacLean and Seidl, ; Whittington et al ., ). Descriptive data show that workshops are seen as integral to the strategic planning process, are largely the preserve of top‐level managers and are undertaken for various purposes, from creating space to reflect on current strategies to stimulating debates about the future and tackling organizational development needs (Hodgkinson et al ., ).…”

“…First, the few empirical studies of workshops published to date have tended to use small‐scale, case‐based methods (Bowman, ; MacIntosh, MacLean and Seidl, ; Mezias, Grinyer and Guth, ; Whittington et al ., ). For instance, Hodgkinson and Wright's () case analysis of scenario planning practices centred on a single workshop‐based intervention.…”

Placing Strategy Discourse in Context: Sociomateriality, Sensemaking, and Power

“…In line with the broader practice turn (Leonardi and Barley, 2011;Orlikowski and Scott, 2008;Schatzki, 2001), the practice of strategy is concerned with the way that sociomaterial aspects such as tools, locations, and spatial arrangements configure strategic interactions between bodies and things (Buergi et al, 2005;Jarzabkowski et al, 2013b). For example, strategy workshops are often carried out in remote locations, separated from 'the coalface', and characterized by different manner of dress and spatial arrangements, such as round tables, U-shaped set-ups, and strategy games, that shape the interactions that take place in such contexts ( Johnson et al, 2010a;MacIntosh et al, 2010;Heracleous and Jacobs, 2011). More generally, strategy is conducted with artefacts of various kinds, from flip-charts, 'post-it' notes, PowerPoint, and other visual aids (Kaplan, 2011;Molloy and Whittington, 2005), to analytic tools and statistical software (Fauré and Rouleau, 2011), used for analysing and making predictions about the business environment.…”