Abstract
AbstractStudies have examined how managers use strategy tools, but we know much less about how managers create strategy tools de novo. We undertook an ethnographic study of a business facing a wicked problem and investigated the sociomaterial practice of collective toolmaking. We identify how strategy toolmaking oscillates between different problem domains and reveal how this manifests process affordances, which are ‘unintended’ by‐products of the toolmaking process. Counterintuitively, by intentionally making a strategic tool, actors unintentionally create a sociomaterial springboard for 'spin‐off strategizing' and ‘the discovery of latent ambiguities’, generating strategic value beyond the tool produced. These insights illuminate how the practice of collective toolmaking can stimulate wayfinding, indirectly helping managers to respond to wicked problems, characterized by high degrees of complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy.
Highlights
Managers frequently operate in environments where they confront wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973), involving unprecedented challenges, tangled issues, and multiple stakeholders with divergent priorities (Camillus, 2008; Conklin, 2006)
We investigate how making a strategy tool de novo, in contrast to using a strategy tool, may unshackle managers from these restrictions and provide an open-ended means to traverse the labyrinthine complexity of wicked problems
We identify two key process affordances that help managers accomplish strategy work when confronting wicked problems: (1) recurrent ‘cycles of spin-off strategizing’, which allow actors to delve into the unarticulated dimensions of a wicked problem; and (2) an unfolding ‘discovery of latent ambiguities’, which are partially translated into the strategic tool
Summary
Managers frequently operate in environments where they confront wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973), involving unprecedented challenges, tangled issues, and multiple stakeholders with divergent priorities (Camillus, 2008; Conklin, 2006). We identify two key process affordances that help managers accomplish strategy work when confronting wicked problems: (1) recurrent ‘cycles of spin-off strategizing’, which allow actors to delve into the unarticulated dimensions of a wicked problem; and (2) an unfolding ‘discovery of latent ambiguities’, which are partially translated into the strategic tool These insights extend the literature on strategy ‘tools-in-use’ (Jarzabkowski and Kaplan, 2015) and reveal how the creation of strategy tools de novo precipitates wayfinding (Chia and Holt, 2009; Comi and Whyte, 2018), drawing attention to the efficacy of spontaneous, in-the-moment, non-linear affordances when tackling wicked problems. We explore how these unanticipated and non-deliberate actions unfold and help managers accomplish strategy work when dealing with wicked problems
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