Visual Interactions with Strategy Tools: Producing Strategic Knowledge in Workshops

TLDR

The study conceptualizes workshops as arenas where visual interaction with strategy tools occurs, building on strategy‑as‑practice and visual organization research. It investigates how managers visually interact with strategy tools during workshops to generate knowledge about strategic issues. The authors analyze a top‑management team’s creation of a strategy tool in a workshop, primarily using video data. The study identifies three distinct patterns of visual interaction—shift, inertia, and assembly—each enabled by the tool’s affordances, thereby extending strategy‑as‑practice and visual organization theories.

Abstract

How do managers visually interact with strategy tools during workshops to produce knowledge about strategic issues? Building on the strategy‐as‐practice perspective and visual organization studies, we conceptualize workshops as arenas where visual interaction with strategy tools takes place. Following this approach, we examine how a top management team creates a strategy tool during a workshop (using primarily video data). Our findings reveal three distinctive patterns of visual interactions: shift, inertia, and assembly. We also show how each of these patterns is enabled by the affordances of the tool used. Our study contributes to theoretical elaborations of how actors visually interact with strategy tools, which offers extensions to the strategy‐as‐practice and visual organization literatures.