#open-strategy — Public Fediverse posts

3rd Open Strategy Workshop 2026 at University of Innsbruck

After UZH Chair of Organization and Management in 2024 and Saïd Business School at University of Oxford in 2025, this year was our turn to host the 3rd Open Strategy Research Workshop at Universität Innsbruck. Even at the risk of sounding like one of those all-too-familiar and unconvincing LinkedIn cheerleading posts, I want to celebrate this event here and share some photos and slides.

First of all, while Julia Hautz and I were lead organisers, it was Leonie Sauer and Thomas Ortner who really made sure that everything ran as smoothly as it did. In Thomas’s case, he also made it possible for us to enjoy the conference dinner high atop Innsbruck’s Bergisel ski jump – shortly after earning everyone’s admiration by fearlessly soaring 129 meters off the ramp.

At the same time, I am confident that we achieved our main goal to challenge the status quo and expand the scope of what makes open strategy research. Both the keynote delivered by Ali Aslan Gümüsay as well as the Young Voices Panel featuring Kristina Stoiber, Julian Just, Monica Nadegger and Christoph Brielmaier led the way here.

Finally, I had the honour to host the final “Open Strategy Family Feud” session: after having surveyed 50 members from the wider open strategy community, Team Finland (Aki Koppinen, Heini Merkkiniemi, Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä & Pilvi Posio) narrowly defeated Team UK (Chris Golding, Josh Morton, Tiantian Qin & Winky Wu) over 12 rounds of guessing the most common answers. A big thank you to all who where so kind to take part in the survey prior to the workshop – check out the slides with the survey results.

For those interested in the 4th Open Strategy Workshop in Helsinki, save the date: June 15-17, 2027 and sign-up for updates here.

While #OpenStrategy research investigates transparent & participatory strategy-making, its relationship to traditional forms of workplace democracy has been mostly ignored.

In a new Strategic Organization article, Felix Schmid and I start to fill this gap: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14761270261456141
(will. soon be available open access)

Some background on why I think this topic has been ignored even though it is highly relevant can be found at the @osconjunction blog: https://osconjunction.net/2026/05/27/new-article-in-strategic-organization-open-strategy-and-traditional-workplace-democracy-bridging-breadth-and-depth-of-inclusion/

#1paper1meme

New Article in Strategic Organization: »Open Strategy and Traditional Workplace Democracy: Bridging Breadth and Depth of Inclusion«

Looking back, I can hardly remember a research project where the research gap was so glaringly obvious to me: while open strategy research investigates transparent and participatory approaches to strategy-making, over more than a decade of Open Strategy research not a single article addressed its relationship to traditional forms of workplace democracy. This is particularly stunning since increasing transparency and participation in strategy are key tasks of works councils and codetermination regulations in many continental European countries.

Yet, there are several reasons for this omission:

• There is an inherent top management bias in strategy research as top management is defined as the acting subject in traditional strategy theory
• Another bias in strategy research is an overwhelming focus on the Anglo-Saxon realm, while traditional workplace democracy as a topic is predominantly pertinent in continental Europe and frequently published in languages other than English
• In addition, open strategy research reflects that most empirical cases of strategy-making labelled as ‘open’ are mostly management-led and temporary initiatives.

Give this situation, it was by no means certain that the research essay by Felix Schmid and myself on “Open Strategy and Traditional Workplace Democracy: Bridging Breadth and Depth of Inclusion” was to be easily published. Consequently, I am all the more pleased to report that it has just been accepted for publication at Strategic Organization. The abstract reads as follows:

Open Strategy (OS) aims to make strategy making more inclusive. Yet its focus on breadth (engaging many voices) often neglects depth (ensuring those voices count), risking tokenism that undermines durability. To address this deficit, we juxtapose the broad-but-shallow approach of OS with the deep-but-narrow practices of Traditional Workplace Democracy (TWD). From this, we develop a two by two framework that reveals four archetypes of inclusion in strategy making. The framework positions most OS practices as Consultative Strategizing (high breadth, low depth) and TWD as Negotiated Strategizing (low breadth, high depth). To overcome its depth deficit, we propose mechanisms that embed depth in OS without sacrificing breadth, such as the formalization of roles and the delegation of decision rights. Such a synthesis allows moving toward more effective and resilient forms of inclusion, including Co-Governed Strategizing (high breadth, high depth), thereby ensuring that inclusion in strategy making is both meaningful and durable.

The article will soon be available open access over at Strategic Organization. In case you or your institution does not have access I would be happy to provide a personal copy. Finally, check out the obligatory #1paper1meme below:

New Handbook Chapter: »Open Strategy as a New Form of Strategizing«

Together with Julia Hautz and Thomas Ortner (both situated at the neighboring department of Strategic Management and Leadership), I had the honor to contribute to the most recent iteration of the Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice with a chapter on “Open Strategy as a New Form of Strategizing”:

[W]e can observe an increasing trend towards more inclusive and transparent strategizing. From a practice perspective, this trend can be described as a shift in the practices of strategy-making. [We] describe the different practices of inclusiveness and transparency and show how they relate to each other. [We] then identify and review distinctive themes of strategy as practice research on Open Strategy. This includes the role of technologies and materiality in enabling openness, the discursive practices and processes underpinning openness, the temporal dynamics of open processes, the difference between controlled and uncontrolled forms of openness and the dialectic relationship between openness and closure.

Check out the article here – and please contact me to receive a personal copy in case your institution does not provide access to the handbook.

#handbook #openStrategy #sap #strategyAsPractice #strategyAsAPractice

Are you interested in #openstrategy?
Meet other researchers at the Open Strategy Coffee Meet-up organized by Theresa Langenmayr.

Join an informal networking event with Julia Hautz, Fleur Deken, Anna Plotnikova, David Seidl, Richard Whittington and Martin Friesl to discuss ongoing and future research projects.

#AOM2024

Therefore, switching from unmanaged to managed self-selection contexts might be a necessary to disrupt stabilizing trajectories of #openstrategy approaches in favor of (again) increasing variety of participation.

Our process model argues that self-selection into strategy work unfolds in sequential phases of stabilizing and shifting trajectories. It explains how recursiveness of self-selection and selection context may lead to inertia and the reinforcement of existing strategic paths. 3/4