Community mission

The Science-Practice Bridge

Our mission is to make strategy-making a more collaborative effort by enhancing open participation in strategy work and by dismantling the traditional silos between studying strategy and doing strategy. We have evolved from a focused research project at Aalto University into a National Platform where academic rigor meets real-world strategic practice. We believe the best strategies are built at the intersection of depth and agility, through involving both practitioners and researchers in activities and outreach.

Our mission is also grounded in the Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) perspective. Unlike traditional models that treat strategy as something an organization has, SAP understands strategy as something people do—in meetings, conversations, tools, and everyday decisions. This makes it uniquely suited to addressing a persistent and underexplored gap: the disconnect between abstract, decontextualized strategy frameworks produced in academia and consulting, and the messy, time-constrained, politically embedded realities in which practitioners actually operate.

In practice, this gap shows up as strategies that look coherent on paper but fail to translate into action; as leadership teams struggling to align around meaning rather than metrics; and as organizations adopting fashionable concepts (e.g., AI, transformation, agility) without the situated capabilities required to enact them. SAP shifts the focus precisely to this level—how strategy work gets done, by whom, with what tools, and with what consequences—making it directly relevant and actionable for practitioners.

International collaboration

Our local efforts are deeply connected to the global Open Strategy Network, ensuring our community remains at the forefront of international developments in the field. Our community’s international contributor Professor Eero Vaara is a world-renowned scholar and a key architect of the Strategy-as-Practice field. His work highlights how strategy operates as a hegemonic discourse—a dominant way of talking and thinking that shapes what is seen as possible or legitimate. Crucially, this means strategy can be actively reshaped in practice: through more reflective use of language, more inclusive forms of participation, and more skillful narrative construction.

For practitioners, this translates into a concrete promise: better strategy is not primarily about better frameworks, but about better strategizing—improving how conversations are facilitated, how decisions are staged, how tensions are surfaced, and how meaning is co-created across organizational boundaries.

The origins of the community - The Wallenberg Foundation research project

The community started with a Wallenberg Foundation funded project (2023-2025) together with Aalto University in collaboration with University of Oxford. Below is the project abstract.

This project builds upon the research on open strategy by exploring the challenges of participation and self-management in strategy processes. The proponents of open and participatory approaches argue that involving organization´s participants in setting organizational direction and strategy increases motivation, commitment, and goal alignment. Participation leads to commitment, which, in turn, fosters autonomy and engagement. It also helps in reducing position bias and enhancing decision quality by tapping into collective intelligence. However, participatory construction of shared goals presents challenges that require careful process design. Without a well-designed process, participatory goal-setting can lead to tensions, power struggles, slowed decision-making, unmet expectations, and counterproductive outcomes.

This research project aims to explore these dynamics of participation in open strategy work and practices related to open strategizing, which has emerged as a valuable area of research for understanding different forms of participation management. The project focuses on four organizations, each offering a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities of open strategizing. Cutting edge tech companies from Finland, Reaktor and Futurice, are self-managing organizations that provide insights into the balance between strategy, participation, and self-management. Burning Man represents the challenge of balancing centralized planning with emergent communal self-organizing and finally, Wikimedia offers a perspective on engagement of crowds in strategy processes.

These sub-projects will examine how to design participation in self-managing organizations, how to balance centralized planning and emergent self-organizing, and how to engage large crowds in the formulation of strategy. Through the examination of varying levels of openness in strategy, the project aims to identify similarities and contrasting dynamics where each sub-project addresses specific research questions and offers practical insights. By studying organizations recognized for decentralization and broad participation, the research project aims to illuminate the design choices and conditions essential for successful implementation of participatory strategies.

The primary objectives of this research project are to gain a profound comprehension of the challenges, dynamics, and best practices associated with open strategy. The project aims to contribute to scientific knowledge by publishing its findings in top-tier management journals. Furthermore, the research endeavors to have practical implications by enhancing open strategy management practices. Given that many organizations have established formalized strategy processes, the project recognizes that a lack of understanding regarding participation at different levels can impede their commitment. To address this, the project will conduct various outreach activities, including seminars, workshops, guidebooks, and articles, to disseminate its insights and improve the understanding and implementation of open strategy in organizations.