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While much literature on strategic agility has focused on strategic flexibility and adaption at organizational levels, there is a need to provide specific guidance at lower, more discrete levels of analysis. This article focuses on the context of a particular professional group, executive information technology (IT) leaders, who have received attention in recent years for their evolving strategic role at the forefront of firms. It identifies and illustrates a number of practices these actors demonstrate in building and maintaining strategic agility, and it concludes by conceptualizing these practices in an agenda and framework for managers.T his article builds on the growing body of research concerning strategic agility. 1 While existing literature produces insights for organizations to achieve strategic agility, the role that key individuals play in the strategic agility process is under-researched. For example, organizations are advised to generate three high-level capabilities in order to achieve strategic agility: strategic sensitivity, resource fluidity, and leadership unity. 2 Respective examples of these organizational capabilities include allowing collaborative strategic ideation such as by fostering open strategic conversations, dissociating strategy from structure to ensure resources are deployed rapidly, and mutual dependency to avoid political stalemates and personal insecurities at

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Extant literature associates the central purpose of open strategizing with organizations seeking to manage legitimacy (e.g. Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Whittington, Cailluet & Yakis-Douglas, 2011; Dobusch, Dobusch & Muller-Seitz, 2017). To date, legitimacy has been highlighted as a potential 'effect' (Gegenhuber & Dobusch, 2017) or 'outcome' (Luedicke, Husemann, Furnari & Ladstaetter, 2017) of strategic openness. Absent has been research attempting to understand open strategy as a process of legitimation (Uberbacher, 2014), and there remains a need to elevate the potential of open strategy for managing legitimacy further. To address this gap, the research presented here adopts a longitudinal, single case analysis to explore a professional association who developed a new four-year strategic plan using an open strategy approach. The findings indicate how open strategy dynamics represent the case organization switching between distinct approaches to legitimation, to manage competing stakeholder demands. The research offers an important contribution by accentuating the principal relevance of organizational legitimacy in open strategizing. This brings open strategy into close alignment with organizational legitimacy literature and its theoretical