The Process Affordances of Strategy Toolmaking when Addressing Wicked Problems

Abstract

Studies 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.

Digitalization and corporate transformation: The case of European oil & gas firms

“…This article also adds to the growing stream of strategy research that examines the different affordances of strategic tools (Burke, & Wolf, 2021;Jarzabkowski, & Kaplan, 2015;Knight, Paroutis, & Heracleous, 2018;Paroutis, Franco, & Papadopoulos, 2015;Spee, & Jarzabkowski, 2009;Wright, Paroutis, & Blettner, 2013) and builds on the academic understanding of how strategic decisions are made, in this case, in the context of a digital transformation.…”

A Qualitative Method Proposal for the Study of Strategy as Practice

“…For example, an advantage of using ethnography in SAP studies is its potential to allow researchers to observe informal and natural interactions between practitioners. It facilitates access to the organization's artifacts and documents, as well as helping to observe strategy toolmaking process (see Burkea & Wolf, 2020). This provides insights into the macro-level of the organizational context as these elements are employed to materialize cultural and institutional characteristics of the external environment such as shared norms, values, and meanings.…”

“…The proposed method is primarily inductive in its approach, so it is "particularly appropriate in new or understudied empirical contexts where there is relatively little prior work" (Bansal, Smith, & Vaara 2018, p. 1190, enabling SAP scholars to offer new theoretical directions. This is especially relevant in contexts where strategists are facing wicked problems in their organizational activities (Burkea & Wolf, 2020). In this sense, more specifically, the method may be useful for studying two underexplored topics in the SAP literature: (a) strategic changing in pluralistic context/organizations (Denis et al, 2007;Jarzabkowski & Fenton, 2006;Sorsa & Vaara, 2020) and (b) open strategy (Hautz, Seidl, & Whittington, 2017;Mantere & Whittington, 2020;Whittington, Cailluet, & Yakis-Douglas, 2011).…”

Material affordances in circular products and business model development: for a relational understanding of human and material agency

“…With a focus on the relationships of humans to materials and matter, our position is that of affordances as relationalsituated between actors and the physical environmentsand dynamic. Refusing to abide by an objective-versus-subjective mode of thinking, we see in the notion of affordance a way of expressing the relationships that emerge and become in the mutual agency (Burke and Wolf 2020) of human and material interaction in an organizational setting. An affordance stands for a potentiality that may or may not be exploited, and Davis and Chouinard (2016, 244) suggest that one ask: 'Affordance for whom and under which circumstances?'…”

“…But some comparisons are ambiguous, as there is a lack of hard data on circular ability (Kristensen and Mosgaard 2020) and material affordances for sourcing, construction, use, take-back, reuse, and recycling may be unclear and contradictory. Moreover, material affordances evolve over time, in unanticipated ways (Burke and Wolf 2020), with some materials trumping others as actors, knowledge, or cultural acceptances change. Accus' organizational members often experience the need for tradeoffs among environmental qualities on ambiguous grounds.…”