STRATEGY WORKSHOPS FOR STRATEGIC REVIEWSA CASE OF SEMI-STRUCTURED EMERGENT DIALOGUES

Given the increasingly popularity of strategy workshops within organizations, it is surprising that there are few accounts of this phenomenon. This paper addresses this issue through two in-depth case studies of organizations employing strategy workshops for strategic reviews. The paper builds on the concept of strategy episodes to examine the initiation, conduct and termination of strategy workshops and their role in strategy making in these organizations. A particular focus is on how workshops move through these phases to enable re-coupling of the workshop outputs with the organizations’ strategic activities. The paper explores the role of the workshops in relation to continuous change by drawing on the concepts of “semi-structures”, “links in time”, and “sequenced steps” found to be key elsewhere (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997). These concepts are used to analyse the different phases of the workshops to show how they can account for the associated flow of activity that involves suspension...