Visuals in open strategy

Examining Open Strategy through the role of visuals holds great promise. Visual artifacts are increasingly central to what organizational actors do inside and outside their firms, for example, with the growing use of visualization tools, big data analytics, presentations (e.g., PowerPoint), user-centered design approaches, visuals in social media, and videoconferencing dominating modern strategy analysis (Berinato, 2016; Boxenbaum et al., 2018; Kim & Mauborgne, 2002). Through the use of these visuals in their strategy process, firms can communicate their strategic direction to internal and external audiences and actively engage these audiences in particular aspects of their decision making, which could in turn, open new, yet unexplored, avenues for their strategy. As such, visuals open up the opportunity to communicate and engage with a much less strategically informed set of actors than is the norm in strategy, for example shop floor workers or stakeholders such as citizens in local communities. This is possible since visuals can reduce cognitive challenges (Täuscher & Abdelkafi, 2017; Hegarty, 2011) and make such challenges more widely accessible compared to more traditional strategy formats (such as memos or reports that often require familiarity with strategy terminology to be understood).