Opening up strategy: discussion with Prof.s Christian Stadler and Julia Hautz

For too long, strategy has been conceived and designed behind closed doors, at the top table. For leaders to invite others to contribute is often seen as a sign of weakness, diminishing the leaders’ stature, authority, and control. However, the reality is that leaders often find it difficult to develop imaginative ideas on their own, shackled as they are by their conventional wisdom and groupthink. It's no wonder that many fail.

Opening up the strategy process through contests, crowdsourcing, communities generates better ideas, more realistic plans, and more effective execution than a traditional, closed approach.

However, we shouldn’t confuse an open strategy process with a free-for-all. There are important nuances of when, how and by how much to open-up the process. Leaders must act forcefully to frame the strategic question, choose whom to involve, establish the rules and incentives of engagement, select the platform for participation, and take the decisions. Professors Christian Stadler and Julia Hautz, two of the four authors of the book ‘Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption outside the C-suite’, describe how to do open strategy skilfully and why it matters.

Here's what we talked about:

0:00 START
1:44 Why it’s taken so long to open up strategy.
3:18 Why closed strategy is the biggest source of failure
5:43 The role of consultants in strategy
6:40 When to use open strategy
9:00 The role of outsiders in open strategy
12:02 The limiting biases we need to overcome
15:24 The role of leaders in the strategy process
17:49 How crowdsourcing could tap into the potential of conferences
19:42 An example of an exemplar company - Saxonia Systems
22:31 Treating the strategy process as an investment, not a cost.
25:50 How this applies to big and small companies
27:44 How the authors practise open strategy themselves
30:55 The challenges of four authors writing a book
36:05 Where to start if you’re thinking about using open strategy
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More about Christian and Julia:

https://openstrategy.info/
https://www.christianstadler.org/
https://www.uibk.ac.at/smt/strategic-...

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