Beyond the Boardroom: The Open Strategy Revolution

A pizza customer could follow an order from preparation to delivery. A mortgage customer might hear only that an application had arrived, then wait for the final decision. Christian Stadler recounts this comparison from a strategy discussion at Barclays. It made the possibilities of digital banking concrete in a way that a broad declaration about transformation might not.

The insight came from opening the conversation to employees. In this episode of Innovation Rockstars, Stadler, professor of strategic management at Warwick Business School and co-author of Open Strategy, explains why leaders should sometimes invite far more people into strategy development. He is interested in what those people know, what they can challenge and what helps them put a decision into practice. The responsibility for making the decision still belongs to leadership.

The professor needed convincing, too

Stadler did not immediately embrace the idea behind his own book. When his future co-authors approached him, he thought they were proposing something rather unlikely. Strategy, in his understanding, belonged to senior management. How could large groups of people usefully participate?

Curiosity persuaded him to investigate. He attended workshops and spoke with organizations that had involved wider groups in strategic discussions. Gradually, he saw how a well-designed process could bring useful knowledge into decisions without transferring those decisions to a company-wide vote.

That distinction remains central to his advice. Participants need to understand what is open for discussion, what is already decided and how their contributions will be used. Management may hold information it cannot share or face constraints others do not know about. Inviting input without explaining those limits creates expectations the process cannot meet.

Stadler is equally clear that a leader who has no intention of listening should not stage an exercise in openness. People will notice when their contributions are ignored.

Choose the participants to fit the question

Open strategy can serve different purposes at different stages. A focused group may help develop or challenge ideas. Broader participation can be valuable when the organization needs people to understand a direction and work out how to implement it.

Stadler describes a nightmare competitor exercise for exploring disruption. Teams invent a business that would present a serious threat if it existed. They develop competing proposals and narrow them through rounds of evaluation. Bringing outsiders into the exercise helps introduce perspectives the organization may not generate on its own.

The threatening frame is intentional. An attractive opportunity can be postponed while everyone attends to today's business. A plausible threat may receive more immediate attention. For R&D leaders, the exercise can help expose assumptions about technologies, customer needs and competitors before those assumptions settle into a development plan.

More participants are not automatically better. The size and composition of the group should follow the purpose. Stadler points to wider engagement at the implementation stage because people have an opportunity to understand and influence what the strategy means for their work.

“By giving people an opportunity to be involved, they're more likely to actually buy into this.”

Make the change real enough to discuss

The Barclays story illustrates that implementation challenge. In Stadler's account, employees in the retail business were invited into an online discussion about its future as banking became more digital. For people working in branches, the subject could immediately raise concerns about their jobs.

The pizza comparison gave participants a specific service problem to explore. Customers could receive updates about a relatively small purchase, yet have little visibility into a major financial application. Talking about that gap made technology relevant to the service employees provided.

Stadler also recalls colleagues helping one another develop digital skills through the Digital Eagles initiative. His emphasis is on bringing people into a change that could otherwise feel like something imposed on them.

A similar principle applies when a technical organization changes its product or technology direction. Employees may understand obstacles, customer frustrations or practical opportunities that the strategy team cannot see from its own position. A useful process gives those observations somewhere to go.

More input still needs informed judgment

Technology can help manage contributions at scale, but Stadler does not treat an AI response as a substitute for expertise. He describes experimenting with a language model on a streaming-service concept. The model suggested arranging contracts with universities so professors would provide content.

As someone who works in a university, Stadler recognized a problem with that neat proposal:

“Professors do what they want to do.”

He pushed the conversation toward the incentives of individual academics. The suggestions became more useful when they considered people who might benefit from greater visibility. His knowledge allowed him to challenge an answer that initially sounded convincing.

The example reinforces the leadership work behind open strategy. Contributions need to be examined, questioned and developed. A platform can widen participation or organize information; it cannot remove the need to understand the setting in which an idea must work.

For a first attempt, Stadler recommends a bounded experiment. He describes Dr. Oetker trying open strategy techniques in its cereal business before extending them to the larger frozen pizza business. Starting smaller creates room to learn which methods fit the organization.

Leaders do not have to open every decision to everyone. They do need to be honest about the invitation. Choose a real question, involve people whose perspectives can improve it and be prepared for an answer that changes the plan. Otherwise, the most valuable observation may remain with the employee who never gets asked.