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p.549 This paper addresses the relationship between strategy content and strategy process in general, and the relationship between process constraints and content outcomes in particular. By 'process' we mean the sequence of events and activities through which 'conversations' about strategy in firms unfold over time. By 'constraints' we mean the implicit and explicit restrictions on, and frames around, such conversations. Our basic hunch, firmly grounded in our experience in teaching and coaching managers on strategy-making, researching strategic management processes, and engaging in the practice of strategy-making ourselves, is that if the constraints of strategy processes are changed, the content generated will change. The purpose of this article is to explore and further develop this hunch.
p.549-550 We are interested in what is actually done, and not done, in people's context-rich activity of making strategy, and what comes out of this activity.
p.550 With respect to the medium of strategy making, our experience suggests that strategy-makers typically engage in conversations that lead to outputs in the form of documents. These conversations often utilize visual media... and data are additionally represented and communicated using some form of electronic media... we have sought to understand how these media might function as constraints on the strategy process.
With respect to the mode... our experience suggests that strategy-makers typically engage in such cognitive activities as 'thinking', 'analysing', and 'assessing.' Their considerations are data-driven
p.551 we consider the mode in terms of the character of the intention with which strategy is made... people who lean more toward the 'emergent' school presuppose... that strategy emerges over time as a pattern of adaptive behaviours in a dynamic stream of action.
p.552 In 1996 the LEGO Company asked for an executive development program... the idea emerged to encourage participants on this program to use LEGO materials to make and express meaning.
p.552 As strategy researchers, we seized this opportunity to experiment more systematically with both the medium constraint (by adding LEGO materials... ) and the mode constraint (by changing it... to an emergent and multi-dimensional [characterization]) of the strategy making process, to see how such changes would play out in the program. These changed mode and medium constraints had the immediate de facto effect of making the executive education program seem less like 'work' and more like 'play'.
p.553 During the course of the program we observed that managers easily constructed and expressed their opinions about organizational challenges and opportunities using the LEGO medium.
p.554 how exactly did our reframing of some sessions as 'play' contribute to the generation of new ideas and perspectives reported? How might a better understanding of play help explain the new and/or changed content? [JLJ - I personally conclude that serious play facilitates scenario construction and model building. This is what it means to 'play' a game: to recast the difficult and richly-detailed 'work' necessary for strategy as a pleasurable exercise of serious 'play'.]
p.554 the literature posits that even though people may not play with the direct intention to produce anything, nevertheless a range of significant benefits can emerge through the activity.
Play has... been shown to develop the capacity for those logical operations and cognitive processes that are the primary means through which individuals interact with the world... the adult cognitive framework takes form as increasingly complex logical operations are enacted through play activities.
p.555 The capacity for imagination is developed through play activities, which begin with direct mimicry of adult behaviours... Similarly, play has been seen as a process through which individuals become familiar with societal symbols... and acquire skills to function effectively in the community... play has been seen as a metaphor for human communication, to the extent that the rule-based frames imagined in play also serve to organize the individual's experience of society.
p.555 even though play activities are in themselves autotelic [JLJ - from p.554, unproductive behaviours and activities that are pursued as ends in themselves] and without direct productive output, they may nevertheless serve to enable people to imagine new possibilities for society and new ways to bring those possibilities into lived reality.
p.556 we began to consider on an empirical level whether practitioners engaged in strategy-making might benefit from engaging in activities constrained as serious play
p.558 In the process, participants made statements like: 'This is absurd! We have to change this.' ...In summary, the content of the conversation in this case shifted from a focus on understanding how things really are today, to a searching for new ideas in order to close known gaps, and finally focusing on potential flaws in their corporate strategy.
p.560-561 these cases allow us to speculate in particular about how the medium of LEGO materials and the mode of serious play might provide a beneficial form of constraint on the practice of strategy... as participants used the LEGO materials to represent and discuss strategic issues, the organization and the environment, they appeared to generate new insights about these different elements of strategy content... Learning theoreticians such as Harel and Papert have argued furthermore that learning occurs when we literally manipulate material in the appropriate context to discover new ways of interacting with the world. If we accept that hand-mind relationship is... a vital part of the modern human mind, then it seems likely that the use of LEGO materials to construct physical representations of ideas, concepts and models of strategy might help strategy-makers to generate new content.
p.561 traditions... that use drawing, collage, sculpture, etc. to create analogues of internal mental maps... are effective means by which conscious and unconscious dimensions can be mediated and brought to the surface of a conversation.
p.561 the serious play concept appeared capable of integrating the cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of experience discussed in the literature, and bringing them to bear on the content of the strategy.
p.561 Other 'play-like' activities such as scenario planning, budgeting and role-playing are commonly found well embedded in the strategy-making process... these playful elements are under-emphasized relative to the more deliberative, cognitive modes of action.
p.562-563 play involves an imaginative frame within which experience is somehow different from 'normal' reality... participants reported that in our interventions they felt more imaginative than in other sessions of the same kind... the people we observed playing were indeed using their descriptive, creative and challenging imagination to 'see' their organizational and strategic reality 'as' something other than the current reality.
p.563 Our two cycles of interventions seemed indeed to align well both with the dialectical form of play Plato deemed relevant for the education of leaders, and with Bourdieu's attempt to overcome the conventional 'play vs. work' dichotomy by situating all human activity in a habitus that is constituted significantly and irreducibly by intentions (as well as structures).
p.563 we suggest that serious play is a mode of activity that draws on the imagination, integrates cognitive, social and emotional dimensions of experience and intentionally brings the emergent benefits of play to bear on organizational challenges.
p.563 The apparently paradoxical character of the intention to pursue emergent benefits calls for a reevaluation of the clear-cut distinction drawn above between deliberate and emergent strategy... the serious play mode provides strategy-makers with a way to create the conditions for the emergence of new ideas and courses of action... we suggest that by constraining the mode of strategy processes as serious play, strategy-makers may intentionally enable the emergence of cognitive, social and emotional outcomes that, in turn, positively influence the strategy content.
p.563 we suggest that serious play can be considered as a process constraint with potentially adaptive content outcomes.
p.563-564 The purpose of this article was to explore, and further develop our hunch that if the constraints of strategy process are changed, the content generated also changes... our study suggest... our initial hunch... may be well justified.
p.564 our use of 3-dimensional construction materials... in the field of strategic management seems relatively new... the idea that play can be taken seriously in the context of strategy remains relatively new.
p.565 The overall lesson for managers is that if you are striving for innovative strategy content, then start by innovating your strategy process. One way to do this is... keeping an open attitude toward emergent change. Another way to innovate the process is to extend the media currently used by integrating three-dimensional objects... If the imagination thus released leads on to the creation of successful new strategies, the effort to complement 'work' with 'serious play' will be money well spent.
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