About the Open Strategy Network
Open Strategy: Transparency and Inclusion in Strategy-Making“Open strategy” describes a variety of practices that promote more transparent and inclusive forms of strategy-making.
Transparency refers to openness in terms of the provision of information to and communication with stakeholders, both internally and externally, for example, via Chief Executive blogs, town-halls or investor strategy updates. Inclusiveness refers to the involvement or participation in strategy-making of internal or external stakeholders from outside the usual senior management team, for example through strategy jams, wikis or workshops.
Internal stakeholders can be for example lower level employees, whereas external stakeholders who might be included in open strategy could be customers, suppliers, competitors, etc.
Openness can be applied to both strategy-formation and strategy-implementation processes.
During the different stages of the strategy process a different number of stakeholders might be included and contribute to the strategy-formation or strategy-implementation. Closely allied phenomena include ‘democratic’ strategy, crowd-sourcing- and open innovation.