The Role of Strategy Workshops in Strategy Development Processes: Formality, Communication, Co-ordination and Inclusion

Strategy workshops, the practice of taking time out from day-to-day routines to deliberate on the longer-term direction of the organisation, are a common practice, yet surprisingly little is known about them. This article presents the first substantial exploration of the role of workshops in strategy development through a large-scale UK survey of managerial experience of these events. The findings, based on 1,337 returns, show that strategy workshops play an important part in formal strategic planning processes; that they rely on discursive rather than analytical approaches to strategy formation; and that they typically do not include middle managers, rather reinforcing elitist approaches to strategy development. The authors conclude that strategy workshops are important vehicles for the emergence of strategy and discuss the implications of their findings for management practice and future research.