Published 18.5.2025 in Talouselämä.

Participatory strategy may be the key to organizational renewal.

Strategy work is undergoing a transformation. Openness, participation, and trust are replacing the closed planning processes of the old world, which no longer meet the complexity and pace of change in today’s world.

Traditional strategy processes are no longer sufficient in a rapidly changing world. Closed strategy processes – where leadership sets the direction and the rest of the organization follows – are too slow and rigid to meet the complex challenges of our time. Instead, we need participatory strategy that brings together diverse perspectives from within organizations and communities.

Our Open Strategy project at Aalto University, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, explores how organizations can make use of open and participatory strategy processes. Our research shows that when employees and stakeholders are genuinely involved in creating strategy, the outcome is not only more innovative but also more committed and sustainable.

A central challenge is finding a balance between centralized planning and self-organization. For example, leading Finnish software companies Reaktor and Futurice apply participatory methods that combine strategic planning with decentralized decision-making. On the other hand, the global communities we study – Wikimedia and Burning Man – represent fully open strategy processes, where a large number of participants collectively define the direction.

However, the dilemma between open and closed strategy cannot be solved with a single model. In practice, organizations must make continuous choices: What information is shared, with whom, and at what stage of the process? Strategy work is not just about participation for participation’s sake; it’s about the ability to gather diverse and relevant feedback without ending up with a disjointed pile of ideas. At its best, a participatory strategy process acts as both a filter and an amplifier: it highlights essential perspectives and refines them into a shared direction.

A significant insight from our research is that many leaders – especially CEOs – find the traditional strategy processes of the old world to be distressing. Strategy work is no longer seen as a useful “press,” but as a process that consumes too much time and energy, often generating little enthusiasm among staff. Participatory strategy can offer an alternative: an approach where strategy is built together, step by step, through shared understanding.

Participatory strategy is not merely a technical process – it also requires cultural change. It demands openness, trust, and the ability to face conflicts constructively. In fact, conflicts and tensions are often the biggest obstacles to participatory strategy. Leadership may perceive participatory strategy as a threat to their authority, and the strategy process can become a power struggle rather than a joint effort to define a common direction. Clashes of egos and the reluctance to give up hierarchical control can block genuine participation and innovation – something that is needed now more than ever in today’s crisis-stricken business world.

 

Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä & Open Strategy -research group
Jaakko Luomaranta
Mia Leppälä
Frank Martela
Jori Mäkkeli
Eero Vaara 

 

More about the research program: 

Open strategy -research group combines academic research with practical applications, focusing on open, self-organizing, and collective strategy processes. 

Reaktor, Futurice, Burning Man, and Wikimedia are among our case organizations, helping us explore how strategy can be developed in more participatory ways. 

Learn more: openstrategy.fi