“Making is thinking”: The design practice of crafting strategy

Abstract

Strategic thinking involves a creative, divergent and synthetic mindset and associated practices often seen as a useful way to achieve direct involvement in strategizing processes, as well as highlighting sensitive organizational and strategic issues that challenge conventional planning. How can we make strategic thinking, as a core component of organizational strategy, work more effectively? Firmly grounded in Richard Sennett’s cultural materialist approach on crafting, this chapter offers a conceptualization strategy work as design practice of crafting embodied metaphors. The chapter demonstrates the approach with a case example of CellCo’s postacquisition sensemaking and concludes with discussing benefits of strategizing as a design practice.