New paper explores use of strategy tools to influence decisions
Thanos Papadopoulos
In a paper published this month in the British Journal of Management, Thanos Papadopoulos (Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at Sussex), Sotirios Paroutis (Warwick) and L Alberto Franco (Loughborough) reveal how visual interactions with strategy tools can create knowledge and be used to influence and persuade others.
Titled 'Visual interactions with strategy tools: producing strategic knowledge in workshops', the study is one of the first to investigate visual interactions with strategy tools. Whilst the use of strategic decision making tools is common among managerial teams, there is little understanding of how the visual interactions with the tool, or the properties or the tools themselves enables discussion and decision making processes.
The study is also quite unique in employing video cameras to record participants’ visual interactions with a strategy tool used within a strategic review process. As a result the researchers were able to capture of micro-behaviours and interactions for cognitive mapping that are key to understanding strategy practices.
The study revealed that visual interactions with the strategy tool elicited three patterns of knowledge production; shift, inertia and assembly.
Notably, the shift pattern was characterized by visual interactions that enabled team members to articulate, test and change their minds about the meaning of strategic issues. This type of visual interaction enables two different positions on a given topic to gradually converge towards new understandings and knowledge.
Through this shift pattern of visual interactions, the tool can be used to persuade and achieve particular outcomes, and therefore influence decision-making. However, to take advantage of power of visual interactions with strategy tools in influencing trajectory and outcomes of workshops, managers will need to be trained in how to interact visually with the others and the tool and how to plan their workshops accordingly.