Off to Plan or Out to Lunch? Relationships between Design Characteristics and Outcomes of Strategy Workshops

Date01 July 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12038
Published date01 July 2015
British Journal of Management, Vol. 26, 507–528 (2015)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12038
Off to Plan or Out to Lunch? Relationships
between Design Characteristics and
Outcomes of Strategy Workshops*
Mark P. Healey, Gerard P. Hodgkinson,1Richard Whittington2and
Gerry Johnson3
Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9QH, UK, 1Warwick Business
School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK, 2Saïd Business School, Park End Street,
Oxford OX1 1HP, UK, and 3Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University,
Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK
Email: mark.healey@mbs.ac.uk
Strategy workshops, also known as away days, strategy retreats and strategic ‘off-sites’,
have become widespread in organizations. However, there is a shortage of theory and
evidence concerning the outcomes of these events and the factors that contribute to their
effectiveness. Adopting a design science approach, in this paper we propose and test a
multidimensional model that differentiates the effects of strategy workshops in terms of
organizational, interpersonal and cognitive outcomes. Analysing survey data on over 650
workshops, we demonstrate that varying combinations of four basic design characteris-
tics – clarity of goals and purpose, routinization, stakeholder involvement and cognitive
effort – predict differentially these three distinct types of outcomes. Calling into question
conventional wisdom on the design of workshops, we discuss the implications of our
findings for integrating further the strategy process, strategy-as-practice and strategic
cognition literatures, to enrich understanding of the factors that shape the nature and
influence of contemporary strategic planning activities more generally.
Introduction
Strategy workshops – also known as strategy
away-days, strategy retreats and strategic ‘off-
sites’ – are a common practice in organizations. In
the UK, nearly four out of five organizations use
workshops for strategizing (Hodgkinson et al.,
2006) and they are part of the executive calendar
in both the USA (Frisch and Chandler, 2006) and
mainland Europe (Mezias, Grinyer and Guth,
2001). Carrying high expectations for influencing
strategy formulation and implementation, they
represent significant resource investments.
In response to calls to reinvigorate research into
the activities and practices of contemporary strat-
egy making of all forms (Jarzabkowski, 2003;
Jarzabkowski and Balogun, 2009; Johnson, Melin
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2010
Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (Mon-
treal, Canada) and the 2008 Strategy, Practices and
Organizations Strategy-as-Practice Symposium (Aston
Business School, Aston, UK). We gratefully acknowl-
edge the financial support of the UK ESRC/EPSRC
Advanced Institute of Management Research, under
grant numbers RES-331-25-0028 (Hodgkinson) and
RES-331-25-0015 (Johnson), and the Millman Research
Fund (Whittington). We are also grateful to the Char-
tered Management Institute for their assistance with the
data collection.
*A free Video Abstract to accompany this article is avail-
able at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/
(ISSN)1467-8551/homepage/26-3-reading-healey.htm.
Correction Note: This article was first published online
on the 9th of September 2013, under a subscription pub-
lication licence. The article has since been made Online-
Open, and the copyright line and licence statement was
therefore updated in June 2014.
© 2013 The Authors. British Journal of Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British
Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
and Whittington, 2003; Johnson et al., 2007;
Whittington, 1996), workshops are receiving
increased attention from management scholars
(Jarratt and Stiles, 2010; Jarzabkowski and Spee,
2009; Jarzabkowski, Balogun and Seidl, 2007;
Johnson et al., 2010; MacIntosh, MacLean and
Seidl, 2010; Whittington et al., 2006). Descriptive
data show that workshops are seen as integral to
the strategic planning process, are largely the pre-
serve of top-level managers and are undertaken
for various purposes, from creating space to
reflect on current strategies to stimulating debates
about the future and tackling organizational
development needs (Hodgkinson et al., 2006).
From a theoretical standpoint, workshops are
of particular interest because they represent an
important type of ‘strategic episode’ (Hendry and
Seidl, 2003). That is, these events provide a rare
opportunity to suspend normal structures to
reflect on current policies and engage in new stra-
tegic conversations. Currently, however, there is
little systematic theory or evidence linking the
structure and conduct of workshops to their effec-
tiveness. Accordingly, in this paper we examine
the critical success factors associated with work-
shops, introducing a design-based theory of strat-
egy workshop effectiveness to understand better
how these events impact upon organizations. In
so doing, we address three issues in the growing
literature on workshops as a key type of strategic
episode.
First, the few empirical studies of workshops
published to date have tended to use small-scale,
case-based methods (Bowman, 1995; MacIntosh,
MacLean and Seidl, 2010; Mezias, Grinyer and
Guth, 2001; Whittington et al., 2006). For
instance, Hodgkinson and Wright’s (2002) case
analysis of scenario planning practices centred on
a single workshop-based intervention. Similarly,
Johnson et al.’s (2010) study of workshops as
ritual was based on cases in just four organiza-
tions. As Huff, Neyer and Moslein (2010) have
observed of research on strategy practices in
general, a heavy reliance on small-scale, ethno-
graphic methods has produced a somewhat
narrow evidence base. These authors suggested
analysing larger data sets to widen the breadth of
information on strategy practices and increase the
generalizability of findings. Heeding this advice,
we report results from a large-scale field survey of
over 650 workshops conducted across a range of
settings.
Second, studies of workshops to date construe
the outcomes of these events in a largely undif-
ferentiated manner, evaluating effectiveness in
terms of the event’s contribution to strategic con-
tinuity and/or strategic change (Jarzabkowski,
2003; Whittington et al., 2006). Although such
organizational-level outcomes are an important
part of the effects of workshops, they do not tell
the whole story. In this paper, we extend strategy
process research (Grant, 2003; Ketokivi and
Castaner, 2004; Mintzberg, 1994) to suggest that
the benefits of workshops also lie in people-
related or interpersonal outcomes. Additionally,
we posit that there is an important cognitive
dimension to workshop outcomes, given the role
of intervention techniques in enhancing strategic
thinking (Bowman, 1995; Grinyer, 2000;
Hodgkinson and Healey, 2008). Hence, we offer a
more nuanced view of the impact of workshops by
distinguishing theoretically and empirically
between three distinct types of outcome organi-
zational, interpersonal and cognitive.
Third, the extant literature considers only a
narrow range of factors that influence workshop
effectiveness, often restricted to the behaviours of
facilitators or influential individuals (Hodgkinson
and Wright, 2002; Whittington et al., 2006). Hith-
erto, no study has examined comprehensively
how basic design features relate to workshop out-
comes, although there have been calls for such
work (Hendry and Seidl, 2003; Jarzabkowski and
Spee, 2009). Studies that have looked explicitly at
design issues have focused on a limited set of fea-
tures (Johnson et al., 2010; MacIntosh, MacLean
and Seidl, 2010). Extending this line of inquiry, we
adopt a design science approach to develop and
test a series of hypotheses that link systematically
a range of workshop design characteristics (e.g.
the extent of preparation, the variety of stake-
holders involved, the analytical tools adopted) to
the various outcomes alluded to above.
Although design characteristics influence the
effectiveness of all workgroup practices, including
those in the upper echelons of organizations
(Cohen and Bailey, 1997), the embryonic litera-
ture on workshops (and indeed strategic episodes
more generally) provides little detailed guidance
on which design features are important or how
they are important. Accordingly, we turn to
various additional literatures to posit multiple
generative mechanisms that contribute to work-
shop (in)effectiveness.
© 2013 The Authors. British Journal of Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British
Academy of Management
508 M. P. Healey et al.

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