Off to Plan or Out to Lunch? Relationships between Design Characteristics and Outcomes of Strategy Workshops
研究了战略研讨会的设计特征（目标清晰度、常规化、利益相关者参与和认知努力）如何影响组织、人际和认知三类结果，基于650多个研讨会的调查数据。
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 characteristics – 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.