The Process Affordances of Strategy Toolmaking when Addressing Wicked Problems
通过民族志研究一家企业集体制作战略工具的过程，发现工具制作会意外产生“过程可供性”，帮助管理者应对复杂、模糊和不确定的棘手问题。
Abstract Studies have examined how managers use strategy tools, but we know much less about how managers create strategy tools de novo . We undertook an ethnographic study of a business facing a wicked problem and investigated the sociomaterial practice of collective toolmaking. We identify how strategy toolmaking oscillates between different problem domains and reveal how this manifests process affordances, which are ‘unintended’ by‐products of the toolmaking process. Counterintuitively, by intentionally making a strategic tool, actors unintentionally create a sociomaterial springboard for 'spin‐off strategizing' and ‘the discovery of latent ambiguities’, generating strategic value beyond the tool produced. These insights illuminate how the practice of collective toolmaking can stimulate wayfinding, indirectly helping managers to respond to wicked problems, characterized by high degrees of complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy.