The swinging role of visualization in strategic planning

Embracing a practice-based approach to strategy and building on existing research on visual artefacts, this paper addresses the role of visualization in the processes of collective strategizing, which characterizes pluralistic settings. Specifically, it explores what happens when strategy mapping (a form of visual technique, sometimes employed in strategy making) is introduced in the strategic planning process of a public university. Building on the results of an inductive case study about the construction of a strategic plan in an Italian university, the paper shows that strategy mapping is a process able to take up different roles in different moments and performing three actions on knowledge in the accomplishment of strategy formation: formalizing, generating and bridging distributed knowledge. The paper thus unveils the swinging role that strategy mapping can have if it is conceived as a process which moves from closure to openness moments. In other words, our empirical insights contribute to shed some new light on the multiple (swinging) roles that visualization plays in ensuing moments of the strategizing process in pluralistic organizations, especially when the forging of collective knowledge about strategic direction is needed.