Crafting Strategy: The Role of Embodied Metaphor

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors expand a description of the relationship between craft and strategy by focusing on the embodied quality of strategic planning, emphasizing how metaphor (through the use of basic, but “non-strategic” materials—like LEGO) positively supports intellectual exploration. Their focus is on metaphorical nature of the objects that are manipulated, as these tools “stand for” complex ideas like strategy. The authors argue that by building with these tools, strategists are able to develop metaphorical representations of ideas that are embodied with meaning about corporate direction, and also meaning about personal and corporate identity.

Metaphor, in this text, operates at two levels.

Most importantly for the authors, the use of metaphor is evidenced as the output of the building activities. The resulting shapes are clearly not business strategy, but provoke discussion and narrative development around business strategy. Building the shapes is a way towards making sense of complex ideas, and of communicating those ideas to others. In this case, the “novel crafting practice of constructing embodied metaphors allowed this team to engage in surfacing and critically reflecting on their current mode of strategizing” (319); the material is a reflective tool in action.

Additionally, the material being manipulated is offered as a metaphor for the raw material of strategy, likely because that raw material is nebulous. The authors only briefly discuss the nature of this materiality and the role it plays, focusing on what may be “pre-configured meanings inherent in the materials,” but position this as a positive quality appropriate to the embodied nature of the exercise, as “participants are able to ascribe local meaning to their constructions through drawing from and combining these pre-configured meanings into broader metaphors and storylines, and therefore emergent, creative sense making is facilitated” (314).

It is this second use of metaphor that becomes most interesting in consideration of crafting strategy, as it provokes a question as to what, exactly, the material of strategy is. If crafting is to be taken literally, the parallel initially established by Mintzberg to a potter crafting clay implies a person manipulating some material within its natural constraints in order to achieve a form. The clay-like substance offered in this case study is a dramatic abstraction from strategy itself. Is there a non-metaphorical, or at least much less-metaphorical, material of strategy?

The answer may be found in language. Ignoring the argument that language itself may actually be metaphorical, the authors briefly offer a glimpse into language as material in reference to the nature of debate: the process of strategizing “provides a context where senior teams can surface and debate contentious or critical management issues, by ‘concretising’ these issues into embodied metaphors that are imbued with meaning, and that can then be debated from a variety of perspectives” (321). They intend this as related to the output, but it’s likely an internal, introspective debate also occurs, and can be externalized in some way that bears resemblance to a personal debate of ideas; this is Robert Martin’s “opposable mind,” the capability of a leader to hold two conflicting ideas in mind at once without simply selecting one.

This article presents material as metaphor, and output as metaphor. Questions raised that are unresolved by this article, then, include: what is the raw non-metaphoric material of strategy, what are the methods by which one manipulates that material, and what is the non-metaphoric form that emerges as an output? A similar question is one that skeptically analyzes the premise: is strategy actually something that is crafted, and is craft really a useful (or at least appropriate and representational) metaphor for developing strategy?