Strategy is usually examined through two questions: what choices does it contain, and how well are those choices executed? This article introduces a third: what form has the strategy acquired?
Strategy form concerns the way strategic meaning is organised so that its choices, distinctions and relationships can be understood, articulated, perceived and used. It reaches deeper than document format or presentation. A strategy may contain sound choices and still remain difficult to grasp as a coherent whole.
Strategy Has Form develops a theory for examining this largely overlooked dimension. It distinguishes strategic content, strategy form and strategy expression, and proposes five dimensions through which form can be studied: conceptual, structural, linguistic, visual and functional. The underlying proposition is simple: how strategic meaning is organised matters to how well a strategy can remain recognisable, shared and usable across different people and situations.
This article develops a theory of strategy form: the way strategic content is organised for shared understanding and use. Its subject is strategy itself, not the production of strategy documents or the promotion of a particular strategy framework.
The starting distinction is between strategic content, strategy form and strategy expression. These are not three separate objects that can be cleanly detached from one another. They are three different questions about a strategy: what it commits an organisation to, how that meaning is organised, and how it becomes available in particular situations.
The article proposes five dimensions of form: conceptual, structural, linguistic, visual and functional. Particular attention is given to two easily misunderstood dimensions. Linguistic form concerns sayability, not merely wording. Visual form concerns visibility, not merely appearance. Functional form concerns the conditions for use that a strategy provides, not the success of its execution.
A fictional industrial software company provides a continuing example. All its choices, situations and alternative expressions are constructed demonstrations. They are not observations from a client engagement, and no improvements described in the example should be read as measured results.
The argument draws on selected strategy research, identified through author–date references. Those sources establish relevant precedents; they do not validate the five-dimensional theory as a whole. The framework and its diagnostic criteria remain proposals to be tested. The final sections explain what useful testing would involve.
This is a foundation article rather than a report of an empirical study. Its purpose is to define an object, show why the distinction matters, make its limits explicit, and give readers a sufficiently concrete basis for examining it themselves.
Appendix A. The 25 diagnostic criteria
An organisation has agreed its strategy. The priorities have been approved, the presentation completed and the launch delivered. Yet something remains unsettled.
One executive describes the strategy as a move into a particular market. Another says it is about operational excellence. A third explains that the real point is to build a new capability. All three can point to the same approved material. None necessarily believes they are contradicting the others.
The strategy picture contains the relevant words. The document explains the background. The objectives have measures. What is difficult to recover is the relationship among these things. Is operational excellence the strategy, the means of delivering it, or a condition that every strategy would require? Does the new capability enable the market choice, or does developing the capability justify entering the market? When the priorities compete, which should shape the decision?
The situation is hypothetical, but the distinction it exposes is precise. Correct statements do not automatically amount to a recoverable strategic logic.
One possible explanation is that the strategic choices are poor. Another is that the organisation has not implemented them effectively. This article proposes that there is also a third question worth asking: has the strategy acquired a form through which its meaning can be understood and used?
This is not a third cause that explains every failure left over after content and execution have been considered. The three can overlap. A confused hierarchy may reveal an undecided priority. A decision tool may be well designed but ignored. A coherent strategy may rest on a mistaken assumption. The point is diagnostic: these possibilities call for different enquiries, and different changes.
A strategy can be well written without being well formed. It can be visually polished while concealing the relationships that make it a strategy. It can be memorable while losing its most consequential exclusion. It can be understood as a statement while providing little basis for choosing between two attractive opportunities.
Equally, a strategy can exist without an impressive document. Its central distinctions may be maintained in conversation, its priorities understood through repeated decisions, and its logic shared through examples. The absence of a slide deck does not establish the absence of strategy. Nor does the presence of a slide deck establish that the organisation has one coherent strategy.
The object therefore needs to be separated from its presentation.
A strategy is not a document. Its form is not its format.
A document is one place in which strategic meaning becomes available. So are a conversation, a diagram and a decision framework. Each makes some things easier to notice and others easier to miss. None should automatically be taken as the whole strategy.
The central argument of this article is that strategic content acquires properties through its organisation: distinctions, relationships, articulation, perceptual emphasis and conditions of use. Those properties can be examined together as strategy form.
This changes the question from “How should we present our strategy?” to something more fundamental: “What kind of strategic whole have our choices become?”
The difference matters because a presentation problem can sometimes be solved by improving a presentation. A strategy-form problem may require clarification across several expressions, changes to the way strategic distinctions are maintained, or a more usable connection between the strategy and decisions. A missing strategic choice cannot legitimately be solved by any of these without acknowledging that a new choice is being made.
The article develops this distinction before presenting the five dimensions. It then follows the same strategy through language, visual expression and use, showing how meaning can remain stable, become more accessible, or change without anyone explicitly deciding to change the strategy.
The ambition is not to replace the question of what the strategy should be. It is to make another question impossible to overlook: can the strategy we have be recognised as the same strategy when different people explain, represent and use it?
The theory begins with a three-part distinction. Strategic content concerns what is chosen or asserted. Strategy form concerns how that content is organised into a strategic whole. Strategy expression concerns its particular manifestation.
STRATEGIC CONTENT | STRATEGY FORM | STRATEGY EXPRESSION |
What is chosen or asserted? | How is that meaning organised? | How is it made available here? |
Commitments, assumptions, boundaries and substantive relationships. | Concepts, structural relations, sayability, visibility and conditions for use. | A particular document, spoken explanation, diagram or tool. |
Three analytical questions about one strategy; not three sequential stages.
Strategic content includes the substantive commitments that make one strategy different from another. Depending on the organisation, these may include a purpose, a market choice, an objective, a way of competing, an exclusion, a capability, a priority, an assumption or a principle for action.
The list is intentionally open. A public organisation, a research institution and an industrial company need not describe their strategies using identical categories. A theory of form need not settle every disagreement about what belongs in a strategy before asking how a given strategy is organised.
Content is also more than a collection of nouns. “Standardisation”, “speed” and “industrial customers” do not specify the same content as the claim that standardisation is expected to enable faster implementation for industrial customers. The relationship asserts something strategically consequential. Removing it, reversing it or inventing it can change the content.
This is important because an excessively simple division would assign every element to content and every relationship to form. That division does not work. A relationship can be a substantive strategic assertion while also occupying a structural role. Content and form are analytically distinguishable, not independently detachable.
The practical content question is: would changing this commitment, qualification or relationship materially change what the organisation is pursuing, ruling out or assuming?
Form concerns the organisation of strategic meaning. Are objectives distinguished from means? Are relationships recoverable? Are priorities maintained when the strategy is shortened? Can a central choice be explained without changing its scope? Can users see what supports what? Does the strategy provide grounds for interpreting a new situation?
A strategy may contain an enabling relationship in a long passage but repeatedly present the two elements as independent priorities. The relationship has not necessarily disappeared from the intended content. Yet the strategy’s organisation makes it difficult to recover. The form question concerns that discrepancy.
Form is therefore not a decorative layer placed over complete content. It is the configuration through which the content becomes a particular strategic whole for its users.
Calling something form does not make it superficial. Reorganising strategic meaning can change which distinctions remain available and which practical interpretations become plausible. That is precisely why form needs disciplined attention.
An expression is a concrete manifestation: a strategy document, a slide, a speech, a narrative, a diagram, a website, a decision card or a management tool. A spoken explanation is an expression even though it is not a persistent artefact.
Different expressions can serve different purposes. An orientation talk may explain the strategic idea. A management tool may expose decision criteria. A detailed document may preserve the assumptions and qualifications behind both. They do not need to contain identical information or resemble one another visually.
Their relationship should nevertheless be intelligible. A short expression may omit detail; it should not silently reverse a priority. A local explanation may introduce examples; it should not quietly broaden a declared exclusion. A diagram may simplify relationships; it should not invent a causal chain merely because a chain makes an attractive picture.
An expression makes aspects of form observable. But an expression is not interchangeable with form. A single misleading slide may be a local failure in an otherwise coherent strategy environment. Conversely, repeated inconsistencies across expressions may suggest that the underlying strategic meaning has never been sufficiently stabilised.
Consider a sentence rewritten to make an existing exclusion easier to understand. The intervention changes the expression and may improve the linguistic form available to its users. It need not change the substantive exclusion.
Now consider a rewritten sentence that permits exceptions where none existed. The intervention changes the expression, affects form, and changes content. Calling it “better wording” does not remove the content decision.
The categories identify what is being examined; they do not require every intervention to belong to only one category. This prevents an artificial choice between saying “the diagram changed” and “visual form changed”. Both may be true, but at different descriptive levels and within different scopes.
The discipline is to state what remained constant, what changed and what evidence supports that conclusion.
Content asks what the strategy means. Form asks how that meaning is organised. Expression asks how it is made available here.
That final word matters. A particular expression always has a context, an audience and a purpose. Its adequacy cannot be decided by asking whether it displays everything the strategy contains.
A concise working definition is:
Strategy form is the way strategic content is organised for shared understanding and use.
The definition identifies the object without assuming that its form is good. A strategy may be organised ambiguously, inconsistently or poorly for the situations in which it is needed. It still has form. The quality of that form is a further question.
A fuller definition makes the theoretical position explicit:
Strategy form is the relatively stabilised configuration through which strategic content becomes available for collective conception, structural understanding, linguistic articulation, visual perception and functional use.
A successful form makes those activities possible while preserving the strategic meaning that matters in the relevant context. This is the article’s central quality principle, not an automatic consequence of possessing form.
A container can hold different objects without changing their relationships. Form is different. It concerns distinctions, positions, connections, emphasis and possibilities for use.
Calling three items “priorities” already organises them in a particular way. Placing one under another organises them differently. Describing an investment as an ambition rather than an enabling commitment can affect what people believe has been decided. Form participates in how the content is available as strategic meaning.
This does not imply that a clever arrangement can turn any collection of aspirations into a viable strategy. If the necessary choices have not been made, arranging the words cannot make them exist. Form may expose a deficiency; it must not hide that deficiency behind apparent coherence.
The strategy’s configuration need not be permanent. People formulate, explain, interpret, contest and revise it. The theory concerns a configuration sufficiently stable to be recognised and examined at a particular time.
“Relatively stabilised” therefore means neither immutable nor universally agreed. The direction may be settled while the timing remains open. A strategic exclusion may be explicit while its application to a new technology requires discussion. Some parts may be contested, and the analysis should preserve that fact.
A strategy can be stable enough to guide action and still capable of learning. Indeed, an explicit account of what has changed may depend on having some prior configuration against which to identify the change.
The language of stabilisation is compatible with research that treats strategy as something people do, rather than simply something an organisation possesses. Whittington’s practice perspective connects practitioners, practices and actual strategic activity; it cautions against separating strategic objects from the activities through which they acquire significance (Whittington, 2006).
The present proposal is narrower: within that activity, a recognisable configuration can emerge and subsequently condition further interpretation and use. Form is produced through practice and can matter within practice.
Shared understanding does not require every person to know the same details or reach the same operational conclusion. An engineer, salesperson and board member may legitimately encounter different parts of the strategy.
The requirement is compatibility at strategically consequential points. If the engineer understands that the platform is standardised, while the salesperson understands that every major customer can receive a bespoke product, the difference may concern the strategy itself rather than normal variation between roles.
Nor is comprehension equivalent to agreement. A person can understand an exclusion precisely and oppose it. A strategy-form analysis should not classify informed disagreement as a defect in understanding. It should distinguish “we disagree about this choice” from “we are using the same words for different choices”.
Form belongs to strategy, but not as an object floating outside people, practices and expressions. Its practical properties are relational: a particular configuration can be accessible to one audience and difficult for another; suitable for one decision and inadequate for another.
This does not reduce form to individual preference. It specifies the conditions under which a judgement is meaningful. “This strategy is linguistically accessible” needs an audience. “This hierarchy is visible” needs an expression and a viewing situation. “This strategy supports decisions” needs a class of decisions.
The object is the strategy. The evidence comes from its expressions, the accounts of its users and, where relevant, its use. The judgement must not exceed that evidence.
To make the argument concrete, consider a fictional industrial software company. Its strategy contains the following commitments.
We focus on Nordic mid-sized industrial companies. We choose to compete through faster implementation rather than through fully bespoke functionality. We expect a standardised platform and reusable deployment methods to enable that speed. We therefore do not build customer-specific product architectures; configuration within the shared platform remains available.
This is a constructed strategy, not a claim that the approach would succeed commercially. Whether these choices are attractive, feasible or competitively defensible is deliberately left outside the demonstration. The example specifies enough content to ask what happens when that content is formed and expressed differently.
The first commitment defines a target. The second states a competitive choice and a trade-off. The third introduces an enabling assumption. The fourth defines an exclusion while preserving a permitted form of adaptation.
Those roles matter. “Nordic industrial companies”, “speed”, “standardisation” and “customer solutions” might all fit on a slide. But the nouns alone do not preserve the strategy. They do not reveal that bespoke product architecture is excluded, that configuration remains permitted, or that the standardised platform is expected to enable speed.
A faithful short explanation might say:
We help mid-sized Nordic industrial companies get our software into use faster through one standardised platform and reusable deployment methods. Customers can configure that platform, but we do not build a separate product architecture for each customer.
The wording is different. The central choices and relationships remain substantially compatible with the reference statement.
Now consider another version:
We deliver fast, customer-centric industrial solutions through scalable technology and flexible service.
This is not necessarily false as a broad description. It is inadequate as a stand-alone account of this strategy. The target boundary is reduced, the exclusion disappears, and “flexible service” leaves the relationship to bespoke work unclear. The expression has lost information that distinguishes this strategy from plausible alternatives.
The problem is not that the second version is shorter or less technical. The faithful version is also short. The difference is what survives.
A visual expression could create a parallel problem. Four equally prominent boxes labelled “Customer focus”, “Speed”, “Technology” and “Flexibility” might suggest independent priorities. A more faithful arrangement would distinguish the customer scope, the competitive intention, the proposed enabling relationship and the boundary on bespoke architecture.
That need not mean forcing all four into a single arrow chain. A target market is not caused by a platform. An exclusion is not an outcome of a customer segment. Different kinds of relationship require different visual treatments.
Finally, consider use. A large prospective customer asks for a separate product architecture in return for attractive revenue. The strategy does not calculate the commercial value of the request. It does, however, provide grounds for recognising that accepting it would conflict with a declared boundary unless the strategy is deliberately revised.
A different request asks for configuration using existing platform capabilities. Treating that request as equally prohibited would also misread the strategy. Strong functional form must preserve both the exclusion and the permission.
This example will recur throughout the article. Its purpose is to keep the analysis anchored in one question: what changes when the commitments remain constant but the organisation of their meaning changes?
The proposed framework examines strategy form through five dimensions. They are not five steps in a process, five artefacts to produce, or five departments responsible for strategy.
They are five questions asked of the same strategic whole.
Dimension | Central question | Focus |
Conceptual | What kind of strategic thing is this? | Meaningful distinctions |
Structural | How does the strategy hold together? | Relationships and overall logic |
Linguistic | How can the strategy be said? | Sayability |
Visual | What can be seen in the strategy? | Visibility |
Functional | What does the strategy provide for use? | Conditions for use |
Conceptual form concerns what kind of strategic thing each element is. Structural form concerns how the elements relate. Linguistic form concerns how the meaning can be said. Visual form concerns what can be seen. Functional form concerns the conditions the strategy provides for interpretation and use.
The distinctions are analytical, not claims of independent causes. A concept can be expressed in language and displayed visually. A priority can be structurally defined, verbally precise, visually obscured and difficult to use. One strategic relationship can therefore be relevant to several dimensions without making those dimensions identical.
Their value lies partly in locating a discrepancy. “The hierarchy exists but cannot be seen” is different from “no hierarchy has been determined”. “The distinction is clear to its authors but cannot be explained without ambiguity” is different from “the distinction itself has not been made”.
The current justification is practical and conceptual. Each dimension identifies a question that the others do not fully answer. Naming an enabling capability does not define its relationship to a goal. Defining that relationship does not ensure that people can explain it. Explaining it does not ensure that a diagram preserves it. Understanding it does not automatically provide guidance in a new decision.
The number five is nevertheless a proposal, not a discovery that strategy has exactly five natural components. The framework should change if a missing dimension proves necessary or if two dimensions cannot be usefully distinguished.
The visual dimension makes this qualification especially important. A strategy can exist and function through conversation and practice without a diagram. The framework does not make visual expression a condition for the existence of strategy. It examines visual form where visual access matters, and asks what remains unassessed where no such evidence exists.
Similarly, use can be intended without being realised. The functional dimension concerns the provisions for use in the strategy, not a requirement that every strategic intention already guide action successfully.
An attempted visualisation may reveal an undecided relationship. Trying to explain a strategy may expose two categories that are not distinct. A difficult decision may reveal that an apparent priority offers no basis for choosing. Analysis can begin at any of these points.
For that reason, the familiar sequence “conceive, structure, say, see, use” should be read as a compact set of questions, not a mandatory chronology. Strategic meaning can move among them in many directions.
The common standard is correspondence: do the distinctions, relationships and boundaries that matter in one dimension remain available in the others where they are needed?
A strong strategy form does not require every dimension to be equally elaborate. It requires the relevant dimensions to work together without concealing gaps, introducing unsupported commitments or contradicting one another.
Conceptual form concerns the distinctions through which strategic content can be thought about as an organised whole. It asks not merely what an element is called, but what role that element plays.
“Priority” may mean a desired outcome, an investment area, an action programme or a competitive choice. An organisation can use the word in any of these ways. Difficulty arises when the differences matter but the shared term hides them.
This is why terminology and conceptual form are related but not identical. Two organisations can use different terms for equivalent roles. Within one organisation, a familiar and apparently clear term can conceal several incompatible roles.
The purpose of conceptual form is not to give everything a separate technical name. Excessive categorisation can make a strategy harder to use. The question is whether distinctions are available where they make a strategic difference.
In the fictional company, customer scope, competitive choice, enabling assumption and strategic boundary serve different purposes. They need not be introduced using those exact labels in every conversation. But a user should not have to guess whether standardisation is the end being pursued or a means expected to support it.
Equally, “no bespoke architecture” must be distinguished from “no customer adaptation”. The strategy excludes one form of adaptation while permitting configuration. A conceptual model that collapses both under “customisation” can generate mistakes even when people believe they share the same principle.
Conceptual strength therefore includes economical differentiation. It preserves differences that affect strategic meaning without creating categories that add no meaningful distinction.
The framework uses completeness as a criterion, but not to insist that every strategy contain a mission, vision, five priorities and a particular set of measures. Completeness is relative to the strategy’s own logic and intended use.
A strategy that depends on a boundary must make that boundary recoverable. A strategy that claims a capability enables an outcome must allow those roles to be distinguished. An exploratory strategy may need to distinguish an experiment from a commitment. A permanent programme may need to distinguish a governing principle from a temporary project.
Absence of a fashionable category is not evidence of weakness. Absence of a distinction necessary to understand the strategy may be.
In the example, omitting a category called “values” would not itself damage the stated logic. Omitting the distinction between shared-platform configuration and customer-specific architecture could damage both understanding and use.
An analyst may discover that “customer flexibility” has no stable meaning. The first question is whether a settled distinction exists elsewhere: in an approved decision, another explanation or a consistently applied boundary.
If it does, the issue may be making that distinction available more consistently. If it does not, defining the boundary may require a new strategic decision. The analyst should not make the choice silently and report that the concept has merely been clarified.
Conceptual analysis can therefore end with an unresolved question. That is not an analytical failure. It may be the most important finding: a term that appeared to organise the strategy actually concealed a decision that had not been made.
The five proposed criteria are completeness, clarity, delimitation, distinctiveness and consistency. Together they ask whether the strategy contains the distinctions it needs, whether their roles and boundaries are intelligible, and whether those distinctions survive across contexts.
The basic conceptual question remains simple: what kind of strategic thing is this, and what difference does that role make?
Structural form concerns the relationships through which strategic elements constitute one strategy rather than a collection of statements. The elements may be individually intelligible while their collective logic remains uncertain.
Porter emphasises choices, trade-offs and fit among activities (1996). The present question is not whether a strategy follows a particular architecture, but whether its own essential relationships are determinate and recoverable.
Not every relationship is hierarchical. One element may enable another; two may reinforce each other; a constraint may limit several choices; a sequence may matter; two ambitions may remain in tension. Treating every relationship as “belongs under” can be as misleading as treating everything as equal.
In the fictional strategy, standardisation is expected to support faster implementation. Customer scope defines the field in which the choice is pursued. The exclusion of customer-specific architecture protects a boundary. These are not three copies of the same relationship.
A linear diagram from target market to advantage to capability to exclusion might look orderly while obscuring this distinction. Structure is not the same as sequence of presentation. Something can be explained last while being logically necessary to understand what comes first.
Structural form asks which kinds of relationship belong to the strategy, what status they have and how they combine.
The statement that standardisation enables speed belongs to the example as an organisational expectation. The example supplies no evidence that the expectation is correct in the real world.
A form analysis can check whether this assumption is explicit, consistently represented and connected to the choice it supports. It cannot infer from coherence alone that standardisation will produce the claimed advantage.
This distinguishes internal intelligibility from external validity. A strategic argument may be easy to follow and factually mistaken. Conversely, evidence may support an approach even while its current articulation makes the logic difficult to reconstruct.
The logic criterion should therefore not quietly become a full judgement of strategic soundness. It asks whether the reasoning can be followed, whether its commitments fit together, and where an empirical assumption remains to be tested.
A relationship described as a hypothesis should remain a hypothesis when drawn. A contingent priority should not become absolute when placed at the top of a page. Structural form includes the qualifications that determine how the relationships should be interpreted.
Prioritisation need not take the form of a numbered list. An exclusion can establish priority by removing a class of alternatives. A dependency can establish precedence because one commitment cannot be pursued without another. A conditional rule can give different priorities under different circumstances.
The fictional strategy does not rank Nordic customers, speed and standardisation from first to third. They have different roles. The meaningful priority is embedded in the choice to compete through implementation speed rather than bespoke architecture.
Equally, a strategy may deliberately preserve tension between two objectives. Structural strength then consists in making the tension and its handling intelligible, not in inventing a permanent winner.
The question is whether users have grounds for understanding strategic weight and dependence. Visual prominence or the order of chapters should not be treated as sufficient evidence of those grounds.
A strategy has structural wholeness when its principal elements can be related to a recognisable strategic idea. This does not mean every activity must appear on a single map or reinforce every other activity directly. It means the organisation can explain why these elements belong together.
If the platform, customer scope and exclusion are remembered independently while the relationship among them disappears, users may retain the ingredients but lose the strategic logic.
The proposed criteria are hierarchy, relationships, logic, prioritisation and wholeness. They examine the strategic organisation of the content, not the sequence of a document.
The defining structural question is: what makes these elements one strategy rather than several important things?
A strategy may be conceptually intelligible to its authors and structurally coherent in their reasoning, yet difficult to explain without losing something important.
This is the problem of linguistic form.
Linguistic form is not merely wording. It is the sayability of strategic meaning.
Sayability concerns whether a strategy can acquire usable verbal expression while preserving its essential choices, distinctions and relationships. A sentence is an expression. A speech is an expression. Linguistic form concerns the organisation of meaning that those expressions make available, individually and across their use.
The question is not whether everyone can repeat the approved paragraph. It is whether people can speak about sufficiently the same strategy without dependence on one person, one script or one unusually careful reading.
Mantere’s language-based view locates collective strategy partly in the organisational use and maintenance of strategic concepts. It treats language as involved in the existence of organisational strategy, rather than simply as a channel through which a finished strategy is distributed (Mantere, 2013).
That precedent does not establish the present five-dimensional framework. It does support a crucial starting point: examining the language of strategy need not mean examining copywriting alone.
The proposed linguistic dimension focuses on a particular question within this broader relationship. What verbal organisation allows this strategy’s meaning to be articulated, distinguished, remembered and explained in the settings where it matters?
A central concept can be well defined in an appendix and still lack a usable place in everyday explanation. A strategic relationship can be present in a document and consistently disappear when the strategy is retold. A prohibition can become a preference through small changes in verbs. These are not necessarily failures of eloquence. They concern what the language allows people to understand as the strategy.
Return to the fictional company. “We do not build customer-specific product architectures” and “Every customer uses the shared product architecture” can express compatible commitments, provided the surrounding explanation preserves the permission to configure the platform.
The expressions are not interchangeable in every context. One emphasises a boundary, the other a common design. Their adequacy depends on what the audience needs to understand. But neither inherently requires a new strategy.
By contrast, “We prefer to use the shared architecture” is materially different from an exclusion. It leaves room for exceptions. “We build the solution around each customer’s requirements” may shift the apparent priority towards bespoke work unless its meaning is carefully delimited.
A change of language can therefore be an expression adjustment, a form improvement, a content change, or a combination. The test is not how many words changed. It is what commitments, boundaries and qualifications changed for the user.
A broad sentence can be easy to understand and strategically uninformative. “We put customers first” requires little linguistic effort. It does not, by itself, distinguish between accepting bespoke work and protecting the standard platform.
Precision concerns the boundaries of interpretation. What does the statement commit the organisation to? What does it leave open? Where does it rule something out?
This is not a demand for legal drafting. A strategy needs enough precision to preserve consequential meaning. It need not specify every operational detail or eliminate all judgement.
For the fictional company, the distinction between configuration and a separate product architecture is worth explaining because it affects decisions. An exhaustive technical definition of every configuration parameter would be unnecessary in an introductory account.
Strong linguistic form makes the important boundary accessible without burying the strategic idea under the detail needed only for specialised use.
Concreteness provides a connection to something users can recognise. It can come from a customer group, a type of decision, a trade-off, an example of what changes, or a contrast between permitted and excluded action.
The contrast between configuration and bespoke architecture is concrete because it helps identify relevant situations. It does not require converting the strategy into a complete delivery manual.
A useful explanation might introduce the customer request described earlier. That example does not add a new strategic rule if it is a faithful application of the existing boundary. It makes the rule’s significance easier to grasp.
Concreteness becomes dangerous when the example silently substitutes for the strategy. Users may learn that one particular request is prohibited without understanding why. They can then fail to recognise an equivalent request presented differently. The explanation should therefore connect the example back to the underlying distinction.
The most memorable words in an expression may not contain its most important meaning. A user could remember “speed without limits” while forgetting that the strategy explicitly limits bespoke architecture. High verbal recall would then coexist with poor strategic recall.
The proposed criterion of memorability concerns whether essential meaning can be reconstructed after the immediate expression is gone. It is not a preference for slogans, rhymes or maximum compression.
A revealing test is to invite a person to explain the strategy in their own words. Does the customer scope remain recognisable? Does the distinction between speed and bespoke functionality survive? Is standardisation still an enabling assumption rather than an unrelated ambition? Are the exclusion and the permitted configuration both preserved?
This is a proposed test, not evidence that the fictional wording has succeeded. A real assessment would need intended users, an agreed reference and a fair way to evaluate variation.
A technically competent employee may use different language from a manager while preserving the same commitments. The criterion is semantic fidelity, not loyalty to official wording.
An organisation need not have one sentence that serves every situation. It may need a short account, a more detailed explanation, examples for particular roles and a vocabulary for discussing exceptions.
Linguistic form concerns compatibility across that repertoire. A shortened explanation should connect to the fuller one. A specialist term should not acquire an incompatible everyday meaning. An exception should be named as an exception rather than smuggled in as clarification.
Spee and Jarzabkowski describe strategic planning through recursive relations between talk and text: discussion informs written versions, and written versions shape further discussion (2011). This is a useful reminder that verbal stability can be produced through use, not merely issued at the beginning.
The proposed criteria are comprehensibility, precision, concreteness, distinctiveness and memorability. Their common object is the sayability of this strategy, for relevant users and contexts.
The strongest question is not “Is this well written?” It is: can people say what this strategy means without unintentionally making it mean something else?
A strategy picture can contain the right words and still show the wrong strategy.
It may give an enabling capability the same status as the choice it supports. It may give a secondary initiative the greatest prominence. It may imply causality with an arrow or suggest independence by separating elements whose connection is essential.
These possibilities locate the visual question beyond attractiveness.
Visual form concerns not merely what strategy looks like, but what can be seen in the strategy.
The proposed term is visibility of strategic meaning: the extent to which relevant distinctions, relationships, hierarchy and emphasis become visually available without unsupported meaning being introduced.
A diagram is an expression. Visual form concerns the perceptual organisation of strategic meaning realised through it. The expression is the particular object; form describes what that organisation makes visible about the strategy.
For the fictional company, the following relationship is part of the stated strategic assumption: a standardised platform is expected to enable faster implementation.
Now compare three schematic expressions using the same two substantive labels. In the second and third, the connector has the same meaning: “is expected to enable”.
A | Standardised | Faster | |
B | Standardised | → | Faster |
C | Standardised | ← | Faster |
Figure 1. Constructed expressions of one strategic relationship. These are illustrations of possible interpretation, not results of a perception experiment.
The first expression leaves the relationship unspecified. A user might see two themes, two priorities or two connected ideas. The second corresponds to the stated assumption. The third reverses it.
The verbal labels remain the same, but the complete informational content of the expressions does not. The connector and its direction communicate meaning. “The words did not change” therefore cannot justify saying that nothing semantic changed.
This distinction protects the theory from a common mistake. The reference strategy has been held constant in the demonstration. The visible assertions have not. Whether particular readers notice or are influenced by the discrepancy is an empirical question.
The demonstration establishes what must be checked: does the visible relation correspond to the relation that the strategy supports?
Structural form asks whether the enabling relationship belongs to the strategy and with what qualification. Visual form asks whether a relevant user can perceive that relationship in the visual organisation provided.
If the relationship is established but hidden in the overview, there may be a visual-expression problem with consequences for the strategy’s visibility in that setting. If no relationship has been decided, a more attractive diagram cannot resolve the underlying gap.
A third possibility is that different expressions present incompatible relationships. That can justify examining a broader instability in form, but not assuming it. The analyst still needs evidence about the status, purpose and authority of the expressions.
The distinction is therefore not “pictures matter, so everything is form”. It is a disciplined separation between the strategic relationship, its particular depiction and the interpretation supported by that depiction.
Position, proximity, contrast, size, typography, colour, spacing and connectors can all be used to make distinctions perceptible. None has an inherently strategic meaning outside its use and context.
A larger box may be intended to indicate importance, but it could also contain more text. A vertical position may imply hierarchy, but a layout may simply follow reading order. An arrow may mean causation, sequence, information flow or contribution.
For this reason, correspondence cannot be assessed from the designer’s intention alone. A visual convention needs to be intelligible to its users. Important relationships should be labelled where an unlabelled convention would leave too much room for interpretation.
The theory does not demand one visual grammar for every strategy. It demands an accountable relationship between what the strategy means and what its visual organisation invites people to infer.
Eppler and Platts describe visualisation as contributing to strategic-planning activity, including cognitive, social and emotional processes, rather than merely decorating final outputs (2009). Csaszar, Hinrichs and Heshmati develop a conceptual account of how external representations interact with cognitive functions in strategic decision-making (2024). These are foundations for taking representation seriously, not proof of this framework’s separate visual dimension.
A serious objection deserves a direct answer: if a strategy can exist entirely through speech and practice, how can visual form be a dimension of strategy itself?
The framework does not claim that every strategy must have a visual expression. Nor does it assume that a strategy without a diagram is incomplete. It distinguishes an analytical dimension from a universal existence requirement.
A spoken strategy may have no visual form available for empirical assessment in the situation being examined. That is a limitation of evidence, not a negative score. Where visual access is relevant, one can investigate how faithfully its strategic meaning could be made visible. But a proposed future visualisation is a design proposition, not evidence about current visual experience.
This boundary matters. Otherwise any imaginable picture could be used to assert that an invisible visual form already exists and has been assessed. That would make the concept difficult to test.
The visual dimension belongs in the proposed framework because visual organisation can make strategic distinctions available in a mode not exhausted by their verbal statement. Its practical relevance varies with the strategy, the audience and the use situation. The universal requirement is not eyesight or a diagram; it is access to strategically relevant meaning through suitable means.
A visual account should not become the only way to recover the strategy’s essential logic. The same important distinctions may need a verbal explanation, an accessible text structure or another appropriate mode.
The theory’s emphasis on visibility is therefore not a claim that visual understanding is superior or necessary for every user. It is an argument for examining a particular mode of access accurately. A relation shown by position alone should remain explainable without relying on that position.
This also makes the five dimensions mutually accountable. A diagram that is difficult to explain may expose a hidden ambiguity. A verbal account that disagrees with the diagram calls for reconciliation rather than a decision that one mode is automatically correct.
Visual organisation can also suggest what kind of strategic whole is being presented: a catalogue, a sequence, a balanced set of concerns, a focused direction, a network of dependencies or a collection of initiatives.
The overall-impression criterion asks whether that impression is compatible with the strategy’s intended character and purpose. It should not become a judgement that a strategy looks insufficiently bold, modern or attractive according to an analyst’s taste.
For example, a strategy based on a firm exclusion may be visually expressed as an inclusive collection of equally available opportunities. The concern is not style. It is whether the overview obscures the fact that some attractive options are ruled out.
A claim about what users actually perceive requires user evidence. Without it, the analyst can identify a plausible mismatch or interpretation risk, not report a measured response.
The proposed criteria are perceptibility, correspondence, hierarchy, relationships and overall impression. Correspondence connects them to the strategy rather than to visual polish.
The governing question is: does what users can see preserve the distinctions and relationships that the strategy requires them to understand?
Understanding a strategy is not the same as being able to use it. A person may correctly explain its main ideas and still lack a basis for deciding what those ideas imply in a particular situation.
Functional form concerns the provisions that the strategy makes for that move from understanding to judgement.
Functional form concerns the conditions for use, not the success of execution.
The distinction is essential. A strategy may provide intelligible boundaries and decision principles while the organisation lacks the resources, authority or willingness to follow them. Those problems should not be relabelled as form failures. Conversely, people may achieve coordinated action through informal experience despite weak provisions in the strategy being examined.
The relevant question is what the strategy itself makes available for interpretation, choice and application.
Linguistic comprehension asks whether a person understands the statement that the company does not build customer-specific product architectures. Functional interpretation asks what that statement means when an important prospect requests a technically unusual solution.
The answer cannot always be read directly from a sentence. The request may be an ordinary configuration, a separate architecture, or a case the strategy does not resolve. The strategy provides a boundary, but relevant technical facts must still be established.
Strong functional form does not eliminate this enquiry. It helps organise it. The question becomes whether the proposal remains within the common platform and preserves the strategic basis for implementation speed, not simply whether the opportunity is attractive.
The result may be a decision, a need for more information, or an explicit request to reconsider the strategy. All three can be legitimate uses.
A strategy is not made more functional by turning every possible situation into a fixed rule. Rules can be useful, but they cannot substitute for the ability to apply strategic distinctions to situations not anticipated in advance.
For the fictional company, a decision aid might ask whether the request can be met through configuration of existing shared-platform capabilities. It might then ask whether the delivery approach preserves the intended speed advantage. A proposal requiring a separate customer architecture should be recognised as conflicting with the reference strategy.
These questions are derived from the stated choices. They do not authorise the analyst to invent a revenue threshold above which exceptions become permissible. That would add a strategic rule not contained in the reference.
Functional design must therefore distinguish derived implications from unresolved decisions. “This request requires a strategic exception” is a different statement from “requests above this value qualify for an exception”. The first may follow from the strategy; the second requires authority and additional content.
A strategy may contain useful guidance that is difficult to retrieve when needed. The issue is not necessarily the length of the main document. Different contexts can require different access points.
A complete strategic argument may be essential for periodic review but unnecessary during a routine screening conversation. A compact decision aid can serve the latter while remaining linked to the fuller reasoning.
The test is whether the relevant meaning is accessible without being replaced by a disconnected shorthand. A checklist that says “standard platform” may be easy to use but inadequate if users cannot distinguish permitted configuration from prohibited bespoke architecture.
Functional usability therefore combines access with fidelity. The convenient expression must preserve the distinctions needed for the decision it claims to support.
A strategy may need to connect to investment decisions, planning, objectives, portfolios or management review. Functional form asks whether its meaning provides a defensible basis for those connections.
In the example, the declared platform choice gives a reason to distinguish reusable development from customer-specific architecture when considering investments. It does not prove that a budget process has made that distinction, or that investments have followed it.
An assessment based on strategy material can identify a specified connection, a possible connection or a gap in the meaning needed to make a connection. It should not infer an effective management system from the existence of a heading or a diagram.
The same care applies to measures. A measure may relate to a strategic objective, but a number alone does not establish why it reflects the strategic choice or how it should influence decisions. Where the connection is missing, form analysis should identify the missing reasoning rather than claim that implementation has failed.
People can reason consistently with a strategy that turns out to be poor. Functional form therefore should not be judged initially by whether decisions are commercially or socially optimal. That would require a wider account of the content, circumstances and outcomes.
A narrower test asks whether the reasoning reflects the strategy’s relevant commitments, recognises conflicts and distinguishes application from revision. Different decisions may remain possible because people have different information or because the strategy deliberately leaves discretion.
The proposed criteria are interpretability, decision guidance, applicability, usability and connectedness. Their common concern is the strategy’s provision for use.
A good functional question is not “Did the organisation deliver the strategy?” It is: does the strategy give people sufficient grounds to recognise what it means here, what remains open and when a new strategic decision is required?
The five dimensions become more than a classification when they are connected through a common problem: the preservation of strategic meaning across transformations.
A strategy can be explained, shortened, translated, drawn, discussed, adapted to a role and applied to a decision. Each transformation can preserve, clarify, omit or alter something strategically important.
The central proposal is that strategy form affects how reliably essential meaning survives those changes. This can be described as its capacity to preserve meaning. “Strategic carrying capacity” is a shorthand for that proposed capacity, not an additional proven construct.
The important outcome is not repetition of the same expression. It is continuity of the meaning that makes the strategy recognisably itself.
Essential strategic meaning comprises the commitments, distinctions, priorities, qualifications and relationships whose material alteration would change the strategy under examination.
In the fictional case, the target scope, the choice of speed over bespoke functionality, the standardisation assumption, the exclusion and the permission to configure are reference points. A particular phrase, diagram shape or chapter sequence is not.
The example supplies these reference points by construction. A real organisation may not have an uncontested account of them. Identifying them then requires evidence, discussion and, where necessary, an explicit decision. The analyst should not treat a personally preferred interpretation as the strategy’s hidden truth.
Nor does establishing reference points require finding one uniquely shortest strategy. The question here is not how much can be removed to produce a minimum structure. It is what must remain compatible across the particular transformations being examined.
Semantic fidelity means sufficient preservation of essential strategic meaning in a specified context. It does not demand that every expression reproduce every part of the strategy.
A public introduction may legitimately omit internal decision procedures. A technical briefing may devote more attention to platform boundaries than to market selection. The assessment should ask whether the expression preserves what its purpose requires and avoids contradiction elsewhere.
A short introduction becomes problematic when it claims to explain the whole strategy but removes the exclusion that distinguishes it. A detailed technical explanation becomes problematic when its added detail silently reverses the competitive priority.
The standard is therefore neither completeness in every expression nor unrestricted local freedom. It is compatible variation: enough common meaning to remain one strategy, with enough contextual freedom to be useful.
Semantic drift is an unintended change in essential strategic meaning during representation, transmission, interpretation or use.
In the example, drift could turn an exclusion into a preference, broaden the target without discussion, convert a proposed enabling relationship into a proven fact, or treat a capability as an independent strategic end.
A deliberate decision to allow a second customer segment is different. It may be wise or unwise, but it is strategy revision rather than drift if it is recognised and the implications are addressed.
This distinction makes fidelity compatible with learning. The aim is not to preserve yesterday’s strategy at any cost. It is to distinguish meaningful change from accidental mutation, and to make changes visible enough to be discussed.
A concept may be sharply delimited in the formal definitions but used loosely in explanations. A hierarchy may be clear in the detailed reasoning but reversed in the main visual. A priority may be repeated in speeches but absent from the decision aid.
These are cross-dimensional discrepancies. Assessing each expression only on its own terms can miss them. The speech may sound clear, the diagram may look orderly and the decision card may be convenient, while the strategic meanings they make available conflict.
This is one reason not to collapse the framework into a simple average. Strength in one dimension cannot be assumed to compensate for a consequential contradiction in another. The extent of such bottleneck effects is a research question, but the diagnostic implication is already clear: a serious mismatch should not disappear inside an overall score.
A further hypothesis concerns the effort needed to keep strategy intelligible. When every new expression requires its author to reconstruct the relationships, organisations may spend recurring effort explaining and reconciling what the strategy means.
The proposed term form debt refers to avoidable interpretive and representational work associated with unresolved weaknesses in form. It is not a label for all strategy discussion. Complex decisions, organisational learning and constructive disagreement legitimately require repeated conversation.
The distinction would need evidence. One cannot count meetings and infer form debt. One would need to identify what repeatedly has to be repaired, why it is not resolved, and whether the recurring work relates to unstable meaning rather than new circumstances.
Form debt is therefore a possible consequence of weak form, not part of its definition. Keeping the two separate makes it possible to test the relationship rather than assume it.
A theory of strategy form needs a credible way to move from observation to judgement. Otherwise the five dimensions risk becoming labels for an analyst’s preferences.
The first discipline is to define the object. Is the analysis examining an approved strategic intention, the strategy inferred from several authoritative sources, the strategy understood by a group, or a pattern of strategy expressed in decisions? These are related, but they cannot be silently substituted for one another.
An analysis can start with documents. It must not end by claiming more than documents support.
A useful scope identifies the organisation or unit, the strategic period, the version being examined, the relevant users and the situations in which the strategy is expected to guide understanding or use.
It should also identify the evidence boundary. “The approved strategy and its principal employee expressions” is a different object from “the organisation’s realised strategy”. A publicly available website may reveal something about the first while providing limited grounds for the second.
Dates matter because apparent inconsistency may be a legitimate change between versions. Audience matters because two expressions can emphasise different things for good reasons. Authority matters because an exploratory slide is not necessarily an approved commitment.
None of this requires a large research project before making a useful observation. It requires proportionate claims.
Suppose the overview presents three elements with equal visual weight. That is an observable feature. Interpreting it as a possible signal of equivalence requires knowledge of the expression’s conventions and purpose. Claiming that users therefore misunderstand the strategy requires evidence about those users.
These are three different steps.
Likewise, identifying several definitions of a central term is not yet proof that the organisation lacks shared understanding. It is evidence that may justify investigation. Users may maintain a stable distinction through a convention not visible in the material, or the definitions may refer to different periods.
A credible diagnosis should show the chain: what is observed, what it may mean, what else could explain it, why it matters, and how confident the analyst can be.
A diagram without visible hierarchy can arise in at least three ways.
A local expression failure. The strategic hierarchy is established elsewhere, and the diagram fails to show it for a purpose that requires it.
A form instability. Different authoritative expressions and explanations organise the same elements inconsistently, leaving no sufficiently stable account available to the relevant users.
A content decision gap. The organisation has not decided the relevant priority or relationship. A hierarchy cannot be faithfully displayed because it has not been established.
These diagnoses are not a rigid taxonomy of everything that can go wrong. They are competing explanations that prevent a premature conclusion. More than one may apply.
The appropriate response differs. Repair the expression; reconcile and stabilise the organisation of meaning; or make the missing strategic decision. A visual designer, writer or analyst should not be expected to solve the third while pretending to perform only the first.
A finding can be written as a short argument rather than an unsupported score. It should identify the evidence and counter-evidence, explain the interpretation, state the consequence that is plausible or demonstrated, give a confidence judgement and specify what needs to happen next.
For the fictional example, an expression-level finding could say:
The reference strategy distinguishes platform configuration from customer-specific architecture. The short employee statement replaces both with “flexible solutions” and does not refer users to the distinction. As a stand-alone explanation of the strategic boundary, it is therefore incomplete. This creates a plausible risk of incompatible interpretations; no user test has been conducted. The next step is to restore the distinction and test whether intended users can apply it to two contrasting requests.
The evidence is explicit. The effect is not invented. The recommendation preserves the existing content rather than adding an exception policy.
Document-based work can assess stated categories, explicit relationships, visible hierarchy and the provisions made for use. It can compare expressions and identify contradictions, omissions or unsupported additions.
It cannot by itself establish actual comprehension, memory, routine use or organisational performance. Those require other evidence: user explanations, structured tasks, interviews, observation or records appropriate to the claim.
An absence in the available material should therefore be reported as an absence in the available material. It may be important, but it is not automatically an absence in the organisation.
The guiding principle is:
Expressions are evidence about strategy form. They are not a licence to infer the whole strategy from whatever happens to be visible.
The proposed diagnostic framework examines each dimension through five criteria. It is an operationalisation of the theory, not the theory’s definition and not a validated measurement instrument.
The distinction matters. A criterion may need refinement without invalidating the underlying question. Conversely, a useful checklist does not by itself establish that a new theoretical construct has explanatory value.
Dimension | Five diagnostic criteria |
Conceptual | Completeness · Clarity · Delimitation · Distinctiveness · Consistency |
Structural | Hierarchy · Relationships · Logic · Prioritisation · Wholeness |
Linguistic | Comprehensibility · Precision · Concreteness · Distinctiveness · Memorability |
Visual | Perceptibility · Correspondence · Hierarchy · Relationships · Overall impression |
Functional | Interpretability · Decision guidance · Applicability · Usability · Connectedness |
The recurrence of words such as hierarchy and relationships is intentional. Structural hierarchy concerns how the strategic elements are related. Visual hierarchy concerns whether their differences in level or weight are perceptible. These questions can produce different findings.
Likewise, conceptual distinctiveness asks whether elements have different roles. Linguistic distinctiveness asks whether the strategy’s particular meaning survives in its language. The same sentence may provide evidence relevant to both without making them the same criterion.
Appendix A defines all 25 criteria and gives their main interpretive boundaries. Here, three principles govern their use.
The initial result should be a reasoned profile of strengths, weaknesses, tensions and uncertainties. A numerical score may eventually support certain uses, but it should not precede clear definitions and reliable assessment.
Averages are especially risky when an important contradiction can be hidden by several favourable ratings. A visually accessible strategy that reverses a central relationship is not made adequate by its typography, attractive impression or memorability.
Significance must therefore be assessed separately from the number of criteria touched by a finding. One consequential ambiguity can matter more than five minor presentational imperfections.
A criterion can be relevant but unassessed because the necessary evidence is unavailable. Memorability requires more than a writer’s intuition about a phrase. Actual interpretive convergence requires evidence from more than one user. Visual form may be outside the scope of an entirely oral use situation.
It is useful to distinguish “not evidenced”, “not applicable in this scope” and “evidence indicates weakness”. Treating all three as low scores would reward documentation volume and penalise legitimate differences in how strategies exist.
An assessment should also distinguish the current state from a design proposal. A proposed decision aid may provide promising conditions for use, but its existence in a report does not show that users can or do use it.
The criteria are not instructions to maximise clarity, hierarchy, brevity or precision independently. Different purposes call for different configurations.
An exploratory strategy may preserve conditional options. A multi-objective strategy may need visible tensions rather than a single hierarchy. A specialist explanation may require exact terminology. An introductory expression may prioritise a few essential relationships while linking to greater detail.
The question is whether the organisation of meaning is appropriate to the strategy, its users and its situations. Purpose should guide interpretation, not become a retrospective excuse for every ambiguity.
A useful diagnostic profile therefore records where flexibility is deliberate, what must remain stable, and where the current evidence does not support a conclusion.
The earlier examples isolated particular dimensions. This section brings them together in one deliberately modest intervention.
The reference remains the fictional industrial software strategy. No new market, advantage, boundary or exception rule is introduced. The intervention concerns the organisation and availability of its existing meaning.
Imagine that employees receive an overview headed “Our strategic priorities”, followed by four equally prominent themes: customer focus, speed, technology and flexibility. The approved strategy paragraph exists in a longer document, but the overview is used as the stand-alone explanation.
The problem is not simply that the overview is brief. It substitutes broad themes for specific roles. Customer scope becomes a generic orientation. The proposed relationship between the platform and speed disappears. Flexibility becomes prominent without the distinction that limits its meaning.
This construction allows a defensible diagnosis of the expression relative to the reference. It does not demonstrate that real employees would misunderstand it. Nor does it establish that the fictional organisation has a weak strategy in every other setting.
Before redesign, the reference commitments are made explicit: the target group; speed rather than bespoke functionality as the competitive choice; the expectation that a shared platform and reusable methods enable that speed; the exclusion of customer-specific architecture; and the permission to configure within the platform.
These are the fidelity checks for the intervention. They are not a claim to have discovered a uniquely minimal strategy.
Any new expression is checked for omissions appropriate to its purpose, contradictions, and unsupported additions. A design that makes the strategy more persuasive by allowing bespoke work would fail that check.
A short spoken explanation could be:
We focus on mid-sized Nordic industrial companies and choose to compete through faster implementation. Our chosen approach is a shared platform with reusable deployment methods, rather than a separate product architecture for every customer. Customers can configure the platform. What we do not do is rebuild the underlying product around each individual request.
The reference’s central distinctions remain available. The explanation also provides a natural place for questions: what counts as configuration, and when does a request require a separate architecture?
It is not necessary to claim that this is the best possible wording. It is one candidate whose semantic correspondence can be inspected and whose sayability can be tested.
A visual overview could separate the customer scope from the mechanism and boundary. Rather than four equivalent priorities, it would show the platform and deployment methods as proposed enablers of speed, within the chosen customer scope. The exclusion and permitted configuration would appear as boundary information, not as another goal.
CHOSEN CUSTOMER SCOPE |
Nordic mid-sized industrial companies |
PROPOSED STRATEGIC MECHANISM |
Standardised platform + reusable deployment methods |
STRATEGIC BOUNDARY |
Permitted: configuration within the shared platform. |
Figure 2. A constructed relational overview. “Expected to enable” identifies a strategic assumption, not an empirically demonstrated effect.
The visual arrangement is not the strategy’s only possible form. Its purpose is to make the relevant roles and relationships available without claiming a false equivalence among them.
A different layout could work equally well. Fidelity concerns the meaning preserved, not loyalty to these boxes or this arrangement.
For an opportunity review, the same strategy can become a sequence of questions. Does the opportunity fit the declared customer focus? Can the requirement be met through configuration of existing shared-platform capabilities? Does the proposal preserve the intended basis for implementation speed? Would it require a customer-specific architecture?
These questions do not decide every case. They distinguish application from conflict and identify information that the strategy makes relevant.
If the opportunity requires a separate architecture, the strategy provides grounds for recognising a conflict. It does not prevent leaders from reconsidering the strategy. It requires them to recognise that accepting the opportunity may involve revision rather than ordinary application.
The expressions changed. Conceptual roles became more explicit, the enabling assumption became easier to recover, the language preserved the trade-off, the overview displayed different relationship types, and a decision conversation made the boundary available for use.
These are proposed improvements in form as realised through the expressions. The substantive reference commitments did not intentionally change. Whether users understand, remember or apply them better remains to be tested.
That last distinction is crucial. A compelling before-and-after display is not evidence of improved comprehension merely because its author prefers the second version. A fair test would present the alternatives to relevant users and assess meaning against a reference established before the results are seen.
The demonstration shows what an intervention can preserve and what it can manipulate. It does not manufacture the evidence that the intervention works.
The argument has substantial neighbours in existing strategy research. Its contribution should not be built on the claim that language, relationships, visuals or practice have been ignored.
Nor should it claim that separating strategy from its representation is unprecedented. Knight, Paroutis and Heracleous explicitly distinguish underlying strategy, visual representation and interpretation in their account of meaning-making around PowerPoint (2018). Their analysis is a close precedent, not merely background support for saying that pictures are useful.
The proposal made here is to organise a related set of questions around strategy form: a configuration examined across five dimensions, with explicit attention to content, expression and preservation of strategically consequential meaning. Whether this synthesis adds enough explanatory and practical value is a question for further comparison and testing.
The language-based view contributes an account of collective strategic meaning. Research on talk and text contributes a process through which that meaning can become more stable. Visual-strategising and external-representation research contribute reasons to examine what visual organisation makes available to thought and discussion. The practice perspective prevents the strategy from being treated as a self-contained blueprint outside organisational life.
These are not five literatures being relabelled as five new discoveries. Their relationship to the proposed theory is more specific: each supplies relevant phenomena and constraints, while the article asks whether examining their correspondence as properties of a particular strategy is useful.
Knight and Wenzel’s account of multimodality distinguishes representational, co-creative and intertwined relationships among modes of strategising (2025). It cautions against assuming a neat sequence from content to language to picture to action. In the present theory, those distinctions are analytical; the processes through which form develops may be recursive.
The source base used here is selective. It is not a systematic review and cannot establish historical uniqueness. A stronger originality claim would require a documented comparison with additional related theories, not simply the absence of an identical label in a search.
Some phenomena examined here can also be described as communication or information-design problems. That overlap is not a weakness to be denied. It is a reason to be precise about the additional question.
A local problem may be fully explained by the design of one expression. In that case, there is no need to elevate it into a new diagnosis of the whole strategy. The form perspective becomes useful when the enquiry requires relationships among the commitments, their conceptual roles, their different expressions and their provisions for use.
Its strongest claim is not that existing fields cannot explain a misleading arrow. It is that a common object and diagnostic vocabulary may help distinguish where the difficulty lies and whether the proposed repair preserves or changes the strategy.
If that distinction does not produce better explanation, better diagnosis or more disciplined intervention, the new vocabulary has not earned its place.
Mintzberg and Waters distinguish deliberate and emergent strategy and describe a range between the two (1985). This is a necessary boundary for a theory that often begins with chosen commitments.
The examples in this article focus on relatively explicit strategic intentions because they make comparison tractable. They do not imply that all organisational strategy starts as an approved text.
A pattern may emerge through action before anyone articulates it. An analyst might then propose an account of its form, but should distinguish inferred regularity from a shared or authorised strategic intention. Evidence of repeated action is not automatically evidence that participants possess one collective verbal account.
The theory therefore has its clearest initial scope in strategies sufficiently articulated or stabilised to permit an identifiable reference. Its application to tacit and emergent strategy is a further research problem, not something solved by broadening the definition until every pattern qualifies.
No. Abdallah and Langley show how ambiguity in strategic planning can accommodate different interpretations while also contributing to later difficulties (2014). The implication here is not that ambiguity is good or bad in general, but that its role must be specified.
A strategy may deliberately leave room for experimentation. It may set a direction while allowing units to choose methods. It may retain two objectives in tension because the tension is real.
Weak form arises when users cannot distinguish deliberate openness from a missing decision, or when different expressions close that openness in incompatible ways without acknowledging it.
The right question is therefore not “How can we eliminate ambiguity?” It is “Where must meaning be stable, where may it vary, and can users tell the difference?”
A framework that rewards maximum precision everywhere would misrepresent its own subject. The purpose is fit for use, not total semantic control.
An official strategy can provide a reference for examining its own expressions. It does not automatically define the whole strategy enacted by the organisation, nor does it establish that its claims are true.
When accounts conflict, the analyst should not resolve the conflict solely by choosing the most senior speaker. Authority, practice, evidence and the declared scope of the enquiry are different considerations.
A disagreement may be political, substantive or interpretive. People may understand a strategy and resist it. They may follow incentives inconsistent with it. They may be implementing a deliberate revision that has not reached the formal material. None of these should be reduced automatically to poor wording or low fidelity.
The analysis should make the disagreement visible and specify what is being compared. Preserving meaning is not the same as requiring obedience.
Connectedness and usability can blur into organisational capacity. The boundary is maintained by asking what provisions the strategy makes, and then separately what actors and systems do with them.
An explicit investment principle belongs to the strategy’s conditions for use. A budget decision consistent with it is evidence of use in one instance. Repeated allocation patterns may support a wider account. Successful outcomes still require separate evidence and explanation.
The form perspective can connect these enquiries without collapsing them. Its discipline depends on keeping their different claims visible.
A foundation article should do more than name a possibility. It should explain what would count as evidence for it and what would require revision.
The central test is whether changing the organisation of strategic meaning, while preserving the substantive commitments under examination, can produce observable differences in understanding or use.
That claim should be tested narrowly before it is extended to organisational performance. Better comprehension, more faithful retelling and more strategy-consistent reasoning are closer to the proposed mechanism than revenue growth or implementation success.
There is a risk of circularity. If stronger form is defined as whatever users understand better, discovering that stronger form produces better understanding explains nothing.
A test therefore needs distinct measures. The form characteristics should be specified independently: whether a boundary is explicit, whether a relationship is labelled, whether conceptual roles are differentiated, whether a decision aid preserves the stated trade-off. Comprehension and use should then be observed separately.
Similarly, memorability as a diagnostic criterion should not be used to predict the exact same recall score without acknowledging that it is an overlapping outcome. Some parts of the 5 × 5 framework are inspectable properties; others need user evidence. They should not be treated as equivalent independent variables.
This distinction makes the framework more demanding, but also more useful. It separates a descriptive profile from a causal explanation.
The fictional strategy provides a starting point for controlled tests because its commitments are specified in advance. Participants could receive different expressions that preserve those commitments but vary in how clearly they organise roles, display relationships or expose conditions for use.
A content-equivalence check is essential. If one version adds a decision rule, removes an exclusion or supplies an enabling relationship absent from the other, the experiment has not varied form alone.
Holding content constant does not always mean holding every word constant. A faithful paraphrase can preserve the commitments with different words. Conversely, identical verbal labels can be paired with a contradictory visual assertion. The reference should therefore include relationships, qualifications and boundaries, not just a list of terms.
The content check should be conducted before outcomes are analysed and, where feasible, by someone other than the person designing the preferred version.
A transmission study could compare how well alternative linguistic organisations preserve meaning as one person explains the strategy to another. The assessment would examine the target, the trade-off, the enabling assumption and the boundary after each explanation.
The test should allow legitimate paraphrase. It should also distinguish loss from deliberate disagreement or revision. Participants might be asked both what they believe the strategy says and what they themselves would choose to do.
Confidence is not a substitute for fidelity. A person may confidently repeat an incorrect interpretation. Similarly, fluent language is not evidence that the strategy has been understood relationally.
The proposed outcome is preservation of consequential meaning, not reproduction of the approved sentence.
The corresponding, unspecified and reversed relationships in Figure 1 could support a small perception experiment. Researchers would ask what participants infer about enablement, priority and the overall logic.
A finding that arrows influence interpretation would support a visual mechanism. It would not by itself validate all five dimensions or show that strategy form is distinct from general principles of representation.
A stronger programme would examine whether the proposed framework helps identify the source of mismatches across multiple expressions, and whether repairs preserve strategic commitments while improving relevant understanding. That moves the test from isolated graphic effects towards the theory’s integrative claim.
Participants could face two kinds of request: one requiring customer-specific architecture, the other using permitted configuration. A useful assessment would examine whether they distinguish the requests, identify relevant facts and explain any conflict with the strategy.
There need not be a single correct operational choice in every scenario. The criterion is whether their reasoning reflects the reference commitments and recognises where new information or an explicit strategic decision is needed.
Situations should not be made arbitrarily unfamiliar. Beyond some point, the strategy may genuinely offer no applicable guidance. The hypothesis that functional form matters in novel situations should therefore be bounded by the strategy’s scope, rather than predicting unlimited usefulness as uncertainty increases.
Several analysts could examine the same strategy material using the same criteria. The comparison should consider whether they identify similar evidence, distinguish local expression problems from broader form instability, and reach compatible significance judgements.
Perfect agreement is neither likely nor sufficient. Analysts could agree because they share an unsupported assumption. The record should preserve the evidence and reasoning so that agreement can be examined rather than merely counted.
Real organisational studies could then compare multiple expressions with user explanations and relevant decision situations. A before-and-after study would be stronger with a comparison group, attention to prior knowledge, and safeguards against simple familiarity with the test.
These are proposed studies, not completed validations. The article reports no sample, measured effect, reliability estimate or performance improvement for the framework.
The theory should be revised if its dimensions cannot be distinguished usefully, if its criteria mostly restate the outcomes they are supposed to explain, or if analysts cannot separate content changes from proposed form interventions.
It should also be reconsidered if the new construct adds no useful explanation beyond established accounts of representation, language or practice. Integration must do work, not merely gather familiar concepts under a new heading.
A failed experiment would not automatically disprove every part of the theory. It would require asking whether the manipulated distinction was real, whether the reference was adequate and whether the test addressed the claim. Repeated well-designed failures, however, should narrow or change the claim rather than provoke an ever-expanding definition of form.
Credibility will come from explicit commitments about what the theory predicts and from a willingness to let evidence change its architecture.
The argument begins with a distinction that is easy to state and difficult to maintain in practice.
Strategic content concerns what is chosen or asserted. Strategy form concerns how that meaning is organised into a strategic whole. Strategy expression concerns the particular manifestation through which people encounter it.
The three are related. Changing an expression can improve access to existing meaning, reveal a contradiction or introduce a new commitment. The task is not to pretend these effects occupy separate worlds. It is to recognise which effect is occurring.
The five proposed dimensions make that enquiry more precise. Conceptual form concerns the distinctions through which the strategy can be understood. Structural form concerns the relationships that make it a whole. Linguistic form concerns its sayability. Visual form concerns its visibility. Functional form concerns the conditions it provides for use.
Language is not reduced to elegant writing. Visuality is not reduced to appearance. Use is not confused with completed execution. A strategy’s relationships can be structurally established but visually hidden. Its distinctions can be clear to its authors but difficult to say. Its statements can be comprehensible but insufficiently formed for a consequential decision.
The common issue is whether essential strategic meaning remains available as the strategy moves among people, expressions and situations. Stability here does not mean rigidity. A strategy can allow different applications and still preserve its governing commitments. It can change deliberately without allowing every new expression to change it accidentally.
This article proposes a vocabulary and a framework for examining that issue. It does not claim that form can rescue poor choices, guarantee implementation, or explain every disagreement. Its usefulness depends on disciplined boundaries and on evidence that the distinctions improve diagnosis and understanding.
The central proposition is nevertheless direct:
The capacity of a strategy to function as strategy depends partly on the form through which its meaning becomes available for shared understanding and use.
That is why a strategy cannot be assessed only by asking whether its statements are individually sensible or its presentation professionally produced. One must also ask what whole those statements constitute, what people can say about it, what they can see in it, and what it provides when a choice must be made.
A strategy has content. It also has form.
Its form is not its format.
And making that form explicit gives us another way to understand why a strategy works as a strategy — or does not.
The following definitions preserve the five-dimensional structure proposed in the article. They are diagnostic questions rather than a scoring scale. Each should be interpreted relative to the strategy, audience, purpose and available evidence. A criterion can remain unassessed without implying poor form.
Does the conceptual organisation include the kinds of strategic elements required by this strategy’s own logic? Completeness does not mean including every category found in strategy literature. In the fictional example, distinguishing an enabling assumption from a competitive choice is necessary; adding a category simply because a template contains it is not. Missing conceptual roles should be distinguished from missing substantive decisions.
Are the meaning and role of central concepts sufficiently intelligible? A familiar term can remain conceptually unclear when its function changes without explanation. “Priority” might name an outcome in one passage and a capability in another. The question is whether the difference can be understood, not whether the word itself is difficult. Evidence should identify the relevant uses rather than rely on a general impression of clarity.
Are the boundaries of strategically important concepts sufficiently defined? A concept should allow meaningful inclusion and exclusion where these matter. The fictional strategy needs a boundary between configuration and customer-specific architecture. It does not require an exhaustive catalogue of every possible request. Delimitation asks whether enough of the boundary exists to preserve the strategic distinction without pretending that all future cases are predetermined.
Do purportedly different strategic elements perform distinguishable conceptual roles? This is internal differentiation, not originality of vocabulary. Calling the same kind of activity a theme, pillar and priority may multiply labels without adding meaning. Conversely, the same ordinary word may be usable in different roles if those roles are made explicit. The criterion examines the differentiation necessary to understand the strategy.
Do central concepts retain compatible meanings and roles across the strategy’s relevant expressions? Consistency does not require exact wording everywhere. It requires changes in terminology, audience or detail not to conceal a change in the underlying concept. Apparent inconsistency should first be checked against scope and version: a documented strategic revision is different from an unacknowledged drift in meaning.
Are differences in strategic level, scope and subordination sufficiently determinate? Not every strategy needs one vertical hierarchy. Where a goal, choice and enabling capability occupy different roles, their relationship should be recoverable. A dependency should not automatically be treated as lower importance, and a prominent position on a slide should not be accepted as evidence of an approved strategic ranking.
Are essential connections among strategic elements identifiable and appropriately qualified? Relevant connections may involve enablement, dependence, constraint, reinforcement, tension, sequence or parallel contribution. The criterion does not demand an arrow between everything. It asks whether users have a supported account of the relationships needed to understand the strategy, rather than having to invent their own incompatible connections.
Can the organisation explain how its choices, assumptions and means are expected to produce its intended direction or outcomes? Logic concerns an intelligible and internally compatible account, not proof that the assumptions are true. The assessment should preserve the difference between a declared causal belief and an empirically supported relationship. A well-organised argument can still need substantive challenge or external evidence.
Does the strategy establish meaningful weight, precedence, conditionality or exclusion where choice requires it? Prioritisation may be expressed through a boundary or dependency rather than a ranked list. The criterion should not manufacture a permanent ordering where the strategy deliberately preserves tension. It asks whether the grounds for priority, or the rule for handling an unresolved tension, are sufficiently available.
Do the principal elements constitute one recognisable strategic logic rather than merely appear together? Wholeness concerns the relationship of parts to an identifiable strategic idea. It does not require exhaustive coverage in one diagram or a uniquely shortest summary. The assessment should explain what connects the elements and identify any essential commitments that appear detached, contradictory or without a clear role.
Can intended users recover the relevant strategic meaning without avoidable linguistic effort? The criterion is audience-relative. Complexity inherent in the strategy should not be confused with complexity introduced by unnecessary jargon or awkward explanation. Material-based assessment can identify likely difficulties; claims about actual understanding require user evidence. Simplification is useful only while the relevant distinctions and qualifications remain available.
Does the language constrain interpretation enough to preserve consequential strategic commitments? Precision concerns what is meant, what is excluded and what remains open. It is not a demand for maximum detail. “We prefer standardisation” and “we exclude customer-specific architecture” imply different boundaries. An assessment should identify the commitment affected by imprecision rather than mark every broad expression as defective.
Does the language provide sufficient connection to recognisable choices, situations, actors or changes? Concreteness can come from an example, contrast, target group or mechanism. It need not mean numerical measurement or a task list. Examples should illuminate the strategic principle rather than replace it: users need to understand why an example fits, so they can recognise comparable situations presented differently.
Does the language preserve the particular strategic meaning of this strategy? Distinctiveness is not cleverness or novelty of phrasing. Generic words can express a specific choice when properly related; a memorable phrase can remain strategically empty. The test is whether the articulation preserves the choices and boundaries that differentiate the strategy, not whether an isolated sentence sounds unlike anyone else’s.
Can essential strategic meaning be retained and reconstructed after the immediate expression is no longer present? Verbatim recall is not the objective. A faithful explanation in different words can be stronger evidence than accurate repetition without relational understanding. This criterion requires empirical caution: material alone can suggest a testable design hypothesis, but does not demonstrate what users will remember or transmit.
Can relevant parts, groupings and distinctions be visually detected without disproportionate effort in the intended setting? The criterion concerns availability to perception, not polish. It must be assessed relative to the overview’s purpose and the audience’s conditions of access. An absence of visual material is not automatically poor perceptibility; it may place the criterion outside the current assessment scope.
Does the visible organisation preserve the strategic meaning it purports to show? A connector, grouping, size or position can imply an unsupported relationship or emphasis. Correspondence asks whether the visual assertions match the reference strategy, including its uncertainty and qualifications. Design inspection can reveal a mismatch; claims about what viewers actually infer require suitable evidence about perception.
Are strategically relevant differences in level, role or weight perceptually available? This differs from asking whether the hierarchy exists. Visual prominence may arise through several means, and its interpretation should not be assumed universal. The criterion requires a known reference and a relevant viewing purpose. Where the strategy intentionally lacks a single hierarchy, imposing one can reduce correspondence rather than improve form.
Can users see the important connections that a particular visual expression needs to disclose? Not every expression must show every relationship. An overview claiming to explain how the strategy works should nevertheless not conceal its essential dependencies or confuse them with causality. Connectors and arrangements should preserve relationship type, direction and qualification rather than merely make the page appear organised.
Is the kind of strategic whole suggested by the visual organisation compatible with its purpose and meaning? An arrangement may appear as a catalogue, hierarchy, sequence or interconnected system. The criterion is not whether it looks attractive, fashionable or sufficiently bold. Assessments should connect the impression to a consequential interpretation, and distinguish an analyst’s prediction from evidence of audience response.
Does the strategy provide sufficient grounds for deriving context-relevant implications? This begins beyond understanding the words. Users should be able to connect a commitment with a situation while recognising what remains uncertain. Interpretability does not require identical local conclusions. It requires compatible reasoning about the strategic meaning and a visible boundary between application, unanswered questions and revision.
Does the strategy help distinguish among competing courses of action within its scope? Relevant grounds may include priorities, exclusions, dependencies or principles. The criterion should not be judged by whether the resulting decision is objectively best. It concerns the availability of strategic reasons, including reasons to reject an otherwise attractive option or to recognise that a proposal requires reconsidering the strategy.
Can the strategy’s logic be used beyond the examples in which it was first explained? Applicability concerns transfer to relevant new situations, not universal usefulness. A strategy may appropriately leave some situations outside its scope. The criterion asks whether users can recognise equivalent strategic issues under different surface details without having to invent a new strategy each time.
Is the relevant strategic meaning accessible in the situations where it is needed? Convenient access and fidelity should be considered together. A short checklist is not usable in the strategic sense if it removes a critical qualification. Conversely, a long underlying document need not be a problem when suitable, compatible access points exist for different users and decision situations.
Does the strategy provide an intelligible basis for connection with relevant organisational decisions and systems? Potential connections include investment, objectives, portfolios, planning and review. The criterion concerns provisions for those connections, not whether they have been implemented successfully. A named measure or management process is insufficient unless its relationship to the strategic meaning can be explained without arbitrary reinterpretation.
Strategic content. The substantive commitments, assertions, boundaries and assumptions that distinguish what a strategy pursues. Relationships can be part of content when they make substantive claims.
Strategy form. The way strategic content is organised for shared understanding and use; a relatively stabilised configuration examined through conceptual, structural, linguistic, visual and functional dimensions.
Strategy expression. A particular manifestation through which strategy becomes available in a context, including an artefact, spoken account or tool.
Sayability. The capacity for relevant strategic meaning to acquire usable verbal expression without losing consequential distinctions and commitments. It is not synonymous with wording, fluency or slogan quality.
Visibility. The visual availability of strategically relevant distinctions, relationships, hierarchy and emphasis. It is not synonymous with appearance, visual polish or the mere existence of a diagram.
Conditions for use. The interpretive provisions, decision grounds, transferable principles and connection points a strategy makes available. Their presence does not demonstrate actual use or successful execution.
Essential strategic meaning. The commitments and relationships whose material alteration would change the strategy under examination. The reference must be established from evidence or explicit agreement, not assumed by the analyst.
Semantic fidelity. Sufficient preservation of essential strategic meaning in a specified expression, interpretation or use context. It permits legitimate variation in wording, emphasis and detail.
Semantic drift. Unintended alteration of essential strategic meaning through representation, transmission, interpretation or application. It is distinguished from deliberate strategic revision and appropriate contextual adaptation.
Cross-dimensional correspondence. Compatibility among the meanings made available through conceptual, structural, linguistic, visual and functional organisation.
Form robustness. A proposed property describing how much legitimate variation in expression and context a strategy can accommodate while preserving essential meaning. Its assessment depends on specifying what must remain stable.
Form debt. A proposed consequence of unresolved form weaknesses: avoidable recurring work to reconstruct, re-explain or reconcile strategic meaning. Repeated dialogue alone is not evidence of debt.
Terminological note. In Finnish, the central pairing used for linguistic and visual form is sanottavuus and nähtävyys. The latter is used here in the defined sense of visual perceptibility: what can be seen in the strategy. It does not refer to an attraction or to visual attractiveness.
The references below are a selected foundation for the argument, not a systematic literature review. Bibliographic details and the specific research summaries used here were checked against publisher or institutional publication records. Some records provide full articles and others abstracts or chapter summaries. No claim is made to have exhaustively reviewed the literature or established historical priority for the general distinction between strategy and representation.
The five-dimensional synthesis, the illustrative case and the proposed diagnostic uses are the argument developed in this article. They should not be attributed to the cited authors as if those authors had endorsed or tested this framework.
Abdallah, C., & Langley, A. (2014). The double edge of ambiguity in strategic planning. Journal of Management Studies, 51(2), 235–264. DOI: 10.1111/joms.12002.
Csaszar, F. A., Hinrichs, N., & Heshmati, M. (2024). External representations in strategic decision-making: Understanding strategy’s reliance on visuals. Strategic Management Journal, 45(11), 2191–2226. DOI: 10.1002/smj.3613.
Eppler, M. J., & Platts, K. W. (2009). Visual strategizing: The systematic use of visualization in the strategic-planning process. Long Range Planning, 42(1), 42–74. DOI: 10.1016/j.lrp.2008.11.005.
Knight, E., Paroutis, S., & Heracleous, L. (2018). The power of PowerPoint: A visual perspective on meaning making in strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 39(3), 894–921. DOI: 10.1002/smj.2727.
Knight, E., & Wenzel, M. (2025). Multimodality in strategy-as-practice research. In D. Golsorkhi, L. Rouleau, D. Seidl, & E. Vaara (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice (3rd ed., pp. 729–739). Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781009216067.042.
Mantere, S. (2013). What is organizational strategy? A language-based view. Journal of Management Studies, 50(8), 1408–1426. DOI: 10.1111/joms.12048.
Mintzberg, H., & Waters, J. A. (1985). Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management Journal, 6(3), 257–272. DOI: 10.1002/smj.4250060306.
Porter, M. E. (1996). What is strategy? Harvard Business Review, 74(6), 61–78.
Spee, A. P., & Jarzabkowski, P. (2011). Strategic planning as communicative process. Organization Studies, 32(9), 1217–1245. DOI: 10.1177/0170840611411387.
Whittington, R. (2006). Completing the practice turn in strategy research. Organization Studies, 27(5), 613–634. DOI: 10.1177/0170840606064101.
Suggested citation: Romero, T. (2026). Strategy Has Form: Content, form and expression — a foundation for understanding strategy. Foundation article, complete draft 0.2, 18 September 2026. Unpublished manuscript.