Strategy-making: The use and misuse of artifacts to achieve common understanding

Strategists intentionally use artifacts to promote their perception of a prudent strategic choice. Separating artifacts and strategists’ intentionality blurs our understanding of how strategy-making unfolds. Our study addresses the dynamics of strategists’ intentionality and their use of artifacts in strategy-making. The study provides empirical evidence that artifacts act as stand-ins for the strategists’ intentionality, used to guide or misused to curb the strategy-making. The implications of our study contribute to the understanding that (1) we can neither assume that the individuals’ intentionality is predictable nor that the involved strategists achieve a common understanding, (2) strategist–artifact relationships are pivotal to align or misalign different strategists’ interests, (3) the mediating role of artifacts is mutable entailing strategists materializing artifacts and adding text and symbols to intentionally manage the strategy-making, and (4) strategists deliberately use many artifacts to reach the intended strategy, not necessarily implementing the optimal strategy choice. JEL CLASSIFICATION: L190