How digital visualizations shape strategy work on the frontlines

The scholarship on Open Strategy and the role of visualization in strategy work are maturing streams of research. Open Strategy scholarship has so far primarily focused on how employees can contribute ideas to strategy making. Also, the lion's share of strategy visualization research has been on the role of visuals in strategy development by top management. Therefore, focusing on the role that specific visualization features play, especially within strategy realization work by frontline employees, can contribute to the nexus of both streams of research. We attempt to do so by drawing on a qualitative interpretive case study of how a university faculty employed digital visualizations to implement a significant organizational turnaround strategy. The focus of the faculty was on strategically transforming the undergraduate curriculum to reverse quality drift and enrollment decline, while gaining international accreditation. The study findings highlight how digital visualizations' features (i.e., incorporating non-narrative elements, network depiction, and adaptive interface functionalities) influenced the realization phases of strategy understanding and strategy enactment. In particular, the study shows that the understanding of strategy appeared to be enhanced by three affordances, namely, affectivity, relationality, and interactivity of the visualization tools and their associated features. Our study further shows that frontline employees' work on strategy enactment was shaped simultaneously via both legibility affordances (aiding the enactment of strategy consistent with the original intent) and enunciability affordances (enabling the enactment of strategy beyond the original intent). We contribute to the literature by showing how digital visualizing features work together as a bundle of affordances reciprocally reinforcing each other and influencing the strategy realization work of frontline employees, thereby enhancing the understanding of strategy and aiding in its enactment.