Constructing the Accomplishable: Authoring Strategy-Making on Team Collaboration Platforms

This paper investigates how organizational members author strategy in digital contexts. Situated within the strategizing literature, we focus on messaging on online collaboration platforms as a less-discussed mode of communication in strategizing and on team collaboration platforms as a neglected context for strategy making. Drawing on the case of a fintech startup in its early days that proposes, discusses, and performs strategic options on Slack, we show that organizational members author strategy by projecting actionability onto a proposed course of action, invoking sustained progress over time, and accumulating efficacy of evidence until the course of action appears inevitable. They do so through practices of referencing, reasoning, and revealing, by blending affordances with messages as the mode of communication. Our findings explain how strategy is authored through displayed actions and outcomes rather than through shared meanings alone and highlight the interplay between communication mode and digital context in shaping strategizing practices and their outcomes.