Dialogue in strategy practice: A discourse analysis of a strategy workshop

Strategy workshops are frequently used by executive management to formulate strategy but are underresearched and underreported in the academic literature. This study uses a form of discourse analysis to identify a dialogic pattern of talk in an executive management strategy workshop. The group’s dialogue in the workshop discourse displayed an emphasis on achieving shared understanding rather than winning a debate. Affirmation, Topic Expansion, Productive Difference, and Reflexive Observation were derived from the dialogue literature as particular features of dialogical interaction and were used in this analysis to identify spontaneously occurring dialogue in the strategy workshop. The study thus proposes a basis for identifying dialogue in naturally occurring strategy discourse and for understanding its potential contribution in that setting.