The Double Edge of Ambiguity in Strategic Planning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract While the communications and strategy literatures have suggested that ambiguity embedded in texts such as strategic plans many enable the accommodation of divergent perspectives and contribute to building consensus and commitment, little is known about the consequences of such ambiguity for the consumption of strategy discourse or for the enactment of planned strategy. In a case study of strategic planning in a cultural organization, we identify three forms of ambiguity embedded in the strategy text, and show how these features generate different forms of consumption among organization members. We find that strategic ambiguity initially plays an enabling role as participants engage in enacting their respective interpretations of strategy. However, over time, the mobilizing effects of strategic ambiguity lead to internal contradiction and overextension. The study contributes by exploring empirically the double‐edged nature of strategic ambiguity, and by identifying the underlying mechanisms by which its paradoxical consequences emerge. We show that while ambiguous strategy discourse enables strategic development and change, it may contain the seeds of its own dissolution contributing to cyclical patterns of strategy development and reorientation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it