Making Inclusion Work: Managing Engagement in Open Strategy

Open Strategy’s promise of collective intelligence hinges on moving beyond inviting a broader set of actors into strategy-making to enabling and sustaining their engagement over time. This paper introduces the Engagement Matrix, a diagnostic framework that describes four contribution profiles in Open Strategy work, and traces how actors move across profiles as process conditions change. The analysis shows how these changing conditions produce broader and narrower engagement patterns across the process. The article explains how ability, motivation, and opportunity shape these movements and derives four design principles for managers and facilitators seeking to sustain meaningful inclusion throughout the process.