This approach also mitigates groupthink and conservatism by reducing bias, which in practice means that "people in power will be less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if you're different. And you respond to that by being more cautious," says Ibarra. And, according to Columbia's McGrath, "the answers to whatever your puzzle is may come from very unexpected places -- it could be a person who normally doesn't have access to power." Make this a routine, not a special exercise. And communicate the strategy -- and the need for change specifically -- in a way that is positive and personal.

This work researches the impact of including a wider range of participants in the strategy-making process on the performance of organizations which operate in either moderately or highly complex environments. Agent-based simulation demonstrates that the increased number of ideas generated from larger and diverse crowds and subsequent preference aggregation lead to rapid discovery of higher peaks in the organization's performance landscape. However, this is not the case when the expansion in the number of participants is small. The results confirm the most frequently mentioned benefit in the Open Strategy literature: the discovery of better performing strategies.