The Rashomon Effect: Exploring Organizational Members’ Strategic Communication of AI Implementation

Building on strategy research that understands multiple and divergent strategy narratives as a natural occurrence in organizational environments, this paper offers a novel view on how to understand polyphonic processes of strategizing. We do so based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a large Danish pension company at which organizational members, in the processes of communicatively strategizing an AI-driven mail-routing technology, narrate four different versions of the past and future of the organization corresponding to four different ways of making sense of what the technology aims to do for and with the organization. Borrowing from Akira Kurosawa’s 1950s movie, Rashomon, in which four different narratives of the same event are presented to the viewer, we propose to conceptualize strategy processes such as this by way of the Rashomon effect. That is, strategy processes wherein there is 1) a presence of multiple strategy narratives; 2) marked by the inability to elevate any one strategic narrative above the others; 3) but where the social pressure for (narrative) closure enables progression, ability to act, despite lack of (narrative) coherence. By doing so we contribute to the understanding of the role of diverse narratives in the communicative constitution of organizational strategy.