Open strategy is a recent research topic within the field of strategic management, which gained thrust amongst academics over the last decade, with a pike of contributions to its literature from 2015 and on (Saile et al., 2017). Open strategy is commonly defined through the notions of inclusion, transparency and participation. However, throughout the literature, there are many variables which come to add complexity to the process. In this paper we argue that organizations might well be opening Pandora’s Box when trying to open strategize without having all the cards in the deck. Indeed, although a prominent literature is being born around the subject of open strategy, we argue that the literature is missing a handbook for organizations, to engage in an informed way within the process of open strategizing. We call upon strategy as practice as our theoretical framework in this paper, as it has brought a new perspective to strategic management research through qualitative studies. Strategy as practice brings empirical research to the micro-level by observing various moments of praxis and enabling a more subtle understanding of a phenomenon, which in macro-level empirical research might seem to have no differences (Vaara and Whittington, 2012). We thus find that this theoretical approach is best suited to explore and make sense of the open strategy phenomenon; and in particular to help us answer our research question. We thus find the need to start writing the first pages of what is an attempt to bridging the knowledge on open strategy by bringing together in this paper the different views developed in the literature. Therefore, we pose our research question as following: What are the elements an organization should be aware of when engaging in open strategizing? In order to answer this question, we develop a qualitative meta-synthesis, which is defined as being the theories, grand narratives, generalizations, or interpretive translations produced from the integration or comparison of findings from qualitative studies (Sandelowski et al., 1997, p.366). Building up on this, a qualitative meta-synthesis (where the database of the study are the findings of a sum of qualitative studies), gives a third level interpretation aimed at pushing forward knowledge or theory on the given object of study, rather than combining studies (Nye et al., 2016). Through our qualitative meta-analysis, we reanalyzed the findings of 17 qualitative case studies; providing a framework of 8 main elements of awareness to keep in mind when crafting an open strategy initiative. We find that the many variables and unpredictable behaviors of the people taking part in the strategic conversation can lead to overwhelming situations and that depending on the organization and its ability to deal with complex situations, open strategy can be more of a burden than a blessing if lily prepared for. We conclude our study by reflecting upon the fact that organizations might end up opening Pandora’s Box in the search of opening their strategy.
