Between Play and Reason: Integrating Sensible Foolishness Into Strategy‐Making Workshops

Abstract

Sensible foolishness through play can offer a valuable escape from prevailing dogmas and rational models of intelligence, affording actors freedom to explore, imagine, and create without constraint. Yet the value of sensible foolishness, and the vital interplay between play and reason, remains underexplored in strategy scholarship. Drawing on a qualitative experimental study of three SMEs, we examine how high‐stakes strategic challenges can be addressed through sensible foolishness. Our analysis shows how the interplay between play and reason gains generative momentum during strategy‐making workshops, as actors co‐create playful atmospheres and shift into more expressive, embodied ways of being. We identify three transitional modes – deliberate , dialectical , and dwelling – through which actors integrate play and reason and co‐produce moments of strategic insight and value. We develop a process theory of integrating sensible foolishness into strategy‐making, showing how attuned facilitation and atmospheric shifts enable its enactment as a collective, affectively sustained mode of strategizing. This extends debates in strategy and serious play scholarship by advancing a practice‐based view of sensible foolishness as a complementary instrument of collective strategic intelligence.