Opening Strategy After the Fact: A Genre Perspective on Reflective Strategic Communication

This paper introduces reflective genres of strategic communication, characterized by dialogic, retrospective, and shared narration of strategy after the fact. While prior research has focused on forward-facing genres (e.g., speeches, plans) that privilege executive voice and projection, we examine how strategy narratives are reconstructed through retrospective reflection by those who enacted it. Drawing on an analysis of Iwata Asks - a series of interviews conducted by the late Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata - we analyze how strategy is reconstructed through inclusive, curated dialogue. We identify four discursive practices - staging, enabling, constraining, and anchoring - that structure participation and meaning-making in these reflective conversations. These practices do not unfold linearly, but recur dynamically to open, shape, and close shared narratives. Our findings contribute to research on strategic communication, participation, and narrative by (1) theorizing reflective genres as a communicative form for post-hoc strategizing, (2) showing how retrospective narration constitutes a site of participatory strategy work, and (3) highlighting the tension between inclusion and coherence in these multi-voiced settings. By foregrounding the voices of developers and the dialogic role of leadership, we extend the strategy-as-practice agenda to examine how strategy is not only made but narrated and made concrete through collective reflection.