Participation in cross-industry working groups can profoundly influence how organizations interpret and adapt their open strategy initiatives. This study explores a longitudinal series of inter-organizational workshops on open strategy, conducted from January 2023 to December 2024, where organizations confronted and collectively made sense of their processual challenges in implementing open strategy practices. Our study draws on multiple data sources, including workshop observations, pre- and post-workshop interviews, and archival materials. We find that organizations experience processual struggles when enacting different open strategy practices. In the workshops, these challenges become focal points for collective sensemaking, as participants share, discuss and reinterpret challenges using insights from other organizations. This iterative exchange not only shapes participants’ understanding but also drives adaptations in their own open strategy practices – often leading to new issues and subsequent cycles of inter-organizational sensemaking. By showing how the intra-organizational (non-)enactment of open strategy practices is shaped by exchanges with and processual issues of other organizations, we advance our understanding of inter-organizational strategizing and sensemaking in the open strategy literature.
