Background: Years of dividing organizations into specified task units to optimize and enhance efficiency has resulted in a public sector with a large divide between units. The units often have intertwined cases, and experience citizens stuck between several units, professional agendas and in transitions between institutions or services. This is the motivation behind the Danish municipal of Viborg’s implementation of a new management tool: “The model of Connectivity”. The model consists of 21 goals formulated by the city council. The goals apply to all units and employees in the organization regardless of function, task, or hierarchical level, and replaces a complex of politics and strategies of all kinds. The model is both a collection of common goals across the organization and a mode of accomplishing these goals. Inherent in the model is an invitation to cooperate across sectors, units, and professions to achieve connectivity. This master thesis investigates how the Danish municipality of Viborg strategize connectivity based on the new management tool “The Model of Connectivity” recently implemented in the organization. The tension between wanting connectivity and common goals in a diverse multifunctional public organization give rise to questions regarding the framework for the realization of the management tool and not least communication’s role in the strategizing-process of getting to connectivity in Viborg. The case represents an investigation of strategy realization in a large multifunctional organization with a professional breadth. The motive of the investigation is to examine existing and new structures influencing the strategizing of connectivity as an example of management strategy, and in addition nuances of understanding of the strategy in practice and initiatives to realize the model.

Design/methodology/approach: The theoretical framework of the thesis is founded in a CCO-perspective but consists further of an extended literature review with presentation of relevant concepts from the fields of organizational communication, strategizing and collaboration/boundary spanning. The concepts contribute to the analysis. The research design is based on McPhee & Zaug’s Four Flows Model (2009) and Gulbrandsen & Just’s Triple-A Model (2016) supported by a range of relevant concepts brought out from the literature search.

Data: Primary empirical data is eight interviews with employees from different sectors and managerial layers in Municipality of Viborg. In addition to that, interviews are conducted with Municipal Director of Municipality of Viborg and Acting Head of Communications. Apart from that several documents retrieved from the organization’s website and through informants are included as the empirical foundation of the paper.

Findings: The key finding in this thesis is that strategizing requires a broad vision of communication as a driver of change. The analysis of the case study reveals two practices of communication coexisting in the organization. One of classic communication theory origin, where communication is a planned act of transmitting the goals, plans and progress of the planned linear strategy process. And one of a different origin, where communication is a strategizing practice in an integrated internal communicative perspective running in two tracks: One track in which the success of the strategizing process is very much depending on the local translation and distribution of “The Model of Connectivity”, which is in the hands of the local leaders and employees within a framework of existing and new structures. And a second track in which the strategy-realization is communicated as an emergent process of trial in which new relations and boundary spanning cooperation emerges and are strengthened in a self-structuralizing communicative flow.
Keywords: strategizing, CCO, affordance, assemblage, integrated internal communication, strategy-as-practice, strategy realization, local strategy translation, organizational communication