Doubt and deliberation: Making strategy in ontario’s food bank system

Deliberation may be used by organizations or networks of organizations to manage the moral and technical uncertainties that are associated with threshold strategies - that is, strategies whose superiority over alternatives is unclear. Much academic literature underestimates the importance of deliberation, largely because of its reliance on paradigms that view organizational life as though it were mechanistic or game-like. A new heuristic, based on the metaphor of organizations as assemblies, is proposed. The experience of Ontario's food bank community is used to illustrate how deliberation is used to manage threshold strategies. The paper discusses some difficulties in promoting deliberation.