Participatory Strategy Making as Dual Sensemaking Process

Existing studies on strategic sensemaking have focused on traditional top-down strategy-development processes where senior managers select cues and apply their knowledge frames during activities of strategy formulation (i.e. sensemaking) and later attempt to impose this sense on others during activities of strategy implementation (i.e. sensegiving). Over the last few years, we can observe a trend towards increasing participation of change recipients in the strategy-development process, often also referred to as “Open Strategy”, which is likely to have profound implications for the strategic sensemaking process. Thus, we will focus on the following exploratory research question: How does strategic sensemaking unfold in participatory strategy processes? To address this research question, we draw on data from a 13-month longitudinal, in-depth case study of an international financial company, which introduced Open Strategy by including 20 lower-level employees throughout the strategy process. We report three main findings which contribute to both the strategic sensemaking as well as the Open Strategy literature: First, we find that strategic sensemaking is a dual process which consists of two distinct types of sensemaking, sensemaking of the strategy content and sensemaking of the strategy process, and we reveal how these two sensemaking types are interrelated. Second, we identify different sensemaking patterns (i.e. (re-)framing participation, displacing cues, aligning cues) which strategy actors initiate to align the two sensemaking processes and enable strategy work. Third, we show that resistance in strategic sensemaking is not only related to sensemaking of the strategy content, as extensively discussed by previous literature, but also to sensemaking of the strategy process.