A sensemaking approach to strategy making: The role of the leader in times of ambiguity

Abstract

Leaders experience high levels of ambiguity when successive waves of rapid change transform their markets. Meetings provide leaders with the most pervasive opportunity to address the implications of ambiguity. Sensemaking conversations generate a shared understanding that helps leaders and their team pierce through this ambiguity. The sharper perspectives and renewed mindsets developed through a disciplined and sustained sensemaking dialogue bring greater strategic clarity to a leadership team. Applying the tenets of sensemaking to a dynamic strategy making framework enables leadership teams to generate and test insights and assumptions, the prerequisite to generating the marketplace understanding that will lead to effective strategies. Through a thoughtful integration of sensemaking and strategy making, leaders are better able to focus on the critical change issues, ask questions that lead to insightful conversations, and manage inquiry and advocacy so that all members of the leadership team productively contribute to the dialogue. With the thoughtful combination of these two approaches, business teams can autonomously accelerate the development of winning strategies at times of ambiguity.