The role of intuiting practices in navigating strategic opportunities

Abstract

This study addresses the question of how strategists use intuiting practices in the process of sensing, navigating and creating strategic opportunities. Existing literature highlights the significant role and nature of intuition in strategy from a theoretical cognitive perspective, but does not examine intuition empirically as a practice utilised by strategists. We undertook a two-year longitudinal study of seven strategists in high-technology firms as they attempted to progress new strategic opportunities. Using abductive analysis of the resulting data, we found that when navigating novel opportunities the practitioners’ intuiting practices were predominantly based on unfolding creative and social types of intuition, as opposed to a rapid expertise-based intuition, previously thought to be the dominant type. We extend existing typologies to propose a dynamic cyclic model of unfolding intuiting practice in the opportunity navigation process. This model draws on dual process theory and includes phases of intimation, investigation, validation and incubation. We found that strategists cycle through these different phases in order to navigate novel spaces, leading to continuation or abandonment of the opportunity development.