Strategy in Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to Strategic Thinking, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3Sense Making and Strategic Insight

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

—Albert Einstein

In this Chapter, We:

• examine the role of sense making and the formation of insight in the greater context of the strategic thinking process;
• explore philosophical underpinnings of sense making and show how and why these matter;
• explore sense making from both the spatial and process perspectives:
  • in the spatial perspective we examine a framework for sense making that relates analysis, intuition, heuristics, and interpretation to the generation of insight;
  • from a process perspective we examine how sense making occurs in complex organization contexts; the roles of triggers, rational analysis, intuition and heuristics – and how these are linked to learning, interpretation, and the ascription of meaning in complex contexts;
  • examine sense making from a learning perspective;
• close with a review of the formation of insight – and a critical reflection on limitations to sense making in strategy practice.

Organizations and their competitive environments resemble a perplexing terrain. Our perceptions regarding that terrain are based on numerous inputs of information. Some of this information might be incomplete and unclear; some information might be outright misleading. That this is so has long been recognized in military contexts. The great Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz pointed out in his treatise On War that a “great part of the information obtained ...