More and Less Effective Updating in Organizational Strategy Work

Strategic management requires coping with unexpected events. While prior sensemaking research has examined how actors can update their understandings of an evolving situation, these studies have focused on organizing in crisis contexts. To investigate how updating occurs in the context of strategic adaptation, we followed the activities of ten top management teams of Swiss private banks during the COVID-19 pandemic. We provide a process model of three interdependent pathways along which updating can occur: enacted, interactive, and self-induced updating. Our study contributes to the extant sensemaking research by showing how strategic updating is not primarily driven by the detection, or even the re-evaluation of cues, but by the dynamics leading to their prioritization among equally plausible alternatives.