Strategy Seminar -Professor Richard Whittington
Wednesday 9 June 2010, 13:30
Lecture Theatre 9
Senseshaping in Organizations: Materiality, Mutability an Mutality in Strategic Work
Richard Whittington
Professor of Strategic Management
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Richard Whittington (Oxford University) and Curtis LeBaron (Brigham Young)
This paper examines the use of shape in the making and giving of sense about strategy. By shape, we refer to both the material artefacts and the material embodiment through which people interact in their strategy work. Our concept of 'senseshaping' is intended to draw attention to the importance of such shapes in both sensemaking and sensegiving. We draw on a video ethnography of a senior management team engaged in an episode of 'retrospective strategising'. We point to the roles of artefacts and bodies in accomplishing this episode of strategy work. We develop a general model for how mutuality between actors and the mutability of artefacts may vary across the different stages of a strategy episode. We discuss implications for future research on sensemaking and sensegiving and propose practical guidelines for the design of mutuality and mutability in strategy episodes
