Making Digital Sense: A Strategic Sensemaking Perspective of Digital Strategy Practitioners

Managers across multiple industries today face increasing pressure to respond to digital innovations with a digital strategy. Digital innovations are increasingly proliferating across industries, crossing product, firm and industry boundaries, and in the process, creating strategic ambiguity for managers. Firm response to digital challenges depends, among other things, on managerial cognition at the level of strategic planners largely unfamiliar with the implications of digital challenges. In this paper, we examine how the newly formed ‘digital strategy team’ of a large oil and gas firm made sense of the highly ambiguous digital challenge confronting them. Our empirical focus on the under-examined sensemaking of strategy practitioners uncovers adaptive sensemaking methods, characterised by experimentation and iteration to deal with the ambiguity afforded by digital challenges. By focusing on the sensemaking process …