Inter‐organizational sensemaking in the face of strategic meta‐problems: Requisite variety and dynamics of participation

• Date: 01 March 2018
• Published date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2723

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Inter-organizational sensemaking in the face of

strategic meta-problems: Requisite variety and

dynamics of participation

David Seidl | Felix Werle

Department of Business Administration,

University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Correspondence

David Seidl, University of Zurich, Department of

Business Administration, Universitaetsstrasse 84,

CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland.

Email: david.seidl@uzh.ch

Funding information

Swiss National Science Foundation, Grant/Award

numbers: 130338, SNF 100014_130338

Research Summary: When faced with complex strategic

problems that exceed their individual sensemaking capac-

ities, organizations often engage in inter-organizational

collaboration. This enables them to pool the participants’

different perspectives and to grasp the problem at hand

more comprehensively. Drawing on data collected from

two longitudinal case studies, we examine how those

who participate in inter-organizational sensemaking pro-

cesses are selected and how the particular selection of

participants affects the dynamics of the sensemaking pro-

cess in turn. In our analysis, we show how the selection

of specific problem issues influences who joins or with-

draws from the collaboration and we identify a mecha-

nism that accounts for changes in the particular dynamics

of the sensemaking process over time. Our findings help

explain how the process of inter-organizational sensemak-

ing can yield different outcomes.

Managerial Summary: The ability to make sense of the

business environment is central to strategic management.

As the complexity of the environment increases and inter-

preting it becomes more difficult, organizations increas-

ingly turn to inter-organizational collaboration, which

allows them to pool their expertise in order to explore stra-

tegic issues. We examine how the participants in projects

of joint exploration are selected and how the selection of

participants affects the process of exploration in turn. More

specifically, we describe how the aspects on which collab-

orating organizations choose to focus influence who joins

and who withdraws from a collaboration. We also identify

a mechanism that accounts for differences and changes in

the dynamics of the sensemaking process over time. These

changes affect how the collaborators come to understand

their organization’s business environment.

Received: 29 August 2015 Revised: 26 June 2017 Accepted: 30 August 2017 Published on: 26 December 2017

DOI: 10.1002/smj.2723

830 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/smj Strat Mgmt J. 2018;39:830–858.

KEYWORDS

collective sensemaking, inter-organizational

collaboration, inter-organizational sensemaking, inter-

organizational strategizing, meta-problems, open

strategy, participation, requisite variety, strategic

sensemaking

1|INTRODUCTION

Ensuring that organizations are able to make sense of changes in their business environment is cen-

tral to successful strategic management (Cornelissen & Schildt, 2015; Daft, Sormunen, & Parks,

1988; Daft & Weick, 1984; Thomas, Clark, & Gioia, 1993). The range of perspectives for interpret-

ing the environment that are available to the organizational members plays a critical role: the more

complex the environment becomes, the greater the variety of perspectives that actors need in order

to comprehend it. As Weick (1979, 1995) explained, organizations need to ensure that they have the

“requisite variety”in perspectives: “organizations have to be preoccupied with keeping sufficient

diversity inside the organization to sense accurately the variety present in ecological changes out-

side”(Weick, 1979, p. 188). Sometimes, however, environmental complexity exceeds an organiza-

tion’s internal variety, which leads to “variety overload”(Trist, 1983, p. 272). This is especially the

case when organizations are faced with so-called meta-problems; that is, multidimensional problems

of strategic significance that often cut across different industries or even different sectors

(Cartwright, 1987; Emery & Trist, 1965; Hardy, Lawrence, & Phillips, 2006; Trist, 1983). In such

situations organizations frequently open up their internal strategy process (Hautz, Seidl, & Whitting-

ton, 2017; Whittington, Cailluet, & Yakis-Douglas, 2011) and seek inter-organizational collabora-

tion as a way of increasing their requisite variety. In this way they “pool their expertise”(Hardy

et al., 2006, p. 98) and thus create a more complex sensemaking system (Teulier & Rouleau, 2014).

While this phenomenon of facilitating requisite variety through collaboration has been well

documented in the literature on inter-organizational collaboration (Gray, 1989, 2008; Hardy et al.,

2006; Huxham, 1996b; Selsky & Parker, 2005; Schneider et al., 2017), there is little research on

how the particular selection of participants affects the dynamics of the process of joint sensemaking.

Earlier research has shown that greater diversity amongst participants of the collaboration, contrib-

utes to a richer understanding of the meta-problem at hand. However, how the perspectives that the

participants bring into the collaboration affect the development of the sensemaking process is still

poorly understood. Against this background, this article aims to answer the following two research

questions: first, how are actors selected to take part in processes of inter-organizational sensemaking

aimed at exploring strategic meta-problems? Second, how does the selection of participants affect

the dynamics of the sensemaking process in turn?

To address these research questions, we use data from two longitudinal case studies on inter-

organizational groups of individuals who got together to make sense of strategic meta-problems

collectively. Case 1 covers a 6-year period, during which an inter-organizational group explored col-

laboratively the strategic role of water as a critical resource. The participants represented different

companies that were confronted and had to deal with novel issues related to water. These issues

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