Talking about strategy: Unpacking the connection between forms of talk and sensemaking in strategy work

Strategizing involves recursive processes whereby managers constantly move between cognitively making sense of the situation they inhabit and enacting a meaningful course of action. This sensemaking effort often relies on talk: that is, the linguistic act by which managers articulate and verbalize an understanding for themselves and for others around them. Drawing on a year-long case study conducted at a UK legal firm during a major strategic change, we investigate how senior managers strategized in and through their talk in response to the increasing marketization of legal services. We found that, in their strategizing, managers made sense of changes in their business environment through different forms of talk - namely metaphors, binary oppositions and modals – each characterized by distinctive affordances and potential for meaning making. Through the combined use of these forms of talk in the ongoing sensemaking process, managers enacted meanings that allowed them to imagine future competitive landscapes, make distinctions in relation to them, and call for future courses of action in relevant strategic domains. We aggregate these findings into an integrative theoretical model that articulates the relationship between talk, the affordances of the identified forms of talk constituting sensemaking, and strategy work.