Strategising through organising: The significance of everyday relational sensemaking

This thesis is about strategy. It is about what happens after the strategy leaves the drawing board and actors try to make sense of it and figure out how to act. There are many perspectives on strategy. This is another one. A perspective that tries to work with strategy from an everyday, relational and sensemaking point of view. It argues that actors’ strategising is closely connected to their organising.
Maybe strategising and organising co-constitute each other? It is a perspective that looks at strategy as emergent wayfinding more than planned navigating. In the attempts to make sense of and operationalise a strategy, maybe actors do not follow a pre-defined map, but instead figure out the way as they go? Maybe actors go in ways that they relationally believe are the ‘right ones’ and in ways that make sense to them? There are, however, many actors in an organisation and, therefore, also many ways to make sense of a strategy. This means that strategising can go in many and sometimes opposing, but equally meaningful ways. In this case, they did. This thesis aims to present, in just ways, the different and opposing ways actors make sense and strategise every day. Maybe this is what strategy is about?