Making Sense of Creative Destruction : Anticipating the Looming Threat

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to find how managers make sense of a future threat that does not have an urgent trigger. The method applied in this study is qualitative case study. Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted of managers at the case company. In the context of the case company facing a threat of creative destruction, we study the sensemaking process of the managers we interview. Special focus is dedicated to prospective, future-oriented sensemaking. We apply a Weickian approach in the operationalization of the research. We found that the managers shared a collective sense of the past, but that there was a loss in shared collective sense of the future. The lack of collective sensemaking of the future is caused by the ambiguous nature of the case company’s future. We further found that emotional dedication impeded prospective sensemaking for some of the managers resembling wishful thinking about the future.