Strategic Sense Making in Growth-Oriented Small Firms

This article examines how sense-making activities in the entrepreneurial, growth-oriented small firm influence performance outcomes. It employs various constructs drawn from the literature and explores how each one affects others, leading to a dynamic model of sense making in the firm. Important constructs include the collective schema the set of moreorless shared beliefs that inform and guide the firms members; their heterogeneity or diversity; and their propensities to engage in affirmative story telling and proactive issue diagnosis. The model recognises the possibility of exceptional contributions to collective sense making by salient figures with entrepreneurial propensities, notably members of the entrepreneurial founder team (EFT). The article uses data from two growth-oriented British SMEs to examine the model empirically, enabling a critique of it and a discussion of the ways in which entrepreneurial growth-oriented SMEs may enhance their performance through a better understanding of collective sense making dynamics.