Entrepreneurial Strategising: the Tacit Mode Entrepreneurial Strategising: the Tacit Mode

Research on entrepreneurialism and strategic thinking has taken a cognitive and constructivist turn in recent years. Such a turn is to be welcomed. However, what remains relatively unexplored, even within this 'softer' approach to entrepreneurial strategising, is a sustained focus on the underlying perceptual mechanisms shaping the processes of cognition and sensemaking. This paper seeks to extend the perceptual approach to entrepreneurial strategising by focussing on the tacit aspects of subsidiary awareness, unconscious scanning and the gestalt processes that constitute the micro-activity of sense-making and sense-giving. Although this cognitive structure is common to all of us, genuinely entrepreneurial sense-making and sensegiving are historic and creative acts of cultural innovation that open up new disclosive spaces in which the very basis for our ways of living, our lifestyles and our entire cultural outlook are often radically challenged and revised. Drawing from a combination of insights developed on perceptual awareness, 'depth' psychology and the study of artistic vision, we attempt to show that cognition and sense-making are very much unconscious acts of decision-making involving the selective abstraction of significant figure from insignificant ground. It is this unconscious structuring of our lived experiences that remains relatively unexamined and less understood within the literature on entrepreneurialism. We maintain in this paper that without a sound appreciation of this tacit dimension in the cognitive process, it is not possible to fully comprehend how entrepreneurial actors produce coherent strategic scenarios out of a cacophony of competing sense-stimuli.