Phronêsis and the Glance: Strategy Formation in the Blink-of-an-Eye

Research on 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' study of strategising is a sustained focus on the underlying perceptual mechanisms shaping the processes of strategic sense-making. This paper seeks to extend the soft cognition approach to strategy formation by focussing on the triumvirate issues of vision, unconscious perception and the gestalt processes that make up the micro-activity of strategic sense-making. Drawing from 'depth' psychology and the study of artistic vision, we attempt to show that cognition is very much an unconscious act 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 cognition in strategy formation. We maintain in this paper that without a sound appreciation of this unconscious dimension of the cognitive process, it is not possible to fully understand how emergent actors develop their own self-identities and at the same time produce coherent strategic scenarios out of a cacophony of competing sense-stimuli. School of Business & Economics, Streatham Court, Rennes Drive Exeter EX4 4PU Tel: +44 1392 2632412 Email: [email protected]