Looking at the Trees to See the Forest: Construal Level Shift in Strategic Problem Framing and Formulation

Effective strategy development, evaluation, and implementation starts with a comprehensive understanding of strategic problems. However, developing such an understanding is often challenging due to the complexity of such problems and because how they can be solved is not yet known. Managers often oversimplify these problems by focusing on a few symptoms and obvious causes. Research indicates that big picture, abstract thinking helps managers explore underlying causes more flexibly, but it can also lead to overlooking key symptoms that do not fit existing frameworks. Instead, concrete thinking is likely essential for individuals to identify the full range of symptoms characterizing strategic problems. Because symptoms are essential for fully understanding strategic problems—they are the building blocks for managers to build theories about causes—both concrete and abstract thinking may be necessary. Drawing on construal level theory, we propose a construal level shift model. The central claim of our model is that managers benefit from first adopting a low construal level (concrete) thinking when framing strategic problems to identify all relevant symptoms. The benefit of a high construal level (abstract) thinking lies in combining these symptoms more flexibly to theorize more comprehensively about the underlying causes. Two experimental studies and one correlational study, involving samples of working individuals, managers, and experienced executives, support our model. Our findings contribute to the behavioral and knowledge-based views of the firm, the theory-based view of strategy, and managerial cognition research.