From Scenario Thinking to Scenario Doing: Strategic Management as Wayfinding

This paper blends the ingredients of practice‐oriented theorizing, scenarios, and dynamic capability to propose wayfinding as an alternative to strategic management as planning. It will augment the notion of “scenario thinking” by placing it within the “scenario doing” of participating in developmental trajectories by which a firm evolves into the future. Wayfinding is presented as being done by way of practical coping, conscious reflecting, or practical solutioning. A firm engaging in practical coping utilizes practical intelligibility—an understanding or “knowhow” and “know why“ of how to enact practices—to generate a ‘business‐as‐usual’ trajectory that is reflected in a baseline scenario: a cognitive and discursive representation of how this trajectory moves the firm into the future. A firm experiences a breakdown IN practical coping when a lack of practical intelligibility makes a firm unable to participate in the ‘business‐as‐usual’ trajectory. Scenario thinking then has to take on the form of conscious reflecting to identify which additional practical intelligibility the firm needs to draw in to restore a firm's practical coping. Practical solutioning deals with a breakdown OF practical coping when practical intelligibility is non‐existent and is to be newly created. Scenario thinking thus becomes speculative imagination to develop new practical intelligibility. Dynamic capability then is elaborated as a firm's ability to participate in ongoing developmental trajectories by way of practical coping, conscious reflecting, and practical solutioning. The argumentation is illustrated with the case of how MP3 became part of the recorded music field.