Sensemaking, wisdom and decision making in marketing strategy

The boundaries of the marketing discipline have broadened to encompass research areas that have informed managerial information use as an input to marketing strategy formulation. A logical extension of the research in information use is a consideration of the concept of decision-making. Sensemaking is intimately linked to decision-making through the formation of preferences, rules and expectations and it is these that shape interpretation of organizational issues as well as frame and order the information selected and gathered for decision-making about them. Recent work has suggested that good decision-making is an outcome of right thinking (Fodness 2005), of the way information is ‘held’ (Weick 2001) or the attitude towards knowledge and knowing (Small 2004). Weick (2001) has termed this an attitude of wisdom. We propose a model incorporating the variables of sensemaking, wisdom, decisionmaking and performance that essentially suggests that sensemaking antecedes decisionmaking and that increased levels of wisdom will increase the contribution that sensemaking makes to decision making. The quality of decision-making then affects the quality of organizational performance.