Struggling in the "War-room": Strategy Making by Top Managers Behind Closed Doors

This paper explores how top managers engage in strategy making behind closed doors facing an organizational crisis. We develop a model of temporary strategy-making that articulates how top managers make sense of a situation with no viable alternative based on two mechanisms, i.e., rationalizing and narrating, and construct a shared understanding to engage in strategy-making by either allowing for individualism or creating for collectivism. Under these circumstances, top managers engage in strategy making with a strong temporal connotation, i.e., strategy making is bound by a strong temporal nature before actors impugn and challenge the constructed shared understanding, and thus, cycle back to the sensemaking process. The findings provide a unique insight in top manager´s strategy decision-making process when facing a “loss-situation”.