The Importance of Local Context in Multidivisional Organizations: Prospective sensemaking in an ambiguous change process guided by an envisioned future

Abstract

Emerging technologies are becoming increasingly important in production processes and forces manufacturing organizations to transform in order not to fall behind. For the automotive industry does this entail a shift towards the envisioned future Industry 4.0 with smart factories and changing ways of working. This paper therefore examines how an envisioned future guided top executives in their attempts to generate a collective understanding of an ambiguous change process between leaders in four production divisions. A qualitative research where data was collected through 17 in-depth interviews, on-site observations and document analysis with the aim to gather information on how leaders made sense of and talked about the change towards an envisioned future. The theoretical framework is composed by the theories prospective sensemaking, a lens to understand how actors interpret and respond to a changing future, and sensegiving, a lens to derive how actors try to influence the meaning constructions of others towards a preferred state. The study revealed that leaders in the regional divisions struggled to make sense of the organizational wide and imprecise change strategy and translate it into regional change initiatives. The findings contribute with insights that the interplay between people and material artifacts develops a unique local context which impedes the forming of an organizational wide collective prospective sensemaking. The paper furthermore outlines a groundwork in categorizing the retrospective and prospective elements mutually occurring in the prospective sensemaking process.