Categories of strategic stimuli: Their implications for managers' sense-making of organizational environments

Top-level managers have responsibility for making sense of their organization's environment through perceiving and interpreting data from various sources. This task may be viewed as a complex process starting with the perception of strategic stimuli which are interpreted and eventually defined as a strategic issue. The environment has been extensively mapped conceptually, and the processes of interpretation and formulation of strategic issues are well documented. What have received less attention are the data actually perceived by the managers. These are labelled strategic stimuli and are here categorized according to two orthogonal dimensions: strength and structure. The four resulting categories are argumented to have specific consequences for managerial and organizational information gathering and processing capabilities.