Coordination, sensemaking, and idea work: How founding teams pivot their venture ideas

This study offers novel insights into how team structure and flexibility affect pivoting. It details how founding team coordination practices shape individual and collective sensemaking of feedback and efforts to improve a venture idea. Following seven founding teams, we identified how teams with overlapping responsibilities enjoyed the flexibility of both fragmented and holistic sensemaking. This enabled them to pivot when needed but otherwise persevere with their venture idea. In contrast, teams with clear separation of responsibilities engaged in fragmented sensemaking and only persevered with their idea. Our findings advance research on founding team coordination, pivoting, and teams' understanding of their venture ideas. • Overlapping responsibilities allow teams to remain flexible. • Only teams with overlapping responsibilities use both structured and unstructured spaces to coordinate their sensemaking. • Fragmented and holistic sensemaking may result in different idea development outcomes. • Understandings of venture ideas may differ within founding teams at times. • Pivoting emerges from layering and recombining team members' different holistic understandings.