Composing With the Wind: Strategizing as Situational Attunement

Research on strategy as practice (SAP) has become a vibrant area of inquiry, but what do people actually do when engaging in strategizing in everyday situations? Drawing on insights from CCO scholarship and practice theory, this paper addresses that question by highlighting situational attunement as an important aspect of strategizing, which unfolds through communicative practices that make responsiveness to what a situation calls for observable, thereby bridging immediate conditions with evolving aims. Situational attunement, in other words, involves sensing what matters in the moment and acting with others who are also shaping the evolving relational field. The value of this concept is illustrated through an ethnography of a female entrepreneur’s communicative practices in a small Icelandic village during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this paper contributes to SAP scholarship and communication research on strategizing by clarifying how a key aspect of strategizing is accomplished in and through communication, showing that situational attunement becomes empirically observable through communicative practices, and specifying two interwoven dimensions of this process (relational sensing and practical reasoning).