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Entrepreneurial Strategising: The Tacit Mode

Paper number 02/05

Robert ChiaUniversity of Exeter

Abstract

Research on entrepreneurialism and strategic thinking has taken a cognitive and constructivistturn in recent years. Such a turn is to be welcomed. However, what remains relativelyunexplored, even within this 'softer' approach to entrepreneurial strategising, is a sustainedfocus on the underlying perceptual mechanisms shaping the processes of cognition and sense-making. This paper seeks to extend the perceptual approach to entrepreneurial strategising byfocussing on the tacit aspects of subsidiary awareness, unconscious scanning and the gestaltprocesses that constitute the micro-activity of sense-making and sense-giving. Although thiscognitive structure is common to all of us, genuinely entrepreneurial sense-making and sense-giving are historic and creative acts of cultural innovation that open up new disclosive spacesin which the very basis for our ways of living, our lifestyles and our entire cultural outlookare often radically challenged and revised. Drawing from a combination of insights developedon perceptual awareness, 'depth' psychology and the study of artistic vision, we attempt toshow that cognition and sense-making are very much unconscious acts of decision-makinginvolving the selective abstraction of significant figure from insignificant ground. It is thisunconscious structuring of our lived experiences that remains relatively unexamined and lessunderstood within the literature on entrepreneurialism. We maintain in this paper that withouta sound appreciation of this tacit dimension in the cognitive process, it is not possible to fullycomprehend how entrepreneurial actors produce coherent strategic scenarios out of acacophony of competing sense-stimuli.

Keywords: subsidiary awareness; unconscious scanning; eye-wander; strategic sense-making

School of Business & Economics, Streatham Court, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4PU, Devon, UKTel: +44 1392 263241 email: R.Chia@exeter.ac.uk

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ISSN 1473-2912

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Entrepreneurial Strategising: The Tacit Mode

'It is the reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in mental life which I am soanxious to press on the attention' (William James, The Stream of Consciousness, inWilson Allen (ed.) 1973: 130)

'When we are relying on our awareness of something (A) for attending to somethingelse (B), we are but subsidiarily aware of A. The thing B to which we are thus focallyattending, is then the meaning of A. The focal object B is always identifiable, whilethings like A, of which we are subsidiarily aware may be unidentifiable. The two kindsof awareness are mutually exclusive' (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 1962:xiii)

Introduction

Entrepreneurship is widely recognised as the greatest source of productivity in both Western

and non-western cultures. Genuine entrepreneurs are those who, more than being merely

financially successful, initiate historical changes by offering a product or service that invite

the consuming public to effectively change their values, social habits, lifestyles or entire

cultural outlook on life. Entrepreneurs are essentially paradigm-shifters and entrepreneurship

is quintessentially the skill of cultural innovation. Few who write and research about

entrepreneurs would genuinely doubt that their crucial contribution is the instigation of a

lasting radical social change. The affordable motor car, the sony walkman, cheap flights, the

internet and even 'Pele's pass' in the 1970 world cup match between Brazil and Italy that

transformed football into the most 'beautiful game', are all striking examples of the lasting

cultural effects of entrepreneurial inventiveness. Entrepreneurs are highly sensitized to

problems, anomalies and aspirations that are deeply rooted in our pervasive ways of life.

They are the antennae of society. Understood in this sense, the essence of entrepreneurialism

lies far beyond the narrow pragmatic and opportunistic economic activity that it is so often

portrayed to be. It is very much an affair involving the depth of perception.

Research on entrepreneurship and strategy thinking has correspondingly taken a cognitive

and constructivist turn in recent years. References to cognitive maps, mental models,

schemas, knowledge structures, semantic networks, information processing, strategic sense-

making and issues of cognitive biases, simplification and inertia abound in the literature. Yet,

what remains relatively unexamined, is the study of cognition itself both as an emergent

phenomenon that is interactively linked to experience and how that process relates to

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questions of intuition, attention, sense-making, decision and action. In other word, the

question of what exactly is involved in the cognitive experience and how it arises must be

addressed if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the workings of the entrepreneurial

mind.

It is important to make a crucial distinction here between cognition as a 'computational'

activity and cognition as a 'sense-making' activity (Von Krogh et al 1994; Mintzberg et al

1998; Mir and Watson, 2000; Weick, 1995; Meindl, Stubbart and Porac, 1996). Computation

implies the acceptance of external existing facts and the optimal manipulation of these to

achieve one's objective. Sense-making, on the other hand, implies an active constructive

process of 'world-making' and the creation of a new, and hitherto unthought perspective: a

particular way of viewing external sets of circumstances. The recent turn towards sense-

making in strategic thinking and entrepreneurial studies is to be welcomed. However, what

remains relatively unexplored even in this 'softer' cognitivist study of strategy formation is a

focus on the underlying perceptual mechanisms shaping the processes of comprehension.

What is involved in generating perceptual awareness? How do the processes of interpretation,

cognition and sense-making work to configure a particular version of reality that we then

subsequently respond to? What is the role of vision and perception in cognition? Is cognition

initially an unconscious tacit process rather than a conscious activity? These are questions

that remain largely unanswered by the cognitive strategy literature.

Our purpose in this paper is to extend this 'softer' cognition approach to entrepreneurial

strategising by focusing on the triumvirate issues of subsidiary awareness, unconscious

scanning, and the gestalt processes underlying concept-formation that collectively make up

the activities of strategic sense-making. Drawing from the work of Michael Polanyi on tacit

knowledge, as well as insights from 'depth' psychology and the study of artistic vision and

action, we attempt to show that cognition is very much a creative act of unconscious

decision-making involving the selective abstraction of figure from ground. This abstractive

process is very much tied to a deeply ingrained gestalt compulsion that skews us towards

articulate form and content and away from the intrinsic vagueness that constitutes the

necessary background of understanding. Through this unconscious structuring of our

primordial experiences we produce the familiar social entities and identities that appear to

exist externally and to invite our conscious apprehension. It is this unconscious structuring of

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the flux of our life experience that remains relatively unexamined and less understood within

the literature on strategic thinking. We maintain here that without a sound appreciation of this

tacit dimension of the cognitive process it is not possible to fully appreciate how emergent

entrepreueurial actors develop coherent strategic scenarios out of a cacophony of sense-

stimuli and then act accordingly to achieve quantum gains.

Cognitivism and Emergence in Entrepreneurial Strategising

The idea that coherent strategies emerge, 'on the hoof' so to speak, against a backdrop of

interpretive, enacted and sense-making interventions is becoming increasingly accepted

within the established domains of strategic analysis. Against the dominant orthodoxy in

strategic research, writers such as March and Olsen (1972), Mintzberg (1978), Smircich and

Stubbart, (1985), and Pettigrew (1990) have emphasised the non-rational, serendipitous and

emergent character of decision-making and strategy formation in action. For this group of

theorists, strategic outcomes are intimately linked to actors' cognitive and sense-making

capabilities (Weick, 1979). Thus, competitive structures (Porter, 1980), rather than being

externally enabling and/or constraining, both determine and are determined by actors'

perceptions and cognitive processes. As Mintzberg et al (1998) and Ohmae (1985) reminds us

if we are really serious about understanding the process of strategy formation, then 'we had

better probe into the mind of the strategist' (Mintzberg, 1998: 150).

In an often-quoted study of the Scottish knitwear industry conducted by Porac et al (1989) a

close relationship was found to obtain between the organizational actor's perceptions of the

environment and the competitive positioning arrived at. In this influential article, Porac et al

showed that although knitwear producers from Italy, the Far East and USA clearly

outstripped the Scots in productive terms, the latter did not consider the firms from these

distant geographical areas to be their serious competitors. Their attention was directed

primarily to what other Scottish firms were producing. Existing mental models of competition

in 'the environment' directed the processes of strategic sense-making and gave rise to a form

of 'competitive enactment' (Porac et al, 1989) in which 'industries' and 'strategic groups' were

created through 'a shared interpretation of reality among business rivals' (Hodgkinson, 1997:

629). These shared interpretations then come to define the competitive domain within which

organizations are situated.

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Accordingly, cognition is not merely a process of passively 'registering' observations nor is it

simply a computational activity. Instead, it is an active and creative process of 'world-making'

(Goodman, 1994). On this alternative paradigm of strategy formation, social reality, including

especially those stabilised identities that we call 'the organization', 'its environment', and 'its

strategy' are deemed to be socially-constructed products of human interactions rather than

free-standing concrete entities. This implies that it is clearly possible for entrepreneurial

actors to construct alternative ways of life than that which we have become habituated into. It

is the capacity for this cultural innovation that lies at the heart of entrepreneurial activity.

Such a constructivist view of the world and the sense-making approach it spawns, however,

can only be defended by rendering more transparent the alternative set of metaphysical

commitments inspiring its uptake.

Metaphysical Commitments of Constructionist/Constructivism

Much confusion exists in the organization theory/strategy literature on the metaphysical

commitments of philosophical constructivism/constructionism1 and how it is best

differentiated from the positivist and realist agendas. This is partly due to a reluctance of

advocates of constructivism to examine the question of ontology and the metaphysical

commitments associated with it. To begin with, genuine constructivists, following in the long

tradition from Heraclitus to William James and beyond, do not necessarily deny the existence

of a material unknown or unknowable reality. What they do deny, however, is that reality, as

it is in itself, is fixed, already-formed and 'thing-like'. The REAL, for genuine constructivists,

is construed as fluxional, transient, formless and ceaselessly changing: it is a becoming rather

than a being. As the American philosopher William James puts it well, reality is 'what is

absolutely dumb and evanescent…We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it' (James,

Pragmatism and Humanism, in McDermott (ed.), 1977: 453). Where the difference with

conventional realism lies is the emphatic denial by constructivists that reality is somehow

already-constituted prior to our linguistic intervention. Thus, the German philosopher Martin

Heidegger (1971) writes, 'words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed

for the commerce of those who write and speak' (p. 134). Instead, 'it is in words and language

that things first come into Being and are' (Heidegger, 1959: 13). Language is constitutive of

social reality in a far more fundamental manner than we are normally aware of. Reality itself

1 Although there is a difference in the intellectual tradition from which 'constructivism' and 'constructionism'have arisen, we will use the term 'constructivism' hereon to refer to the common emphasis in both that reality issomehow constructed and not already 'out there' awaiting our systematic apprehension and documentation.

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'flows' like a stream or a river. The essential difference, therefore, between traditional realism

and constructivism is that for the former 'reality is ready-made and complete from all

eternity', while for constructivists 'it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion

from the future'. On one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing

its adventures' (James, Pragmatism and Humanism, in McDermott (ed.), 1977: 456),

emphasis original).

Following on from this commitment to a becoming ontology, it becomes clear that the key

linguistic activities of naming, affixing a symbol and classifying provide this initial ordering

impulses for the systematic structuring of our human life-worlds and it is this structuring

characteristic of language that creates the impression that reality itself is somehow stable,

pre-organized and law-like in character. Moreover, such divisions and distinctions are

visually-inspired so much so that our modern forms of knowledge are necessarily linked to

the elevation of vision as the dominant form of knowledge-creation. Visual perception,

awareness, conception, and sense-making are conscious or pre-conscious activities that help

render the multifaceted aspects of lived experience more familiar, predictable and hence

liveable. For this reason, it becomes crucial to study the structure of this cognitive experience

and in particular the tacit dimension of cognition more carefully so that we can then begin to

better appreciate how the strategic sense-making process actually takes place beginning

almost unconsciously at the level of subsidiary awareness.

The Tacit Dimension

In a series of powerfully-argued seminal works, the scientist-turned-social philosopher

Michael Polanyi (1962, 1967, 1969) drew attention to a crucial missing element in our

understanding of the structure of knowledge and of human experience - the tacit dimension.

Polanyi believed that throughout most of Western philosophy from Plato onwards, what

constituted proper knowledge had been defined far too narrowly in terms of the explicit and

the visible so much so that the tacit aspects underlying our epistemological endeavours have

been surreptitiously ignored. Polanyi makes an important distinction between explicit

knowing, which can always be observed, articulated and demonstrated, and a more basic

form of tacit knowing in which we will always be unable to prove or even articulate despite

the fact that we may feel certain of knowing in every proper sense. The ineffable nature of

this kind of knowledge does not in any way detract from the fact that we do actually know

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many things that cannot be articulated through language. This claim is easily verifiable

through our common-sense experience of, for example, being able to recognise people we

know, sometimes from even the very slightest or fleeting glimpse, without being able to

specify exactly what it is that enables us to make these correct judgements. An important

distinction, therefore, exists between explicit knowing and tacit knowing with the latter

providing the necessary conditions out of which explicit knowledge acquires its possibility

and significance. For Polanyi, tacit knowledge is logically prior and the very condition of

possibility for explicit knowledge.

Polanyi begins by identifying and articulating three key dimensions of the cognitive

experience. On the first dimension of awareness, he distinguishes between focal awareness

and subsidiary awareness. Focal awareness refers to the consciously directed attention one

gives to an object of interest whilst subsidiary awareness is that which provides the ground or

context around which focal awareness operates. Thus, when we use a hammer to drive in a

nail we attend to both the hammer and the nail but in significantly different ways. When we

bring the hammer down to strike the nail we do not, as a matter of common experience, feel

the handle of the hammer 'striking' our palm, but we certainly do feel the impact of the

hammer on the nail. As Polanyi writes:

'The difference may be stated by saying that the latter (i.e., the hammer) are not, likethe nail, objects of our attention, but instruments of it. They are not watched inthemselves; we watch something else whilst keeping intensely aware of them. I have asubsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hands which is merged into myfocal awareness of my driving in the nail' (Polanyi, 1962: 55).

The distinction between focal awareness and subsidiary awareness is formulated in

recognition of the essentially vectorial character of human comprehension. In other words,

awareness is, of necessity, directional. Thus, as you the reader, focus on the meaning of the

words written here, you will become only subsidiarily aware of the fact that they are written

in English and that they observe certain rules of grammar and so on. If you begin to focus on

the grammatical structure of this sentence, its meaning and content moves to a subsidiary

level. The relationship is one of figure and ground. Thus, it is possible to fully understand

what a piece of text is saying but be completely unaware of its linguistic status. Polanyi, who

is Hungarian by birth, tells the story of a regular breakfast routine in which he reads his mail

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and then occasionally passes it on to his son, who can only understand English, to read often

unaware that the letter had not been written in English.

'My correspondence arrives at my breakfast table in various languages, but my sonunderstands only English. Having just finished reading a letter I may wish to pass iton to him, but must check myself and look again to see in what language it waswritten. I am vividly aware of the meaning conveyed by the letter, yet know nothingwhatever of its words' (Polanyi, 1962: 57)

Although having read and understood the contents of the letter, he had not consciously noted

that it was written in a language other than English. According to Polanyi, focal and

subsidiary awarenesses are mutually exclusive in the sense that one cannot focus on what is

presently functioning subsidiarily since awareness is, by definition, always vectorial. This

figure/ground relationship is one that is familiar to those who have seen those pictures used to

evoke the imagination in creativity exercises. The thing to note is that only one aspect of the

picture can be see at a time and to the untrained eye, it is virtually impossible to see both

images at the same time.

Polanyi's first dimension of awareness is intersected by a second dimension of active

engagement. All human activity, according to Polanyi, takes place along a continuum ranging

from a more bodily to a more conceptual pole (Gill, 2000: 38). Polanyi calls these the

proximal and the distal. What this means is that all human activity comprise a necessary

blend of the physical and the mental. Thus, even if we are exerting ourselves in the most

strenuous physical form of exercise some mental activity remains. On the other hand, in even

the most mental activities, we still get physically hungry and tired. Hence, the vast majority

of our activities fall within a continuum of bodily and conceptual engagement. For Polanyi,

the activity dimension, like the awareness dimension is also characterized by a vectorial

quality that runs from the proximal to the distal. Activity can, therefore, be either more bodily

physical or mental, more concrete or abstract. To complete his overall scheme of things,

Polanyi maintains that the intersection of these two dimensions of awareness and activity

gives rise to a third dimension of cognitivity. Cognitivity, therefore is an outcome of

particular conjunctions between the dimensions of awareness and activity. At one extreme, a

focal awareness combining with a distal conceptual pole produces what Polanyi terms

'explicit knowledge' while at the other extreme, subsidiary awareness combining with the

proximal bodily pole produces what he calls 'tacit knowing'. Tacit knowing is thus, as the

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term implies, a kind of vague, inarticulate bodily form of knowing that does not lend itself to

linguistic expression since it always occur at a subsidiary level of awareness. The diagram

below gives an idea of how tacit and explicit knowledge can be located.

Explicit Knowledge

Awareness Dimension

ActivityDimension

Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowing, therefore, is essentially inexpressible and any attempt to formalize and render

explicit this form of knowing is ultimately 'self-defeating' (Polanyi, 1967: 20). Yet, like the

background lining of a kimono that enables it to keep its form, tacit knowing shapes the

epistemological contours upon which much of human sense-making and decisional action

rests. For example, the ability to recognise a problem or to perceive an opportunity is to see

something hidden, inarticulate, or not yet revealed. It is the result of an 'intimation of the

coherence of hitherto not (yet) comprehended particulars' (Polanyi, 1967: 21): a tacit

'foreknowledge of yet undiscovered things' (ibid: 23). Polanyi argues that it is precisely this

kind of foreknowledge that the Copernicans must have had when they passionately defended

the idea that the heliocentric theory was not merely a convenient way of computing the paths

of the planets but that it was actually how things were. It is also what in more common

business parlance we would call 'vision' or 'foresight'. In so far as such unconsciously

Focal

Subsidiary

BodilyConceptual

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motivated commitments, actions and decisions are a form of response to external stimuli it

might be said to be practising at least an elementary form of rationality albeit one far

removed from the kind of conscious purposefulness and rationality that is normally elevated

as the guiding principle for strategy formation. This kind of rationality entails the tacit act of

selectively abstracting significant figure from insignificant ground.

This issue of the relationship between figure and ground has been much studied by Gestalt

psychology. However, as Polanyi, as well as a number of others have pointed out

(Ehrenzweig, 1965; Arnheim, 1969), Gestalt psychology has tended to assume that 'the

perception of a physiognomy takes place through the spontaneous equilibration of its

particulars impressed on the retina or the brain' (Polanyi, 1967: 6). In other words, Gestalt

psychology has assumed that the dominant figure impresses itself onto our passive awareness

and this according to Polanyi is an error because it understates the active role of perception:

'I am looking at Gestalt, on the contrary, as the outcome of an active shapingexperience performed in the pursuit of knowledge. This shaping or integrating I holdto be the great and indispensable tacit power by which all knowledge is discovered'(Polanyi, 1967: 6)

By placing undue emphasis on the 'figure' and bisecting it from the 'ground', Gestalt

psychology underplays the active shaping and integrating of experience performed by the act

of subsidiary awareness in the pursuit of knowledge. For Polanyi, therefore, it is the very

structuring of the Gestalt itself that provides the underlying logic for tacit knowledge. This

would mean that the 'structure of comprehension' necessarily corresponds to the 'structure of

the comprehensive entity which is its object' (Polanyi, 1966: 33-34). In other words, the

object produced for our conceptual awareness is always already a product of the tacit

structure operating to abstract figure from ground. Such a claim implies that a hidden order

underpins the creation of tacit knowledge. It is an unconscious order well traced by the art

theorist Anton Ehrenzweig in his classic study of the psychology of artistic vision.

The Hidden Order of Cognition

We tend for the most part to notice simple, compact and precise forms and to generally ignore

vague, incoherent and inarticulate forms in our perception. Because of our deep cultural

programming, our eyes are always eager to perceive a good gestalt: a clear picture, form or

shape, the familiar features of someone we know, the distinct outlines of a building etc.

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Gestalt psychologists call this the 'gestalt tendency'. A 'good' gestalt is that which exhibits

characteristics of simplicity, compactness, coherence, clarity of form, etc. However, because

of this preoccupation, we pay little attention to those inarticulate form elements that make up

an essential aspect of our cultural experience. We commit what William James calls the

'Psychologist's Fallacy par excellence': mistaking inarticulate perceptions for an absence of

order. Conscious perception or what Polanyi would call focal awareness, excludes 'eye-

wander' (Sir Herbert Read, Art and Industry) because of its dogmatic insistence on achieving

a 'good' gestalt.

According to Ehrenzweig (1965, 1967), in order for us to become sensitized to the registering

of such inarticulate forms operating at the level of the unconscious, we have to adopt a mental

attitude not dissimilar to that which the psycho-analyst must adopt when dealing with the

unconscious of the analysand; namely, some kind of a 'diffused attention'. This diffused

attention is none other than Polanyi's subsidiary awareness. This reversal of the common-

sense attitude of focussing consciously on objects of interest enables us to watch for that

seemingly fortuitious, unrelated and accidental detail that is more likely to conceal the

unconscious content of our everyday experience. Whilst Polanyi insists on the mutual

exclusivity of focal and subsidiary awareness, insisting that one cannot attend to the two

aspects simultaneously, what Ehrenzweig and Sir Herbert Read are saying here is that it is

actually possible through training in the practice of art for instance, to equip ourselves with

the capacity for reversing the priority accorded to focal awareness and paradoxically placing

subsidiary awareness at the focal point of our comprehension. This is what training in the arts

is able to achieve and what a depth-psychological analysis of unconscious cognition is able to

demonstrate.

A truly depth-psychological analysis of cognition, therefore, directs attention away from the

focus of attention and searches for the seemingly serendipitous and insignificant details

through which the unconscious works both in terms of the visual and the audible. For

instance, in the case of music, it directs attention away from the articulate forms that the

melody conveys towards the apparently accidental 'glissando and vibrato inflexions, or to the

slight distortions of rhythm and intensity which defy musical notation and are left to the

seemingly "arbitrary" execution by the performer' (Ehrenzweig, 1965: 5). In music, the

surface gestalt is typically represented by the melody. It draws conscious attention to itself

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immediately and keeps it as the locus of attention. The accompanying voices are not as

pregnant and 'ear-catching' s as the main melody and form only an indistinct background. The

music student, however, learns very quickly that the accompaniment really consists of several

voices which 'form more or less continuous melodies in their own right….Instruction in

music does the same as the art school. In both cases the pupil's attention is turned away from

an exclusive concentration on a single surface gestalt and made to branch out to follow

several competing form events unfolding at the same time' (Ehrenzweig, 1965: 41). In order

to truly enjoy polyphonic music therefore, one has to begin to experience the 'fugue-theme

from the very beginning not as a melody but as the germ cell from which the intricate

polyphonic structure of a fugue will grow; to follow the unfolding of this structure with a

diffused attention not concentrated on a single voice but on the structure as a whole; to feel

how it gains in transparency and expands into infinite space….only then will the listener feel

the deep elation connected with polyphonic music which has to speak in several tongues

instead of in one' (Ehrenzweig, 1965: 43). It is this diffused and multifaceted attention that

constitutes the kind of subsidiary awareness that Polanyi makes much of and which gestalt

theory conveniently overlooks.

Likewise, in artwork, it is the 'minute, almost microscopic, scribbles which make up the

technique of a great draughtsman or the brush work of a great painter' (Ehrenzweig, 1965:

30). The student of art is therefore taught a technique of perception that deliberately works

against the gestalt principle.

'When the art-school student takes up drawing he is made to watch not only theoutline of the object he draws (the figure of Gestalt Psychology), but also the negativeforms which the figure cuts out from the background' (Ehrenzweig, 1965: 28).

In other words, art students are taught to work directly against their natural gestalt instincts

and to observe, simultaneously, the unfolding of the negative form as its outline emerges at

the tip of the pencil. Rubin's double profile shown below gives an idea of how positive and

negative forms co-construct one another in the gestalt process.

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As we can see, if we concentrate on one side of the figure (i.e., direct our focal awareness) we

also find that the other side is immediately relegated into a state of subsidiary awareness.

However, what Ehrenzweig maintains is that it is actually possible to hold both figures

together through the cultivation of what he calls 'diffused attention' through the act of

'unconscious scanning' (Ehrenzweig, 1967: 32-46) and this can only be done by cultivating

the habit of attending to the unfolding negative form instead of the gestalt figure. Such an

emphasis may be puzzling to the uninitiated since the spectator of the drawing will not easily

perceive these negative forms. But it is precisely this awareness of 'otherness' that marks out a

good artist from the ordinary painter. The mature artist knows from a hundredfold experience

that it is the varied combination of these invisible negative forms that will make for a great

improvement in the general impression of the picture.

This impact of invisible forms is parallel to the pleasing effect that a good wall-paper

produces on the general atmosphere of a room. As Ehrenzweig writes:

'A good wall-paper pattern must avoid a precise picture-like structure….a good wall-paper must not be "eye-catching"…It forms only a neutral background to real picturesand furniture and must not contend with them in attracting the eye. We might lookabsent-mindedly at a wall-paper a hundred times without once realising what itpattern represents. The "eye-repelling" effect is based first on the lack of eye-catchingfeatures and the equality of single forms but also on the same superimposition andoverlapping of forms which occur in modern painting….A good wall-paperpattern….must try to be as ambiguous and indefinite as possible….The eye, always

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eager to perceive a good gestalt, will be repelled by the wall-paper as it should be andglide to the real pictures to which the wall-paper gives only a neutral background' (p.25)

In other words, a good wall paper enhances our subsidiary awareness by repelling our focal

attention. It is gestalt-free and causes 'eye wander' by redirecting the eye towards other

objects in the room thereby creating the necessary productive contrast. It is this aspect of

otherness which traditional gestalt theory overlooks. For this reason, the seemingly chaotic

scribbles of a master painter's technique, for example, will be deemed to be accidental and

inconsequential to those who subscribe to gestalt theory. They will gloss over these

accidental details and tidy up these little strokes and arabesques to make them align with the

continuous outline of real objects. Thus, the apparently accurate copying of a commercial

artist will produce in our conscious perception the same grey as the sensitive and nervous

scribbles of a Rembrandt. However, although the grey tone may be identical, 'emotionally the

parallel neat shading of the commercial artist remains dead compared with the secret life

active in the technique of Rembrandt' (Ehrenzweig, 1965: 30). The unconscious is able, in

other words, to scan and detect the differences between an original and a copy, even if it is

unable to express this difference in articulated form.

The Tacit Dimension in Entrepreneurial Strategising

What can we now say about the value of subsidiary awareness, 'eye-wander', and unconscious

scanning in the cognitive processes given these insights gleaned from philosophy, depth

psychology and the study of artistic vision? How can these new understandings throw fresh

light onto our understanding of strategy-formation? To begin with it is clear from our

previous analysis that strategic thinking and decision-making are intimately linked to vision,

perception and cognition. These are essentially pre-conscious dividing activities. Unconscious

scanning with its roaming glance and 'eye-wandering' tendencies is what actively structures

the strategic sense-making process. Whilst, as we have previously noted, there is now an

abundance of literature on the role of cognition and sense-making in strategy formation, the

emphasis has been on conscious computation, intentional action and the privileging of gestalt

form and focus over the formless, the accidental and the serendipitous. Thus, deliberate

conceptual analysis of previously documented data with its reliance on focal attention is

privileged over wandering open-endedness of subsidiary forms of knowing. Scanning is

relegated to the passive role of 'gathering information' for focal analysis. Subsidiary

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awareness is thus disdained because it is not assumed to involve any kind of intelligent

thought. The unconscious structure of cognitive sense-making in the strategy process remains

relatively unexplored.

What we have tried to argue in this paper, however, is the fact that perception is itself an

active and intelligent albeit oftentimes unconscious activity. We have tried to show that this

process is going on all the time in virtually every aspect of our daily lives and hence

necessarily so in the process of strategy formation. Oftentimes, it is the aggregative outcome

of serendipitous and accidental aspects of human comprehension which leads up to what we

then see as a coherent strategy. To fully appreciate the process of entrepreneurial strategising

therefore, we must, like the trained artist, look away from the dominant figure of explicated

strategy to those subsidiary domains which are glossed over in the haste to achieve an

explanatory coherence.

This understanding led us to examine studies in artistic vision and to give a primacy to the

unconscious scanning as a quintessential form of active perception that takes in, assesses,

selects, narrows, sharpens and combines our visual sense-data to build up a coherent version

of social reality. Yet all this takes place in the 'blink-of-an-eye'. This is what enables the

experienced craftsman or gifted card player to consider all the relevant possibilities in a split

second. The playing of a combination game such as bridge or Chinese 'mah-jong', for

instance, requires the scanning of serial structures in order to decide strategy. In order to play

the right card or make the right bid each player must evaluate the many possible distributions

of the cards or maj-jong pieces almost instantaneously. Yet such a seemingly complex

evaluative process is undertaken without much conscious effort on the part of the player. This

is where subsidiary awareness, tacit knowledge and unconscious scanning operates.

If we were to ask the player how he/she performed this feat and what was going on in his/her

mind when performing this feat he/she would probably be unable to tell us. Likely, his/her

attention was blank and blurred whilst unconscious scanning went on at the deeper levels of

his/her mind. Any attempts at more precise visualisation and explication would render his/her

attempts confusing and even incoherent. Given this extensive wealth of observation in the

workings of an unconscious scanning process, there is therefore much justification for a more

sustained study of how such forms of processing actually shape and influences the issue of

17

strategic action and decision-making. Additionally what this understanding of strategy-

formation means is that any attempts at thinking and acting strategically are intrinsic to our

own identity-constructing activity: they reflect our continuing struggle to realise ourselves

and our potential as societal contributors and cultural innovators.

It is not as if, as completed individuals, we somehow then begin to pursue certain strategic

courses of action that are somehow external to our own being and becoming. Rather, such

courses of strategic action, are themselves, very much attempts to define who we are and why

we are here for. In this way strategy formation is not just an economic-administrative activity

but an existential endeavour. As the philosopher Ortega y Gasset puts it well some time ago:

'We are not things but dramas; we have no nature, only history; we are not, though we live'

(in Ingold, 1986: 117). Thinking and acting entrepreneurially are very much a part of our life-

project not merely a practical function of business or organizations. Our actions both

constitute 'our' strategies and also help to realise our own actor-identities. Thus, like Rubin's

double profile show below, the project of self-realisation and the forging of strategic action

are both mutually constitutive. One cannot take place without the other.

An exaggerated need to explain entrepreneurship in terms of the clarity of purpose, the

intentionality of action and the rationality of outcomes, can be exceedingly harmful to any

attempt to understand the essentially creative nature of entrepreneurial strategising. A would-

be entrepreneur who cannot draw on his/her subsidiary awareness to achieve an unfocussed

state of 'eye-wander' and to refuse familiar well-trodden thought-pathways will of necessity

become an overly narrow specialist or technician. What takes place in successful

entrepreneurial innovation is a form of undifferentiated attention which holds both figure and

ground together in a single undifferentiated visual field in which the concrete here-and-now

that is the ultimate source of creativity and novelty is grasped and transformed into a new

cultural innovation.

18

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