Conclusion

Abstract

Strategic renewal research is now confronted with important challenges concerning process design, cognition, and dynamic capabilities. Sensing and sensemaking of relevant signals as a basis for initiating strategic renewal are preceded by an action-centric and explorative engagement with the world. We are moving from co-aligning organization with environment in form of adaptation to co-creation as firms build agility through distinctive environmental enactment. All existing frameworks and studies in corporate governance as well as strategic cognition remain characterized by one or a combination of the following fundamental limitations: (1) environment and environmental change are generally treated as objective reality; (2) strategic renewal is treated as a top-down ‘content’ rather than a top-down/bottom-up ‘process challenge’; (3) strategic renewal is studied at the managerial level but only marginally at the board level; (4) formal processes only are the focal unit of analysis; and (5) demographic and universally measurable variables dominate with no due consideration for strategy-relevant meta-capabilities at the board level. FEG introduces a novel cross-hierarchical generative (inference centric) framework empowering the firm as a generative model of its eco-niche. Shareholders and board directors must reinterpret the board’s ‘strategic relevance’ in a discontinuous world. If not, the board is prone to turn into (or remain) a source of inertia compromising firm performance and survival.