Intuitive Pausing In Practice: Navigating Grand Challenges

The purpose of this article is to surface pausing as an intuitive, silent and socially constructed concept and action, which merited investigation from a strategy-as-practice micro lens perspective while opening up this discourse towards a macro grand challenge perspective. Human actors are at the forefront of challenges in the contemporary environment of today, notwithstanding the increasing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Humans provide a key function in strategizing to discern the impact of challenges; and thereafter seek to improve, stabilize, or advance themselves and their environment. The researchers focused on pausing, which is often intuitive in nature, as a practice, during a disruptive challenge. By adopting a qualitative case study research design, the researchers explored pausing by practitioners as a strategic practice amidst a grand challenge in an apex business area of risk. The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically altered the familiar landscapes of everyday lives and livelihoods and the habituated practices that people took for granted. Using banking credit risk to foreground the research framework, the study centred on practitioners’ pausing (to stop, reflect or reconsider) while they implemented a technology-related strategy across Africa during the complexities of Covid-19. The action of pausing is presented in terms of Popper’s three worlds and affirms the relevance of the three world framework where pausing informs, in World 2, how the physical world is interpreted from an individual or collaborative basis to influence World 3.