To enhance our understanding of strategic decision making, one of the most central phenomena in organizations, it is important to direct attention to the making of decision and the making of sense in relation to compatibility, time and information, and emotion. Prior research on strategic decision making has tended to adopt an overly reductionist view of the process involved. Generally, studies of decision making treat judgment and choice equivalent and in reference to compatibility, it is pointed out that decision making concerns the pairing of input and output information in terms of sets of stimuli and responses used in a specific situation. A decision making process extends in time, offering a forward movement through the search of information, judgment, evaluation of information, and choice. ‘Cold’ cognition is emphasized in the neglect of emotion.

   The purpose of the paper is to reflect upon the making of decision and the making of sense in relation to compatibility, time and information, and emotion, paving the way for a sensed decision making approach. A sensed decision making approach could provide deeper insights into the complexity of managers’ decision making in the face of turbulence. When the world is characterized by complex problems and unpredictability with ambiguity and its corollary uncertainty a constant companion to social actions, there is a need to make sensemaking part of decision making. The sensed decision making approach suggested in the paper provides a linkage between compatibility and managers’ beliefs and expectations, and attributes time to retrospective as well as prospective sensemaking. In addition, the paper opens up for emotion while bringing to the surface self-correction in association with filtration of information through managers’ beliefs and expectations. The concept of ‘bounded rationality’, commonly employed in the strategic decision making literature, helps dealing with complex strategic problems. Nevertheless, situations emerge in which a manager exercises judgment using emotion, as the empirical examples presented in the paper indicate. When there is nothing like a déjà vu episode that could enforce a rational (or bounded rational) decision-making process but a vu jàdé episode where managers suddenly feel that their reality is no longer a rational, ordering system, ’sensed decision making’ is induced.