Last, cognitive entrenchment provides a particularly salient source of strategy blindness. Entrenchment is viewed here as
a condition in which fixed, stable frames make practices immune to changes in their environment by making situated actors
ignore information that would permit or necessitate new forms of sense-making and understanding (Section 2.2). By linking the concept of entrenchment to the (re)production of strategy blindness, we extend and corroborate earlier studies on the effect of entrenchment on organizational change (see Dane, 2010). At PaperMill, entrenchment played a key role for the strategic failure, as it suffocated the organizational change necessary for the realization of PaperPack’s strategic intent. Both unwilling and unable to adapt to the change, the project team, for example, creatively implemented the system so as to accommodate existing practices. Recognizing the fixity and complexity of the highly interrelated production practices, they, in fact, actively avoided change. Reflecting the institutionalized aversion of risk at PaperMill, the MES implementation came to be perceived as a threat rather than an opportunity (cf. Beaudry and Pinsonneault, 2005). In this way, entrenchment and associated deep-rooted practices – may not only make actors blind to the opportunity afforded by new IT systems, but also increase actors’ perception of risk, providing grounds for disturbance-handling, accommodation approaches such as those observed here (Beaudry and Pinsonneault, 2005). This finding well illustrates the need for a multi-dimensional view of IS strategy: to understand the outcomes that are produced, we must inevitably account for how practically situated actors make sense of, respond to and actively shape strategic processes, in effect elucidating interactions between the IS strategy process and the practices it seeks to affect. As alluded to, these factors were interrelated. Jointly shaping the way change-recipients made sense of the change, they came together in the particular production of strategy blindness observed here. The flexibility of the artifact was, for example, integral to the translation of the strategic intent. Similarly, as entrenched actors are less receptive to change, cognitive entrenchment aided the mistranslation of the intent while the (IT-assisted) mistranslation recursively shielded actors’ entrenched schemata. Further research could help uncover the nature of these relationships in more detail as well as explore other possible antecedents to strategy blindness: the context and culture within which practices and organizations are situated may, for example, be critical features that affect to what extent organizations are prone to strategy blindness. Similarly, while we point out that cognitive entrenchment is a likely key source of strategy blindness, there might be situations where organizations produce strategy blindness despite showing flexibility in their cognitive schemata.