Constructing Comparability: Analogical Reasoning for Strategic Foresight Under Uncertainty

Strategic decisions often unfold under uncertainty, involve long time horizons, and lack clearly specified alternatives or precedents. In such contexts, complex and dynamic environments can exceed managerial information-processing capacities, making analogical reasoning, as a form of strategic cognition, important for strategic competence. Yet analogies are risky precisely because the strategic problem and the relevant precedent are rarely self-evident. Existing accounts of analogy in strategic judgement largely explain how prior cases are retrieved, mapped, or evaluated, but say less about how managers first construct the target situation in a way that makes disciplined comparison possible. We address this limitation by reconceptualising analogical reasoning as an anticipatory process of construing through which managers construct the target situation, identify relevant sources, interrogate correspondences, and develop conditional forward inferences. We develop Structured Analogical Reasoning (SAR), a conceptual framework of strategic reasoning, by drawing on Personal Construct Theory to explain how managers construe indeterminate situations and bounded rationality to explain why such construing must be structured under cognitive limits. The paper contributes to research on strategic judgement and decision making by theorising analogical reasoning as a pre-comparative process of problem construction through which managers discipline the use of analogy and shape strategic foresight when neither the problem nor the precedent is fully given. SAR helps strategists treat analogies not as ready-made lessons from the past, but as conditional resources whose relevance must be constructed, tested, and revised before informing strategic action.