Sensemaking · How People Work Out What Change Means
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Summary || Sensemaking · How People Work Out What Change Means
Most change work is built on an assumption that rarely gets said out loud: that a well-made narrative will produce a shared interpretation. Write it, repeat it often enough, and people end up holding the version you intended.
The research points somewhere more useful. People work out what is happening for themselves, using whatever is nearest to hand, and most of what is nearest to hand is not what you sent them. Then they act on the version they built, which starts making it true.
This piece covers what sensemaking is, what makes it particularly difficult during change, and what changes for a leader who has been communicating carefully and getting nowhere.
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noun
the process by which people give meaning to an experience, particularly one that is ambiguous or unexpected.
“the announcement set off weeks of sensemaking across the organisation”
8min read
A change gets announced. Three weeks later I hear colleagues describing the programme, and it is not the one I recognise.
It is a full account, with causes and actors and a clear view of who benefits, and it has skewed somewhere between the announcement and the fourth week. Nobody signed this version off. It is the one people are working from.
This happens more than I care to admit. There is a bigger question underneath it, and it is the one I have become curious about. How do we, quite literally, make sense of change?
What sensemaking is
Sensemaking is the ordinary work we do when something happens that our current picture does not explain.
We gather up whatever information is nearby. We put together an account of what is going on. We act on it, and keep adjusting.
Karl Weick spent a career on this, and the useful part is how unheroic it turns out to be. We rarely work from the whole picture. We notice a few things, build an explanation around those few things, and get on with the day.
Three features matter for anyone leading change.
The few things get chosen for being noticeable. Importance has little to do with it. A detail we can see and check will beat a detail that is more significant and harder to verify.
The account only has to be plausible. We need something that holds together and is good enough to act on this afternoon, and we act on it long before we have the evidence to know whether it is correct.
It gets built from where we are standing. The specialist and the generalist sit through the same demonstration and leave with different futures, because each was quietly asking what this does to the thing that makes them useful.
That is why two teams can live through the same restructure and give you two accounts that contradict each other. The leadership team watched the market move and read the restructure as the organisation finally getting ahead of it. The team three floors down watched four experienced people leave while the workload stayed where it was, and read it as a cost exercise wearing better language. Each account is built from what that group could actually see. Neither one was invented. Both are built from real observations, and that is what makes them so hard to argue with.
Sense also arrives late. We often act before we fully understand what we think is happening, then use what happened to refine the account. Which means the explanation someone is defending in month four was assembled in week one, out of whatever was lying around at the time.
Two words sit close together here, and the research does not always separate them. The distinction I find useful is this. Sensemaking answers what is happening here. Meaning-making answers what it means for me. The first is about the situation and the second is about the self, and a person can be perfectly clear on the first while the second is still unresolved.
What people build it from
This is the part that should give any communications plan pause. What people pick up is almost never what you sent.
You put forty slides and a case for change into the room. What travels out is that two executives did not attend.
You say no decisions have been made about roles. Someone finds a job ad in March for a role that does not exist yet.
You commit to investing in capability. The training budget goes quiet.
You tell a team you value their expertise. That same week, somebody asks them to write down, step by step, exactly how they do their job.
None of these things was designed to say anything about your change. A job ad is designed to fill a vacancy. A meeting invitation is designed for logistics. An absence may be nothing more than a diary clash. They get read anyway, because each one is concrete, checkable, and arrived without anyone trying to persuade you of anything. That last quality is what gives them weight. A slide turns up already arguing its case. A job ad just sits there.
So you end up competing with your own organisation’s behaviour, and behaviour usually wins.
I have stopped treating this as a communication problem. The gap people are reading is usually a real gap, and what they are picking up is accurate. The work is in the gap, not in the wording.
The account starts shaping what happens next
A team decides leadership is holding something back.
Acting on that, they stop volunteering information upwards. They check with each other before answering. The interesting questions get routed around the formal channel. Within a month the organisation has the secrecy their account predicted, and they have gathered the evidence honestly.
Weick calls this enactment. People produce part of the situation they are then responding to.
It works the same way in the other direction, which is the useful half. A team who decide there is something here worth shaping will go and shape something, and the shaping becomes their evidence too. The account does work either way. What matters is which one people start acting from.
Why this matters now
Two conditions make this particularly difficult in change.
The first is pace. Sensemaking works well when the environment changes slowly enough for existing patterns to keep up. When the ground moves faster than the patterns can absorb, people fall back on older explanations, because an old pattern applied quickly beats no pattern at all. The account being applied to your announcement may have been laid down by a previous leadership team, in an episode you know nothing about.
The second is the instinct to send more.
When people seem confused, the reflex is another briefing, another FAQ, another deck. Sometimes that works, because the missing thing really was a fact.
Often it produces more things to reconcile. One message implies stability. Another describes an operating model in which nothing could stay still. People come out of the third update less able to say what is happening than they were before it.
This is where Weick’s use of Ashby’s requisite variety becomes useful. Ashby’s law, from cybernetics, holds that a system needs as much variety in its responses as it meets in its environment. Applied to change, the useful version is that an organisation can only work with as much complexity as it can tell apart. People need enough interpretive capacity to work out what the clues around them might mean. More information is not the same thing as more capacity to make sense of it, and after enough programmes I would rather spend an hour on four distinctions than a week on another deck.
AI adoption is a particularly visible example. It reaches into how people understand their work, so it raises questions of identity alongside process. And the clues are unusually easy to read: who got access first, whose work became the pilot, who was asked to document their process.
Where the account gets made
Sensemaking happens between people, which means it has a location, and the location sits underneath the chart.
David Krackhardt’s work on informal networks found three structures running below the formal one: who people go to for advice, who they talk to routinely, and who they trust with something delicate. Managers were confident about all three and mostly wrong about anyone outside their immediate circle. One manager had no idea his branch had separated into two cultures with almost no contact between them until somebody drew him the map.
The trust network becomes particularly important during major change. It is also the one a leader sees least of, at exactly the moment it is doing the most work.
This is where sensemaking becomes fieldcraft. Who has gone quiet. Who is suddenly having a lot of coffees. Which questions are being discussed everywhere except the formal meeting.
Leaders are usually the last to know which account is taking hold.
What changes in the work
Five things move once you treat the account as something people build rather than something you send.
Put the account into the plan. Before the narrative gets written, run a round of conversations whose only output is what people believe is happening, in their words. Give it an owner and a date, the way you would any other piece of analysis. Ask for the account itself, with its causes and its actors, rather than for a list of concerns. An hour of that is worth more than anything else available at the design stage.
Do something visible with what you find. Going to look and then changing nothing is worse than never asking, because the silence afterwards becomes a clue in its own right. Where the account contains something you recognise, move something and let people see the change traced back to what they told you. Where it rests on an assumption you can correct, say so in their words first, and keep the part that holds. Where nothing can move, say what you did with what you heard and why the decision stands. An account that has been argued with in the open behaves differently from one that has only ever circulated.
Audit the clues before every announcement. List what the organisation has funded, cancelled, staffed and promoted in the last month, then read each item as somebody already uneasy would read it. Put that list on the same checklist as the legal review, with a name against it. People tend to give more weight to what the organisation does than to what it says, so the list is a better predictor of what lands than the deck is.
Publish the four distinctions. What is decided and what is still open. What is changing and what is holding. What is known and what is assumed. What the organisation intends and what people are currently experiencing. One page, one place, updated on a rhythm people can rely on. Four distinctions do more than four hundred slides, because they give the next piece of information somewhere to land.
Write the sentence that says who they still are. For each group the change reaches, write one sentence describing who they are in the new operating model, and treat it as a gate on the design rather than a line in the communications plan. Weick wrote about wildland firefighters who were ordered to drop their heavy tools while escaping a fire and who died still carrying them. His point is that the tools are bound up with who the person is, so letting go of them means becoming, for a moment, somebody without a trade. This is the meaning-making question rather than the sensemaking one, and it is the one that decides whether anybody moves. If you cannot write the sentence, the design is not finished.
Where to look first
Four things to notice in the work you are already doing, and what to do with each one.
The account. What does your most sceptical team believe is happening, in their words?
Write it down in their language, then show them the words and ask what you have missed. If you cannot write it down, the diagnosis has not happened yet.
The contradiction. What has the organisation done in the last month that contradicts something it has said?
Name it yourself, in the next forum you are in, and say which of the two now holds. Somebody has already built something on it, and it is load-bearing.
The memory. Who here has lived through a programme like yours before, and how did that one end for them?
Ask them what they are watching for this time, and say what will be different. That episode is the pattern your announcement is being read through, whether or not you know what it was.
The loss. What does this change take from the people who are best at the old way?
Find the thing they are known for that survives this change, and say so early. Someone who cannot find themselves in the new picture has little reason to walk into it.
Closing reflections
An organisation does not own the meaning of its own change. It never has. Meaning gets put together in kitchens and car parks and one-to-ones, out of fragments nobody chose to send, by people doing careful work with the material available to them.
I am inside that too. My own account of a change I am leading gets built the same way, out of whatever clues are nearest to hand, and I am as prone as anyone to settling on the version that is easiest to live with.
What I notice in the change work that holds is a leader who went looking for the account already forming, early enough to still be part of it.
People are already making sense of your change. The only question is whether you are in the room while they do it.
The question worth sitting with: if you asked the most sceptical team in your organisation to tell you the story of what is happening, would you recognise the programme you are leading?
. . .
Researched and written by Rebecca Agent, with credit to AI tools for assistance in producing this content:
Editorial and grammar writing assistant | Grammarly (AU/British English)
Research, writing, reader timing and SEO | ChatGPT, and Claude
The Deep Dive Podcast Overview | NotebookLM by Google
Topic research to link peer-reviewed research papers | Storm Genini Stanford; Google Gemini, Perplexity
References
Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage (1995)
Karl E. Weick, The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster, Administrative Science Quarterly (1993)
Karl E. Weick, Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies, Administrative Science Quarterly (1996)
David Krackhardt & Jeffrey R. Hanson, Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart, Harvard Business Review (1993)
W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman & Hall (1956)
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