Adaptive sensemaking

The ability to continuously interpret what is happening while acting, updating understanding as the system shifts, rather than relying on fixed plans or static analysis.

Leaders skilled in adaptive sensemaking understand that in complex adaptive systems, meaning cannot be established once and then executed against. They treat strategies, diagnoses, and plans as provisional interpretations rather than facts. Instead of separating thinking from doing, they continually test whether their understanding still fits the reality on the ground. Adaptive sensemaking involves holding the map lightly and staying close to the territory. Leaders actively scan for weak signals, contradictions, and anomalies, recognising that early signs of change often appear messy, ambiguous, or uncomfortable. They update their interpretation of the situation as new information emerges, using action itself as a way of learning. Rather than seeking certainty, they focus on plausibility, coherence, and responsiveness.

“The future is not predictable, but it is navigable.” — Peter Schwartz

Why adaptive sensemaking matters

In complex environments, conditions change faster than formal analysis, reporting cycles, or governance processes can keep up with. By the time a situation has been fully analysed and agreed, the context it was based on has often already shifted. Leaders who rely on static diagnosis or delayed data find themselves acting on yesterday’s reality.

Adaptive sensemaking matters because complexity produces ambiguity before it produces clarity. Early signals rarely arrive as neat trends or clean metrics. They show up as tensions, inconsistencies, unexpected behaviours, or unease at the edges of the system. Leaders who wait for certainty miss the window in which adjustment is still possible.

Without adaptive sensemaking, organisations become brittle. Plans are followed even when they no longer fit. Anomalies are dismissed as noise. Feedback is filtered to preserve confidence rather than accuracy. Over time, the gap between the map and the territory grows until surprise turns into crisis.

Leaders who practise adaptive sensemaking maintain a closer coupling between interpretation and action. They are quicker to notice when assumptions no longer hold, more willing to revise their understanding, and better able to respond proportionately as situations evolve. This does not eliminate uncertainty, but it allows the system to learn, adapt, and correct course before disruption becomes irreversible.

“Sensemaking is about the continuous redrafting of an emerging story so that it becomes more comprehensive, plausible, and actionable.” — Karl E. Weick

What weak and strong adaptive sensemaking look like

What weak adaptive sensemaking looks like (static interpretation)	What strong adaptive sensemaking looks like (continuous interpretation)
Treating plans as truth: Assumes the strategy or operating model accurately reflects reality. Continues execution even when conditions shift, framing deviation as failure rather than feedback.	Holding plans as hypotheses: Treats strategy as a provisional interpretation. Regularly tests whether assumptions still match current conditions and updates direction accordingly.
Delayed interpretation: Waits for complete data, formal reviews, or consensus before revisiting assumptions. Sensemaking happens after outcomes are already visible.	Real-time updating: Interprets while acting. Adjusts understanding as new information emerges rather than waiting for review cycles.
Anomaly dismissal: Explains away odd events, outliers, or uncomfortable signals because they do not fit existing narratives or dashboards.	Weak signal attention: Treats anomalies as early data about changing system dynamics and explores their meaning before volume makes them undeniable.
Over-reliance on dashboards: Uses lagging indicators and summary metrics as the primary source of truth, mistaking representation for reality.	Multiple sensing modes: Triangulates data, lived experience, narrative, and direct observation to build a richer, more current picture of the system.
Certainty seeking: Delays action until clarity is achieved, believing understanding must precede movement.	Learning through movement: Accepts partial understanding and uses action itself as a way to generate insight and refine interpretation.
Linear interpretation: Assumes continuity with the past. Expects trends to persist smoothly and is surprised by sudden shifts or breakdowns.	Nonlinear awareness: Expects discontinuity, tipping points, and sudden change. Reads instability as information, not failure.
Centralised sensemaking: Interpretation happens mainly at senior levels, filtered through hierarchy before action is taken.	Distributed sensemaking: Actively draws insight from the edges of the system where information is freshest and least filtered.
Suppressing uncertainty: Treats confusion or ambiguity as weakness. Pushes for clarity even when the system is not yet intelligible.	Holding ambiguity: Creates space to sit with not knowing long enough for clearer patterns to emerge without forcing premature conclusions.
Retrospective explanation: Makes sense of events mainly after outcomes are known, reinforcing hindsight bias.	Ongoing interpretation: Continuously updates meaning as events unfold, reducing surprise and increasing adaptive capacity.
Stability bias: Assumes current conditions are normal and will persist unless clear evidence proves otherwise.	Environmental vigilance: Assumes change is constant and actively scans for signs that the system is shifting beneath the surface.

“In complex situations, right answers do not exist. What exists are multiple plausible interpretations.” — Dave Snowden (paraphrased)

Barriers to adaptive sensemaking

Plan fixation: Once a strategy is agreed, organisations tend to treat it as reality rather than as a hypothesis. Leaders become psychologically and politically invested in the plan, making it difficult to reinterpret conditions without appearing inconsistent or incompetent. Sensemaking freezes while execution continues.

Certainty bias: Senior roles reward confidence and decisiveness. Over time, leaders learn to project certainty even when the situation is ambiguous. This suppresses curiosity, discourages exploratory interpretation, and narrows the range of signals leaders are willing to notice.

Lag indicator dependence: Most organisational data reflects the past. Revenue, engagement scores, and operational metrics arrive after underlying conditions have already shifted. When leaders rely primarily on these indicators, interpretation lags reality and adaptation becomes reactive rather than anticipatory.

Anomaly suppression: Weak signals are often inconvenient. They complicate the story, threaten commitments, or trigger anxiety. As a result, anomalies are explained away, reclassified as noise, or quietly filtered out before they reach decision-makers.

Hierarchical filtering: Information moving up the hierarchy is routinely sanitised. Ambiguity, doubt, and bad news are removed in favour of clarity and reassurance. By the time signals reach senior leaders, they have lost the texture needed for meaningful sensemaking.

Speed and urgency pressure: Sustained urgency collapses interpretation. When leaders feel compelled to move quickly, they default to existing narratives rather than revisiting assumptions. Action accelerates while understanding stagnates.

Expert overreach: Deep expertise can become a liability in complex conditions. Specialists may over-apply familiar models to unfamiliar problems, narrowing interpretation rather than expanding it. Leaders defer to confident expertise even when the system has changed.

Retrospective sensemaking: Organisations are good at explaining events after they happen. This creates an illusion of understanding while masking the absence of real-time interpretation. Leaders learn convincing stories instead of improving their ability to notice emerging change.

Cultural intolerance of ambiguity: Many organisations equate clarity with competence. Expressions of uncertainty are interpreted as weakness, discouraging leaders from naming confusion or incomplete understanding. Sensemaking becomes private rather than collective.

Attention saturation: Modern leadership roles are cognitively overloaded. With little space for reflection, scanning, or dialogue, leaders rely on summaries and abstractions. The system’s subtle signals are lost to noise, not ignorance.

“In complex systems, the behaviour of the whole cannot be understood simply by understanding the parts.”— Melanie Mitchell

Enablers of adaptive sensemaking

Treating strategy as hypothesis, not commitment: Adaptive sensemaking begins when leaders explicitly frame strategy as a working hypothesis rather than a fixed plan. This legitimises reinterpretation as conditions change and reduces the psychological and political cost of updating direction. When plans are provisional, learning stays alive.

Multiple sensing channels: Leaders expand sensemaking capacity by drawing insight from diverse sources, including frontline experience, customer narratives, informal networks, and external signals. This reduces dependence on a single data stream and increases the likelihood that weak signals are noticed before they escalate.

Legitimised challenge and dissent: Sensemaking improves when questioning dominant narratives is expected rather than punished. Formal mechanisms such as red teaming, pre-mortems, and rotating dissent roles protect alternative interpretations from being dismissed as negativity or disloyalty.

Time and space for interpretation: Adaptive sensemaking requires protected time for reflection, dialogue, and pattern recognition. Leaders deliberately create pauses in the operating rhythm to ask what is changing, what feels different, and what assumptions may no longer hold.

Power-aware facilitation: Senior leaders recognise how their authority shapes what others say. By delaying their own interpretations, asking open questions, and inviting multiple readings of the same situation, they reduce premature convergence and allow richer meaning to surface.

Narrative alongside data: Quantitative indicators are complemented with stories, observations, and lived experience. Narrative sensemaking preserves nuance, emotion, and context that dashboards often strip away, expanding the system’s ability to interpret emerging conditions.

Weak signal amplification: Leaders treat anomalies as potential information rather than inconvenience. Small deviations, odd complaints, or isolated failures are explored for what they might indicate about changing system dynamics, rather than dismissed for lack of statistical weight.

Triangulation of interpretation: No single perspective is treated as sufficient. Leaders actively compare data, expert opinion, and experiential insight to identify tensions and inconsistencies. Meaning emerges from the relationship between perspectives, not their alignment.

Tolerance for ambiguity: Adaptive sensemaking depends on leaders being willing to name uncertainty without rushing to resolution. This creates a container in which incomplete understanding can be shared and refined collectively rather than privately suppressed.

Fast feedback loops: Leaders shorten the distance between action and learning. By designing mechanisms that reveal the consequences of decisions quickly, sensemaking remains connected to reality rather than lagging behind it.

Distributed sensemaking responsibility: Interpretation is not reserved for senior roles. Leaders invite teams at multiple levels to articulate what they are seeing and how they interpret emerging conditions. This turns sensemaking into a system capability rather than an executive task.

Psychological safety for interpretation: People only offer tentative or contradictory interpretations when it is safe to do so. Leaders model curiosity, reward honesty about uncertainty, and respond constructively to ambiguity, signalling that sensemaking is valued over certainty.

“We live in a world that is largely beyond our ability to predict.” — Stuart Kauffman

Self-reflection questions for adaptive sensemaking

When you interpret what is happening in your organisation, how often do you treat that interpretation as provisional rather than correct?

Which assumptions are currently shaping your strategy or decisions, and when were they last actively tested against reality?

What recent anomalies, contradictions, or uncomfortable signals have you noticed but not explored, and what might they be pointing to?

How do your position and authority influence which interpretations reach you and which are filtered out before they arrive?

When new information conflicts with the current plan, do you treat it as noise to manage or as data that may require updating your understanding?

Where might you be mistaking clarity for accuracy, or decisiveness for understanding?

How much time do you deliberately create for sensemaking, as distinct from problem-solving or execution?

When uncertainty is high, do you rush to provide interpretation for others, or do you create space for multiple interpretations to be explored?

Whose perspective in the system is best positioned to notice early change, and how directly are you connected to them?

How often do you revisit past decisions to ask whether the reasoning that led to them still holds under current conditions?

When your organisation continues to execute well but results begin to drift, do you look first at performance or at meaning and assumptions?

What would it look like for you to say, out loud, “My current interpretation may be wrong”?

“Reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs.” — Karl E. Weick

6 micro-practice for adaptive sensemaking

1. The pause before irreversible decisions

Before approving a major commitment (investment, restructure, acquisition, public announcement, escalation), introduce a mandatory pause of 24–72 hours unless there is immediate safety risk. During that pause, ask only three questions:

• What has changed since this decision first came onto the table?
• What are we assuming is stable that may no longer be?
• What is hardest to reverse if we are wrong?

No new analysis. No slides. Just sense-checking the reality you are acting into. This practice reduces decisions driven by momentum, sunk cost, or urgency theatre rather than current conditions.

2. One unfiltered reality check per month

Once a month, deliberately speak to someone who is close to the work but far from power. This could be a frontline employee, customer, supplier, or recent joiner. Ask two questions only:

• What feels harder here than it should be?
• What are people working around rather than through?

Do not defend, explain, or promise fixes. Your only job is to listen and notice patterns over time. The return is earlier detection of friction, workarounds, and emerging failure modes that dashboards and reports rarely surface.

3. Frame challenge, not solution challenge

In senior meetings, explicitly assign one person the role of challenging how the situation is being interpreted, not what decision should be made. Their task is to ask:

• What else could plausibly be going on here?
• Whose experience is shaping this story the most?
• What assumption is holding this interpretation together?

This avoids adversarial debate while preventing early framing from becoming invisible truth. It protects leaders from acting on a single coherent narrative that feels convincing but incomplete.

4. Keep a visible “does not make sense yet” list

Maintain a short, shared list of things that feel odd, contradictory, or disproportionate. Examples:

• Effort increased but results stalled
• Customer behaviour that contradicts strategy
• Morale shifts that metrics do not explain

Do not analyse or resolve the list immediately. Review it quarterly and ask:

• Are patterns starting to form?
• What might these signals be pointing to?

This practice stops weak signals being dismissed individually and allows meaning to accumulate over time.

5. Time-limit strategic assumptions

For each major strategic assumption, write it down and attach a review date. At that date, the assumption must be actively tested against current conditions. Examples:

• “Customers will prioritise price over reliability”
• “This regulation will remain stable”
• “We can continue to hire at this rate”

At review, the question is not “Was this wrong?” but “Is this still true enough to rely on?” This prevents outdated beliefs from silently driving new decisions and allows course correction without loss of face.

6. Separate sensemaking from fixing

When a complex issue surfaces, explicitly separate the conversation into two phases:

• Phase one: understanding what is happening
• Phase two: deciding what to do

In phase one, prohibit solution proposals. Ask only:

• What patterns are we seeing?
• What feels unstable or unresolved?
• Where might cause and effect be delayed or indirect?

Senior leaders often jump to action because action signals competence. This discipline ensures action is grounded in shared understanding rather than anxiety or habit, reducing rework and reversals later.

This page is part of my broader work on complexity leadership, where I explore how leaders navigate uncertainty, sense patterns, and make decisions in complex systems.