The ability to create shared understanding and coherence across a system when meaning is uncertain, contested, or still forming.

Leaders skilled in collective sensemaking understand that in complex adaptive systems, interpretation is not an individual act. Meaning emerges through interaction, conversation, and shared narrative. While adaptive sensemaking focuses on how a leader updates their own understanding in real time, collective sensemaking focuses on how understanding is formed together so that coordinated action becomes possible.

When uncertainty rises, organisations rarely stall because leaders lack insight. They stall because people are operating from different, unspoken interpretations of what is happening, what matters, and what action means. Collective sensemaking addresses this gap. Leaders do not impose a single story or wait for perfect clarity. Instead, they convene dialogue that surfaces multiple perspectives, integrates signals from across the system, and builds a coherent, workable understanding that people can act on together.

When leaders enable collective sensemaking well, confusion becomes productive rather than paralysing. Alignment improves without forced agreement, action proceeds without false certainty, and the system retains its capacity to adapt as meaning continues to evolve.

“Sensemaking is about the social construction of meaning.” — Karl E. Weick,

Why collective sensemaking matters

In complex adaptive systems, coordination fails long before competence does. People are rarely confused because they lack information; they are confused because they are operating from different, unspoken interpretations of the same situation. When meaning fragments, action fragments with it.

Collective sensemaking matters because large-scale action depends on shared coherence, not individual insight. Without a common working understanding of what is happening and why it matters, teams make locally rational decisions that collide at the system level. Effort increases, alignment decreases, and leaders experience resistance that cannot be solved by clearer instructions or tighter controls.

When uncertainty is high, organisations instinctively look to leaders for direction. If leaders respond by issuing conclusions rather than convening interpretation, they unintentionally narrow the system’s intelligence. Important signals are suppressed, alternative readings disappear, and premature certainty hardens into brittle narratives that cannot adapt as conditions change.

Collective sensemaking allows leaders to create movement without manufacturing certainty. By bringing people together to surface perspectives, test emerging narratives, and build a plausible shared understanding, leaders enable coordinated action while keeping meaning flexible. This preserves trust, reduces hidden disagreement, and allows the system to adapt as reality continues to unfold rather than forcing alignment around a story that no longer fits.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”— George Bernard Shaw

What good and bad looks like for collective sensemaking

What weak collective sensemaking looks like (individual interpretation)

What strong collective sensemaking looks like (shared meaning)

Private interpretation: Leaders make sense of the situation largely on their own, then communicate conclusions downstream.

Public interpretation: Leaders convene others to interpret what is happening together before conclusions are drawn.

Assumed alignment: Believes that once direction is stated, understanding is shared. Differences in interpretation remain invisible.

Explicit alignment work: Actively checks whether people share the same understanding of what is happening and why it matters.

Single narrative dominance: One compelling story, often from the most senior or confident voice, crowds out alternative readings.

Multiple perspectives held: Encourages competing interpretations to coexist long enough for a more robust shared picture to emerge.

Premature convergence: Pushes quickly towards agreement to reduce ambiguity or tension.

Deliberate divergence before convergence: Allows disagreement and uncertainty to surface before shaping a coherent narrative.

Debate and advocacy: Conversations focus on defending positions and winning arguments.

Dialogue and inquiry: Conversations focus on exploring meaning, testing assumptions, and building understanding together.

Data without meaning: Shares metrics, updates, and dashboards without integrating them into a shared story.

Narrative sensemaking: Connects data, experience, and context into a plausible story people can act on.

Silenced signals: People with less power, proximity, or confidence hesitate to share their view of what is happening.

Voices deliberately surfaced: Leaders actively invite perspectives from across levels, functions, and edges of the system.

False clarity: Presents certainty to reassure, even when understanding is incomplete or contested.

Plausible coherence: Offers a “good enough for now” shared interpretation while keeping it open to revision.

Confusion treated as failure: Discomfort, ambiguity, or disagreement are seen as problems to eliminate quickly.

Confusion treated as information: Ambiguity and tension are used as signals about what the system is struggling to resolve.

Coordination by instruction: Relies on directives and control to force alignment when interpretations differ.

Coordination by meaning: Enables aligned action because people understand the situation in broadly the same way.

Static story: Once agreed, the narrative is defended even as conditions shift.

Evolving story: Shared understanding is revisited and updated as the system responds and new signals emerge.

Leader as narrator: The leader defines reality and expects others to follow it.

Leader as convener: The leader hosts the process through which reality is interpreted collectively.

“Groups become intelligent when they think together.” — Peter Senge

Barriers to collective sensemaking

Individual sensemaking bias: Leaders are trained, rewarded, and promoted for forming their own judgement quickly. Over time, this creates a habit of interpreting situations privately and then communicating conclusions, rather than convening shared interpretation. Collective sensemaking is unintentionally bypassed in favour of efficiency.

Pressure to provide clarity too early: When uncertainty rises, leaders feel pressure to reduce anxiety by offering answers. This leads to premature narratives that close down exploration. The organisation aligns to a story before it has been sufficiently tested, making later revision politically and emotionally difficult.

Hierarchical gravity: Power shapes participation. When leaders speak early or strongly, alternative interpretations collapse. People adapt their views to match perceived expectations, not because they agree, but because disagreement feels unsafe or pointless. The system loses its ability to sense itself.

Conflating alignment with agreement: Many leaders equate effective leadership with consensus. As a result, they push conversations towards agreement rather than coherence. Differences in interpretation are smoothed over instead of examined, leaving misalignment hidden until it surfaces as execution failure.

Debate-trained cultures: Organisations often reward argument, persuasion, and certainty. Meetings become arenas for advocacy rather than inquiry. In these conditions, people defend positions instead of exploring meaning, and sensemaking turns into rhetorical competition rather than collective understanding.

Over-reliance on data as a substitute for meaning: Dashboards, metrics, and reports are treated as self-explanatory. Leaders share information without integrating it into a narrative that connects context, experience, and implication. People leave with data but no shared sense of what it means or how to act.

Suppression of ambiguity: Confusion, doubt, and discomfort are often treated as signs of weakness or poor leadership. Leaders may unconsciously signal that uncertainty is unwelcome, causing people to withhold tentative or emerging interpretations that are essential in complex systems.

Speed and urgency bias: Sustained urgency compresses dialogue. Leaders default to instruction because conversation feels slow. Collective sensemaking is sacrificed for momentum, even when momentum is heading in the wrong direction.

Social risk of speaking up: Collective sensemaking depends on people voicing partial, uncertain, or unpopular interpretations. In many environments, doing so carries social risk. Silence becomes rational, and the dominant story persists unchallenged.

Fragmented interaction patterns: Remote work, functional silos, and transactional meetings reduce informal dialogue where sensemaking naturally occurs. Without deliberate convening, meaning fragments across the system, and coordination weakens.

Leader identity tied to being right: For experienced leaders, credibility has often been built on judgement and decisiveness. Shifting to a posture of inquiry can feel like a loss of authority. When identity is tied to having the answer, collective sensemaking is unconsciously resisted.

Retrospective comfort: Organisations are good at explaining events after outcomes are known. This creates an illusion of shared understanding while masking the absence of real-time sensemaking. Leaders mistake good stories after the fact for effective interpretation during uncertainty.

“Conversation is the medium through which collective intelligence emerges.” — Etienne Wenger

Enablers of collective sensemaking

Delay interpretation deliberately: Collective sensemaking improves when leaders resist speaking first. By holding back their own reading of the situation, leaders allow other interpretations to surface before gravity takes effect. This simple discipline prevents premature convergence and expands what the system can see.

Frame uncertainty as legitimate work: Leaders enable sensemaking when they explicitly name uncertainty as normal and necessary, rather than something to be resolved quickly. Saying “we do not fully understand this yet” creates permission for exploration instead of performance. Ambiguity becomes shared rather than privately managed.

Ask meaning-seeking questions, not solution-seeking ones: Questions such as “What are you seeing?”, “What feels inconsistent?”, or “What does this mean from where you sit?” shift the conversation from advocacy to inquiry. Leaders who consistently ask interpretive questions signal that understanding precedes action.

Create containers for dialogue, not debate: Collective sensemaking requires spaces where ideas are explored rather than defended. Leaders enable this by setting simple interaction rules: no interruptions, no immediate rebuttal, curiosity before judgement. This changes how power operates in the room.

Surface multiple interpretations before moving forward: Rather than asking for a single view, leaders explicitly invite contrasting readings of the same situation. Naming differences early prevents false alignment and allows a more coherent shared understanding to form over time.

Use narrative to integrate data: Leaders help meaning emerge by translating data into stories that connect context, action, and implication. They do not replace data with opinion, but weave quantitative and qualitative signals into a narrative people can orient around.

Make power visible and manage its impact: Leaders acknowledge how their role shapes what others say and do. By explicitly inviting challenge and protecting dissent, they reduce the distorting effects of hierarchy and keep the sensemaking field open.

Invite perspectives from the edges: Collective sensemaking improves when leaders actively draw in people closer to the work, the customer, or the point of friction. These perspectives often notice change earlier and with less filtering than central roles.

Allow coherence without consensus: Leaders enable coordinated action without forcing agreement. They summarise what is shared, name what remains different, and clarify what can be acted on now. This keeps momentum without collapsing meaning prematurely.

Revisit and update the shared story regularly: Sensemaking is not a one-off event. Leaders reinforce it by returning to the question “Does this still hold?” and updating the narrative as conditions evolve. The story stays alive rather than hardening into doctrine.

Model learning in public: When leaders visibly change their view in response to new insight, they legitimise adaptation. This demonstrates that updating understanding is strength, not weakness, and keeps the system responsive rather than defensive.

Protect time for sensemaking: Collective sensemaking does not happen accidentally at senior levels. Leaders who schedule time explicitly for interpretation, reflection, and dialogue signal that understanding is part of the work, not a luxury.

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

Self-reflection questions for collective sensemaking 

When uncertainty is high, do you create space for multiple interpretations to surface before moving towards action?

Do you notice when your authority shapes what others say, and do you deliberately counteract that effect?

Do your questions open up meaning (“What might be going on here?”), or do they narrow it (“What’s the answer?”)?

When perspectives differ, do you treat the difference as friction to resolve or as information about how the system is experiencing itself?

Do you name uncertainty openly, or do you feel compelled to provide clarity before shared understanding has formed?

Do you actively draw insight from those closest to the work, or does interpretation mostly happen at the centre?

When a dominant narrative takes hold, do you protect space for alternative stories to be voiced?

Do you focus on building coherence that enables coordinated action, or do you push prematurely for consensus?

Have you visibly updated your interpretation in front of others when new insight emerged, and what signal did that send?

If someone observed your leadership conversations, would they say you are directing decisions or shaping shared meaning?

“Coordination depends less on agreement than on a shared understanding of differences.” — Edgar H. Schein

Micro-practices for collective sensemaking

1. Delay narrative closure, not action

In moments of uncertainty, leaders often rush to provide a clean story to create reassurance. This stabilises anxiety but prematurely locks meaning in place. Instead, deliberately separate action from narrative closure. Act where needed, but signal explicitly that the interpretation is still forming. For example: “We are acting on this now, but our understanding of what this really means is still evolving.”

This keeps the organisation moving without forcing alignment around an incomplete story. The return is avoiding situations where people execute flawlessly against a narrative that later proves wrong, requiring painful reversals and loss of credibility.

2. Make interpretations visible before decisions

Before moving into decision-making, ask people to state how they are interpreting the situation, not what they recommend doing. For example:

  • “I’m interpreting this as a coordination issue.”
  • “I’m reading this as a trust signal.”
  • “I see this as a capacity constraint.”
  • “I think this is really about conflicting incentives.”

Capture these interpretations side by side without resolving them immediately. Do not debate yet. This practice surfaces hidden divergence early. Collective sensemaking fails most often not because leaders disagree on decisions, but because they are acting from different meanings while believing they are aligned.

3. Separate meaning-making from problem-solving

In complex situations, problem-solving too early narrows perception. Solutions pull interpretation towards whatever makes the solution seem sensible. Explicitly run conversations in two phases:

  • First phase: collective interpretation
  • Second phase: action and response

In the first phase, prohibit solution proposals. Focus only on patterns, tensions, contradictions, and shifts. When meaning begins to stabilise, then move to action. The return is fewer confident actions that later unravel because the system was misunderstood.

4. Design for coherence, not consensus

Instead of pushing for agreement, design for coherence. At the end of a sensemaking conversation, summarise:

  • What we understand well enough to act on together
  • What remains unclear but tolerable
  • What interpretations are being held provisionally

Collective sensemaking does not require everyone to agree. It requires enough shared meaning to coordinate action without pretending certainty. The payoff is progress without forced alignment and adaptability without fragmentation.

5. Use narrative checkpoints instead of status updates

Replace some progress updates with narrative checkpoints. Ask the group to articulate:

  • What story is forming about where we are
  • How that story has shifted since last time
  • What informal stories are circulating at the edges

This keeps leadership connected to how meaning is actually forming, not just how work is progressing. The return is earlier detection of misalignment, fear, or false confidence before they harden into resistance or disengagement.

6. Regulate your own meaning-making pace

Collective sensemaking is heavily shaped by the leader’s behaviour. When leaders speak early, strongly, or conclusively, meaning collapses around their interpretation. Practise delayed interpretation:

  • speak later in the conversation
  • offer interpretations tentatively
  • explicitly invite alternatives
  • revise your view in public when new meaning emerges

This is not facilitation technique. It is power discipline. The return is a system that continues to sense itself rather than orienting prematurely around authority.

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.