Sensemaking: A Leadership Superpower That Creates Hope In Uncertainty

Forbes

2 days ago

Will you face uncertainty alone with prefabricated answers, or together with the superpower of ... More collective sensemaking. Which leader will you choose to be?
You're three minutes into an all-hands meeting when someone asks the question you've been expecting, "What does AI transformation really mean for our jobs?" The room goes quiet. Twenty pairs of eyes turn to you. They know you don't have the information they seek, yet they're still searching for something. Your instinct is to provide reassurance, share the implementation timeline and outline the training programs. But what if that's exactly the wrong response?
Gallup research reveals that employees need hope more than anything else from their leaders— accounting for 56% of all positive leadership attributes and far exceeding trust (33%), compassion (7%), and stability (4%). But hope that comes from false certainty or sugar-coated predictions is fleeting and does more harm in the end. Hope that endures is created when leaders help people to make sense of complexity, find meaning in change, and discover their own capacity to navigate uncertainty.
The Answer Trap: Why Traditional Leadership Is Failing
Join any leadership meeting today, and you'll witness a familiar pattern: problems are presented, solutions are discussed, and decisions are made. It's a ritual that suggests control and competence. But as the author Jennifer Garvey Berger observes in her groundbreaking work on leadership, "The most effective leaders are no longer the ones with the best answers, but the ones who host the best conversations."
This isn't just about communication style. It's about recognizing that we've moved from the Information Age to what we might call the Interpretation Age. Information is ubiquitous; making sense of it is a scarce resource. Organizational psychologist Karl Weick demonstrated through his pioneering research on sensemaking in the 1960s that humans don't simply process information; they actively construct meaning from ambiguous cues, and the sensemaking process is fundamentally social. Sensemaking isn't a one-way street from leader to follower.
The Bidirectional Nature of Sensemaking
As Berger says, "Other people are likely to be making sense of the world differently from ourselves, and their different sense of the world can help us build a bigger picture of the situation before we make decisions."
Rather than attempting to distill and dispense meaning in complexity, leaders should actively seek and surface diverse perspectives within their organizations. Weick believed that the best defense against complexity is not simplicity but organized complexity—varied, diverse, partially connected responses that enable learning and adaptation. A single leader's perspective, no matter how brilliant, cannot match the interpretive richness of a diverse team.
When that employee asks about AI's impact on jobs, they're not just seeking information; they're also offering their perspective, concerns and their reading of the situation. Traditional leaders miss this gold mine of insight by rushing to provide answers. Sensemaking leaders recognize the question itself as valuable data about how the organization is interpreting change and use it as an opportunity to gather more perspectives from the team.
Building Your Sensemaking Toolkit: Three Transformative Practices
Sensemaking is a learnable skill that can transform how leaders help their teams navigate uncertainty:
Instead of rushing to provide answers, master the art of asking questions that generate new understanding.
In Practice: When a team member comes to you with a problem, resist the urge to solve it. Instead, try:
Move from information transfer to meaning creation. This involves creating structured conversations that allow multiple perspectives to surface and interact.
In Practice: Replace traditional update meetings with sensemaking sessions:
Help teams see situations through multiple lenses, expanding their repertoire of responses. This involves consciously shifting between different frames of reference.
In Practice: When facing a challenge, explore different frames:
From Sense-Giver to Sense-Maker: Your Leadership Evolution
The shift from answer-giving to sensemaking is a fundamental evolution in leadership identity. It requires what Robert Kegan calls a "subject-object shift": moving from being the subject who has answers to being someone who can observe and facilitate the process of answer-finding.
Your next meeting, your next crisis, your next "I don't know" moment—each is an opportunity to practice sensemaking rather than answer-giving. In a world where change is the only constant, the leaders who thrive won't be those with the most answers, but those with the best processes for finding them.
The question isn't whether you'll face uncertainty—we all are, right now. The question is whether you'll face it alone with prefabricated answers, or together with the superpower of collective sensemaking. Which leader will you choose to be?