I was tempted to describe change as similar to “Brownian motion” but, well, that just felt too clever, a little too precious. And, besides, the point I wanted to make is much simpler than that: Change moves through organizations by contact. People talk. They interpret. They misinterpret. They compare notes. They test the official story against what they are actually experiencing. Then they decide what they think is really happening.
That’s where change starts to become real. Not in the deck. Not in the announcement. Not even in the beautifully crafted communication plan. Those things matter, but they aren’t control mechanisms. They are inputs into sensemaking.
We often talk about communication as if meaning travels intact from sender to receiver. But in organizations, messages arrive surrounded by history. They are interpreted through prior disappointment, workload pressure, informal influence, manager credibility, peer reaction, operational inconvenience, and the memory of what happened the last time leaders said, “But this one is different!”
The reality? People aren’t blank slates waiting for a message. Every change lands in a living interpretive environment. That’s why the same change can mean very different things in different parts of the organization. For one team, it may mean progress. For another, loss of control. For another, more work. For another, exposure. For another, just an added initiative that will fade once attention shifts.
While the interaction may be accidental, the interpretation rarely is. People bring memory to the encounter. They know which leaders follow through and which ones “perform” enthusiasm. They know whether feedback is welcomed or punished. They know whether workarounds are quietly rewarded. They know whether the official story matches operational reality. This is where change management has to get more honest.
If meaning is formed through interaction, then change management cannot be reduced to messaging, training, stakeholder maps, and adoption dashboards. The work is not to pretend every interaction can be engineered. It is to improve the conditions under which better sense can form. That may sound abstract, but it is actually intensely practical.
It means preparing managers for the conversations they will actually have, not just giving them talking points. A manager who cannot explain what is changing, why it matters, what is still uncertain, and what support exists will fill the gap with hesitation, ambiguity, or improvisation. And people will read that hesitation as information.
It means paying attention to weak signals before they become loud problems. Repeated “basic” questions are not always a communication failure. They may be evidence that the change is being understood differently than intended. Silence in a meeting rarely means agreement. It probably means people are doing their real sensemaking somewhere else.
It means creating feedback loops that are not performative. Asking for feedback is easy. Doing something visible with it is where credibility is built. If people raise concerns and nothing changes, they learn something. If they raise concerns and the team responds honestly, even when the answer is imperfect, they learn something else.
It means watching for the gap between the official narrative and operational reality. If leaders say the change will simplify work, but users experience more rework, the local interpretation will win. If the project says the process is ready, but frontline teams are still relying on workarounds, the workaround becomes the truth. People believe what the system teaches them, not only what the message tells them.
It means equipping informal influencers, not just formal sponsors. The persons people trust may not be on the org chart in any meaningful way. They may be the experienced dispatcher, the respected analyst, the skeptical supervisor, or the person everyone quietly asks, “What do you think of this?” Ignore those people and you ignore a key part of the sensemaking system.
It means helping leaders respond without defensiveness. When people question the change, they are often trying to reconcile the story with their reality. Treat every challenge as resistance and you shut down the very information you need. The better move is to ask: “what are they seeing that we are missing?”
And, finally, it means intervening while the change is still becoming, not after the dashboard turns red. Not after adoption stalls. Not after the rumor hardens into belief. Intervene earlier, when the interpretation is still forming and can still be shaped.
The goal is not to control every interaction. It is to understand that every interaction has the potential to shape what the change becomes. Change is more interaction-dependent than most methods admit. And that may be the main reason it so often refuses to move in those straight lines we like draw for it.