Leaders make sense of and engage with transformative organizational change through a complex process primarily driven by their own sensemaking. This process is not straightforward and is influenced by their existing beliefs, experiences, and the social context, according to Ronald Skea, author of “Leadership, Organizational Change, and Sensemaking (2021)”. Successful change in thinking begins with how leaders themselves make sense of the need for change and the challenges it poses to their existing thinking. Leaders don’t inherently resist change but, rather, resist what they perceive as “bad ideas,” especially those that challenge their long-held beliefs.
Transformative change interventions often present “heretical ideas” that challenge leaders’ current orthodoxies about how to lead and organize. Methodologies like systems thinking and agile, while perhaps not explicitly postmodern, have underlying principles that challenge traditional modernist views of organizations and change. These methodologies question assumptions about organizations being stable entities, leaders managing change, leadership being a fixed role, and organizations being fixed things.
Leaders approach potential change initiatives with their existing preunderstanding, which is shaped by their prior experience. This preunderstanding acts as a filter through which they interpret new information. For example, leaders often initially make sense of a transformation methodology by comparing it to previous change projects they have experienced. This can lead them to view the methodology through a traditional, project management lens, expecting specific outcomes and timescales.
Leaders’ deeply held beliefs about what is true or real (ontology) and their basic concepts and beliefs about a particular aspect of reality (paradigms) significantly impact how they sense the need for change and engage with interventions. Transformational methodologies aim to impact leader paradigms and mindsets, which can have implications for their wider ontological perspectives. Challenges to these fundamental beliefs can be significant.
Engagement with interventions or exposure to data that conflicts with their current understanding can create cognitive dissonance. This discomfort, which arises when behaviors and attitudes are dissonant, can lead to a situation where leaders can no longer rationalize their current behaviors. This can trigger moments of sudden realization or “ah-ha! moments” where their current thinking is revealed to be flawed. These moments are often described as dramatic turning points.
While interventions may aim for a complete “paradigm shift” from old to new thinking, the reality is often a displacement of concepts where elements of both modernist and postmodern paradigms co-exist. Leaders may adopt new concepts (like organizing as a verb) while still using language associated with old concepts (like organizational structures as nouns). Paradoxically, leaders’ post-engagement sensemaking stories often frame this complex process as a clear, one-way journey from an “old world” to a “new world,” a trope that simplifies the messy reality.
When confronted with challenging data or ideas, leaders may engage in rationalization and defensive reasoning to maintain psychological congruence. This is a predictable reaction to cognitive dissonance and can manifest as blaming others or arguing for the continued validity of existing practices despite evidence of problems21…. Understanding this is crucial for interventionists.
Skea posits that transformative change aligns with a view of reality as continuous flux. From this perspective, organizations are constantly “organizing” to create temporary order, and change is a pervasive, permanent state. Leadership in this context is not about controlling or planning specific outcomes, but rather about navigating and responding appropriately to the continuous stream of change. This contrasts sharply with the modernist, planned approach where change is seen as an occasional, manageable event.
Changing leader mindsets is portrayed as not something that has easy ‘how to’ recipes or can be achieved by following simplistic step-by-step models. It is a complex, messy, and iterative process influenced by multiple sensemaking elements. The leader’s thinking is seen as directly responsible for the organizational system and its performance. When data reveals poor performance, leaders accepting responsibility for this, without rationalizing, is a significant step in mindset change.
Leaders engage with transformative change not just by implementing new models or processes, but by undertaking a personal and social sensemaking journey that challenges their fundamental beliefs about reality, leadership, and the organization itself. This process involves navigating cognitive dissonance, interpreting experiences through existing preunderstanding, and often results in a complex blending of old and new concepts rather than a clean break. The prevalent high failure rates* of change programs suggest that many traditional approaches fail to account for the profound nature of this sensemaking process and the reality of continuous flux.
Sources:
Skea, R. (2021). “Leadership, organizational change and sensemaking”. Routledge.
* In Skea’s view, change programs often fail to meet their stated objectives on time and/or on budget for several interconnected reasons, primarily stemming from a fundamental mismatch between the underlying assumptions of many traditional change methodologies and the actual nature of change itself, coupled with the complex process of leader sensemaking.