Leadership When Meaning Becomes the Work: Sense-Making, Organisational Design, and Authority in Persistent Uncertainty

Leadership’s new core task: sense-making.

Across many sectors, leadership is undergoing a quiet redefinition. This shift is often described through the familiar language of agility, adaptability, or resilience. While these terms suggest responsiveness, they often leave unexamined a more fundamental change beneath them: a shift not just in how organizations act, but in how they understand what is happening. The core task of leadership is moving away from directing action and toward stabilizing meaning. In environments where signals are fragmented, causal relationships are uncertain, and conditions evolve faster than institutional frameworks can adjust, the primary challenge is no longer deciding what to do, but determining what is happening.

Historically, leadership authority rested on decision-making capacity. Decisions implied a shared understanding of context: that the nature of the problem was broadly agreed that relevant information could be distinguished from noise, and that outcomes would eventually clarify whether judgement had been sound. Even disagreement occurred within a relatively stable frame. Today, these assumptions are increasingly fragile. Decisions still occur, but their legitimacy depends less on outcomes alone and more on whether the interpretation that preceded them is seen as credible, proportionate, and contextually grounded.

Sense-making, in this context, is not an individual cognitive skill or a communication technique. It is a systemic function through which organizations establish provisional coherence under conditions of uncertainty. It involves framing ambiguity, holding competing interpretations without forcing premature closure, and articulating what remains unknown in ways that allow coordinated action to proceed. Authority therefore begins to shift toward those able to sustain meaning in motion, rather than impose clarity before it can be justified.

This does not eliminate the need for decisiveness. Rather, decisiveness is repositioned within a broader interpretive process. Leadership becomes less about closing questions and more about structuring how questions are held. The work lies in enabling shared orientation to reality, even when that reality resists stable description. In this sense, leadership authority increasingly rests not on command, but on interpretive legitimacy.

Organisational resistance to unstable meaning

If sense-making is becoming central, it is striking how poorly many organizations are designed to support it. Resistance is often attributed to culture, incentives, or individual reluctance to change. While these factors matter, they obscure a more fundamental dependency. Organizations rely on stable meaning to function, particularly large institutions, policy-driven environments, and hybrid organizations where legitimacy is continuously negotiated across multiple audiences.

Resource allocation depends on agreed priorities. Accountability depends on identifiable causes and timelines. Legitimacy depends on coherence between stated purpose, action, and outcome. Each of these relies on a relatively stable interpretation of reality. When meaning becomes fluid, these foundations weaken simultaneously.

Under such conditions, organizations often respond by accelerating closure. Ambiguity is treated as a threat rather than a signal. Interpretive questions are reframed as operational problems, and uncertainty is compressed into simplified narratives that allow existing processes to continue. Change is permitted only insofar as it can be translated into familiar categories, metrics, or governance structures.

This produces a particular form of inertia. Organizations may acknowledge transformation rhetorically while resisting the instability of meaning that transformation entails. The issue is not opposition to change itself, but discomfort with environments in which justification becomes difficult and authority appears exposed.

From an organisational design perspective, this resistance is structural rather than attitudinal. Performance systems reward clarity, speed, and confidence. Reflection is crowded out by delivery cycles. Provisional understanding is penalized as indecision. The organization demands stable meaning while operating in conditions that continually undermine it.

Leadership sense-making therefore encounters friction not because leaders lack skill, but because organisational systems are optimized for certainty. Interpretation becomes an informal activity rather than an institutional function. Over time, this misalignment erodes the organization’s capacity to engage complexity without retreating into oversimplification.

Ambiguity exposes power structures

Ambiguity does more than disrupt understanding; it exposes how power operates. When meaning is stable, authority can remain largely implicit. When meaning is fractured, the question of who gets to define reality becomes visible.

In uncertain conditions, interpretation itself becomes a form of power. Those whose framing is accepted gain influence over priorities, resources, and legitimacy. Conversely, interpretations that fall outside recognized frames are marginalized, regardless of their empirical grounding. Ambiguity therefore redistributes authority, not evenly, but along existing lines of trust, status, and institutional recognition.

This redistribution is particularly evident in hybrid and distributed systems. Signals emerge unevenly across geographies and functions. Local conditions diverge, while central narratives struggle to relevance. Authority no longer flows solely from position, but from perceived proximity to unfolding reality. Those understood to be closer to events gain interpretive credibility, even as formal hierarchies persist.

Crucially, ambiguity also reveals that uncertainty is tolerated. In many organizations, senior actors are granted permission to not know without reputational risk, while uncertainty expressed by less established voices is interpreted as weakness or lack of competence. Power operates through this differential permission to not know. Sense-making authority is therefore inseparable from legitimacy, status, and organisational positioning.

From an organisational design perspective, this raises important questions about whose interpretations are surfaced, who’s filtered, and how meaning is consolidated. Leadership is exercised not only through decisions, but through the structuring of interpretive space. Who is invited into sense-making processes, whose signals are amplified, and whose doubts are set aside all shapes how organizations understand themselves and their environment.

Conclusion

As uncertainty becomes structural, leadership is reconfigured at a fundamental level. Its core task shifts from deciding what to do to establishing what is happening. This is not a softer form of authority, but a different one, grounded in interpretation, legitimacy, and organisational design.

Organizations that attempt to preserve stable meaning while operating in conditions of permanent transition place increasing strain on their own structures. Not because they fail to act, but because the effort to maintain coherence through premature closure makes authority more brittle, accountability more performative, and learning more difficult.

In this sense, the challenge facing leadership today is not primarily about performance or resilience. It is about sense-making: the capacity to sustain meaning long enough for systems to remain oriented in motion, and to act without pretending that certainty has returned.