Work is one of the places where people build a story about who they are. A role provides more than tasks. It can provide coherence, contribution, belonging, competence, and a recognizable future. When the work changes, the story can change with it.
That is why a reorganization, new leader, technology rollout, promotion, merger, or reduction in force can feel larger than the event itself. The visible change may concern structure or process. The lived change concerns meaning. People are trying to understand what the change says about the organization, what it says about them, and what kind of person the new environment will reward.
Sensemaking is where the story begins
Sensemaking is the process through which people interpret ambiguous experience well enough to act. It is not a clean sequence in which facts arrive, everyone reaches the same conclusion, and behavior follows. People notice different cues. They connect those cues to prior experiences. They test interpretations in conversation. They watch what leaders do next.
The result is not simply an explanation of an event. It is a working story: This is what is happening here. This is what it means. This is what someone like me should do now.
This does not mean every perception is factually correct. It means perception becomes consequential when people use it to decide whether to speak, withdraw, trust, apply, stay, leave, lead, or protect themselves. A leader may experience a change as a reasonable adjustment. An employee may experience the same change as evidence that expertise no longer matters. Both are responding to the same event, but not to the same story.
Narrative identity organizes experience over time
Narrative identity is the evolving internal story people use to connect remembered experience, present identity, and an imagined future. At work, it helps answer questions such as: What kind of contributor am I? Where do I belong? What have I learned to expect? What future is available to me here?
Recent research gives this idea more precision. In a 2026 study of teachers, Dela Sawatzki and Dorthe Kirkegaard Thomsen examined narrative work identity—the stories people tell about significant experiences across their working lives. Narratives in which difficult experiences moved toward constructive meaning, a pattern the researchers call redemption, predicted later stress resilience. The finding should not be generalized beyond the study without care, but it offers an important signal: how people organize the meaning of work experiences can shape how they meet what comes next.
The point is not to force a positive ending onto harm. It is to recognize that people need enough agency, truth, and coherence to place a difficult experience inside a story they can continue living.
The white space of the story
Between an event and the conclusion a person carries forward is what I think of as the white space of the story. It is the unsettled space where meaning is still being made.
Leaders do not control this process, but they are always participating in it. The speed of communication, the fairness of a process, the quality of an explanation, and the willingness to revise an early interpretation all influence what can be made of the experience.
Identity threat can look like a performance problem
When people cannot locate themselves in the future story of the organization, leaders may see hesitation, defensiveness, reduced initiative, conflict, or disengagement. Those behaviors still have consequences and may need to be addressed. But addressing behavior without understanding the identity question underneath it can deepen the very pattern leaders are trying to change.
Consider an expert whose role is redesigned around a new technology. The organization may describe the change as efficiency. The employee may hear that accumulated knowledge has lost value. A manager who responds only with training may miss the deeper question: If the work I was known for is disappearing, who am I in this organization now?
This is also why meaning cannot be delivered once in an announcement. A 2026 case study of sensemaking during layoffs found that collective interpretation and healing were iterative, identity-driven, emotionally complex, and nonlinear. People revise the story as consequences become visible. Leadership communication must therefore continue after the official message, when lived experience begins to confirm or contradict what was promised.
Leadership is not authorship over other people
Leaders can create context, offer credible explanations, invite competing interpretations, and change the conditions that are producing harm. They cannot responsibly dictate what an experience means to someone else.
The work is not to hand people a polished story and ask them to repeat it. The work is to keep the white space open long enough for evidence, voice, history, and possibility to be considered. That requires leaders to distinguish sensegiving—offering a frame that helps people understand—from narrative control, where one authorized account erases lived experience.
Research on leader identity development similarly treats meaning-making as foundational, drawing together sensemaking, self-authorship, narrative identity, and reflective practice. A recent scoping review shows that leadership identity develops through interpretation and interaction, not merely through acquiring competencies. Who people become as leaders is connected to how they make meaning of what they have lived.
What leaders can do in the white space
Slow the conclusion without dismissing the experience.
Ask what is known, what has been inferred, and what evidence is still missing. Curiosity should widen the story, not invalidate the person telling it.
Make the identity implications discussable.
Do not limit the conversation to tasks and timelines. Ask what the change may alter about contribution, status, expertise, belonging, or future possibility.
Create more than one credible role in the next chapter.
A change story that recognizes only enthusiastic adopters and resistant laggards is too narrow. People may be grieving, testing, translating, protecting others, learning, or reconstructing their role.
Let action repair the narrative.
Words matter, but patterns carry more weight. Fair processes, transparent explanations, real voice, visible learning, and accountable follow-through give people new evidence from which a different story can form.
Before the story hardens
- What story might people be forming about who is valued here?
- What identity, role, or future feels threatened by this change?
- What part of the experience have I explained—and what part have I only announced?
- Whose interpretation is being treated as official before other perspectives are heard?
- What new evidence could our actions provide?
Workplace change always produces more than a new structure. It produces material for a new story. The question for leaders is not whether people will make meaning. They will. The question is whether the organization creates enough truth, voice, fairness, and possibility for that meaning to support both human dignity and the work ahead.