A colleague misses a deadline. Before the conversation begins, a story may already be forming: they do not care, they cannot handle the role, they are avoiding accountability. The event is real. The meaning attached to it is still an interpretation.
Leaders are paid to interpret incomplete information, so making meaning is not the problem. The risk appears when the story becomes invisible to the storyteller. Once an assumption feels like fact, we listen selectively, ask narrower questions, and act as though the conclusion has already been tested.
This is not a personal flaw—it is how human sensemaking works. Sensemaking describes the process whereby people notice and interpret equivocal events and coordinate a response to clarify what such events mean. (Adapted excerpt from Kudesia (2017), abstract) But the speed of this process creates a hidden danger. Two prominent cognitive biases are confirmation bias, in which an analyst disproportionately considers information that supports the current hypothesis, and anchoring bias, in which an initial judgment is insufficiently revised in the face of new evidence. (Adapted excerpt from Lebiere et al. (2013), Introduction)
The danger is not the interpretation itself. It is the invisibility of it. Mindsets directly affect cognition, behaviour, and decision-making. The practical consequences of not intentionally reflecting upon one's mindset can impact sense-making in unexpected or inimical ways. (Adapted excerpt from Petrie, Lindstrom, and Campbell (2024), “Say what?”)
Reflexivity is the capacity to examine our own meaning-making while we lead. While reflection moves us from perplexity to equilibrium/certainty, reflexivity moves us from equilibrium/certainty to doubt to new possibilities. (Adapted excerpt from Cunliffe (2020), “Reflection and reflexivity: definitions.”) It asks us to separate what happened, what we believe it means, and what else might be true. That pause is not indecision. It is disciplined leadership.
Managers utilize reflexivity in sensegiving to facilitate participants' sensemaking. Reflexive sensegiving is a multivocal process aiming to influence how the sensemaking and construction of meaning evolves. (Adapted excerpt from Kihlberg and Lindberg (2021), abstract) This matters because the key is to work with others to observe what is going on, to tap different data sources and collect different types of data, and to keep prior biases from interfering with your perceptions. (Adapted excerpt from Ancona (2012), p. 8)
This distinction changes everything. Knowing separates observable fact from interpretation. The colleague missed the deadline. That is what you know. The interpretation—why they missed it, what it means about them, what you predict will happen next—that is the story. Reflexivity does not mean doubting yourself into paralysis. It means entering the conversation curious enough to test the story before acting on it as truth.
Before a consequential conversation, write two lines:
Take only the first line into the opening of the conversation. Let curiosity test the second.
Try saying it this way: "I noticed you missed the deadline on this project. Before I draw any conclusions, I want to understand what happened from your perspective. What is going on?"
Notice what shifts. You have named what you observed. You have explicitly separated it from your interpretation. You have created room for another story—the real one—to emerge. You have signaled that you are interested in understanding, not in confirming what you already believe.
Sensemaking involves coming up with a plausible understanding—a map—of a shifting world; testing this map with others through data collection, action, and conversation; and then refining, or abandoning, the map depending on how credible it is.
(Ancona (2012), p. 3) That testing is where leadership lives.
The stories leaders tell themselves shape the stories organizations tell about people. Once a narrative has calcified—this person is not a team player, this department cannot execute, this group is resistant—it becomes nearly impossible to see anything else. People feel it. They adjust to it. And the story becomes self-fulfilling.
Reflexivity disrupts that cycle. It does not require you to abandon your interpretations or pretend you do not have instincts. It requires you to hold your story lightly enough to test it. To separate what happened from what you made it mean. To let the person, the situation, or the system teach you something you did not expect.
That is how leaders see clearly. Not by eliminating interpretation—that is impossible. But by making the interpretation visible, examinable, and subject to reality.