Change depends on more than communication: the importance of shared understanding

Last year, a mid-sized professional services firm rolled out what leadership called a “clear and compelling” transformation. There were strategy documents, town halls, leadership briefings, FAQs, newsletters and an intranet hub. The message was consistent: the firm was shifting to a more client-centric, collaborative operating model. Yet six months in, partners were still billing individually, teams were hoarding client relationships, and the new collaboration tools sat largely unused. Leadership assumed the problem was resistance. In reality, it was misalignment. One person heard opportunity. Another heard cost-cutting. One saw a new way of working. Another saw another initiative that would fade.

This reveals something deeper than communication. Change depends on shared understanding. Shared understanding is not complete agreement, identical views or universal enthusiasm for the change. It is the point at which people hold enough common meaning about what is happening, why it matters, what is expected and how they should respond that they can coordinate action. That sounds straightforward. In practice, it is one of the harder things organisations create.

We do not experience change in quite the same way

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, particularly in Philosophical Investigations, illuminates why. Wittgenstein argued that language does not simply label a fixed external reality that is the same for everyone. Words gain their meaning through use within particular social contexts and activities, what he called “language-games.” Meaning is shaped by the shared practices, conventions and expectations in which words are employed, not by private mental objects or a one-to-one correspondence with things “out there.”

The significance for organisations is considerable. Consider a word such as “transformation.” To a chief executive it may mean a fundamental shift in the business model. To a programme director it may mean a portfolio of projects. To a technology leader it may mean replacing a legacy platform. To a frontline employee it may mean learning a new system and changing daily work. The word is the same; the meaning is not necessarily the same.

The same divergence occurs with terms such as accountability, empowerment, customer-centricity, agility, culture, innovation, strategy and leadership. Organisations often assume that because people use the same words, they are talking about the same thing. They may not be.

People are not simply responding to objective facts. They interpret those facts through existing experience, assumptions, relationships, incentives and expectations. The change itself may be real. What the change means is partly constructed through the conversations people have about it.

Change creates a sense-making problem

This connects directly to the organisational literature on sensemaking. Karl Weick and later researchers describe sensemaking as the process through which people interpret ambiguous, unfamiliar or unexpected situations and develop plausible explanations that enable them to act. Maitlis and Christianson emphasise that sensemaking becomes especially important when people encounter situations that are novel, confusing or inconsistent with prior expectations.

Organisational change creates these conditions almost by definition. Structures, strategies, technologies, markets, roles and performance expectations that once seemed stable are no longer stable. Sometimes the organisation’s understanding of itself is shifting. People therefore begin asking, explicitly or otherwise: What is happening? Why now? What does it mean for me and for us? What will be different? What is expected of me? What is no longer expected? What happens if I get this wrong?

These questions are often signs of sensemaking rather than resistance. If leaders treat every question as opposition, they may respond by communicating harder: more presentations, more emails, more explanations. But if the underlying issue is that people have not yet developed a sufficiently shared understanding, more information alone will not resolve it.

Information is not understanding

Leaders frequently believe they have communicated because they have transmitted information. Transmission and understanding are not the same. A strategy can be clearly written but poorly understood. Despite excellent documentation a programme can still generate divergent interpretations. And, a leader can explain the rationale repeatedly and still find that people have constructed different stories.

Behavioural psychology shows that people do not receive information neutrally. They interpret it through existing beliefs, experiences and mental shortcuts. Under uncertainty they pay particular attention to cues about risk, threat, control and what might happen next. A change that looks straightforward from the executive suite can feel quite different further down the organisation. An executive may see simplification of the operating model; an employee may hear team reductions; a programme team may hear another scope change; a customer-facing team may hear more work with fewer resources. These interpretations need not involve deliberate distortion. They often simply reflect different positions in the system. Shared understanding therefore cannot be created merely by telling people what the change is. It has to be developed through interaction.

Shared mental models help people coordinate

A related body of research concerns shared mental models. Drawing from cognitive and team psychology, a mental model is a person’s internal representation of how something works. A shared mental model exists when team members hold sufficiently similar understandings of the task, the environment, their roles and how they need to work together.

Research originating with Cannon-Bowers, Salas and colleagues showed that shared mental models support effective teamwork. Later studies linked convergence in team members’ mental models with better team processes and performance. The key word is sufficiently. Shared understanding does not require identical thinking. Organisations would likely be less effective if everyone thought the same. The objective is coordination: enough common understanding of the goal, how work connects, what decisions mean and how to respond when circumstances change.

In an emergency response team, members bring different expertise and perspectives. They do not need identical knowledge, but they need a shared grasp of the situation, the objective, respective roles and the signals that require action. Without that, coordination breaks down. Organisations experience the same dynamic during transformation, except the “emergency” is often less obvious, allowing people to keep working while holding fundamentally different interpretations of the change.

Misalignment often hides in ordinary language

One of the most useful things leaders can do is listen for apparently simple words that conceal different meanings. “Ownership” may mean responsibility for an outcome, authority to decide, accountability when things go wrong, taking initiative, coordinating others or accepting responsibility for decisions made elsewhere. “Empowerment” may mean greater discretion, removal of approval layers, delegated decisions, more information or expectations of greater responsibility. The word itself does not resolve the question. The organisation has to establish what the term means in practice. This is where leadership becomes more than simply transmitting meaning; it's about helping the organisation construct enough shared meaning to act.

Leadership is partly the work of creating meaning

Management provides structures, plans, processes, resources and controls. Leadership also involves helping people understand where they are going, why it matters and how their efforts connect to something larger. John Kotter’s work on leading change has long emphasised the importance of a common understanding of the desired future. The power of a vision depends not only on its existence but on people across the organisation understanding the direction well enough to contribute to it. There is a subtle but important difference between saying “This is the strategy” and asking “What do you think this strategy means for how we work?” The first assumes meaning can be transferred, second recognises that meaning has to be worked through.

People need to be able to test their understanding

Psychological safety, as researched by Amy Edmondson, becomes relevant here. It is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Her work links psychological safety to learning behaviours such as asking questions, discussing mistakes and seeking feedback.

Understanding is rarely achieved in a single conversation. People need to be able to say: “I don’t understand.” “I think we are saying something different from last month.” “What does this mean for my team?” “I don’t think this will work in practice.” “Can you explain what has actually changed?” These are not obstacles; they can be mechanisms through which shared understanding is created. If people cannot ask them, leaders may receive apparent agreement without genuine understanding. Silence can be misleading - a quiet room does not necessarily signal alignment; it may signal uncertainty, deference, fatigue or unfinished sense-making.

Shared understanding does not mean consensus

An organisation does not need universal agreement before it can move. Legitimate disagreements about priorities, risks, methods or consequences may and often should remain visible. The objective is not to erase difference but to make differences understandable.

A leadership team can disagree about preferred approaches while sharing an understanding of the problem being addressed, the required outcome, the constraints, decision rights, what is non-negotiable, where experimentation is possible and how progress will be assessed. That is a more useful form of alignment than superficial consensus. A practical test is not “Does everyone agree?” but “Could people explain the situation, the intended outcome and their role in it in broadly compatible ways?” If they cannot, the organisation may have agreement on paper without alignment in practice.

The real test happens in behaviour

Shared understanding is not demonstrated by people repeating the language of the strategy. It is demonstrated through behaviour. An organisation may declare itself more customer-focused while decisions continue to prioritise internal convenience. It may announce strengthened accountability while decision rights remain unclear. It may encourage innovation while punishing failed experiments. It may promote collaboration while performance measures reward individual or functional optimisation.

Wittgenstein’s insight remains useful: meaning is connected to use. In organisational terms, what a concept means is partly revealed by what people actually do with it. If leaders speak of empowerment yet require approval for every meaningful decision, the lived meaning of empowerment is not what the strategy document claims. Shared understanding must therefore connect what we say, what we expect and what we do. When those three are inconsistent, people resolve the contradiction themselves, and they will.

Creating shared understanding requires conversation, not just communication

Leaders can usefully shift from asking only “How do we communicate the change?” to asking “What does the organisation need to understand in order to act differently?” That produces a different set of questions and practices:

1. Specify what needs to be understood. Not only the vision, but the problem, the reason for change, the intended outcome, what is changing and what is not, decision rights, roles, dependencies and how success will be recognised.
2. Identify where meanings may differ. Words such as strategy, transformation, ownership, accountability, customer, value, risk, success and urgency often sound clear yet are interpreted differently.
3. Create opportunities for people to test their interpretation. Move beyond presentations. Ask people to explain the change in their own words: What does this mean for your team? What will you do differently? What becomes more or less important? What remains unclear? The answers are diagnostic.
4. Make disagreement discussable. Surface different perspectives deliberately so that disagreement can be distinguished from misunderstanding.
5. Reinforce meaning through decisions and behaviour. Every significant decision teaches people what the change really means. Resource allocation, incentives, governance and leadership behaviour often speak louder than strategy documents.
6. Keep revisiting the meaning. Shared understanding is not created once and filed away. As people act they learn; as circumstances change, interpretations shift. Sensemaking is iterative: the organisation acts, observes, discusses meaning and adjusts. That is not a failure of planning; it is how complex change works.

The question leaders should ask

Instead of asking “Have we communicated the change?”, ask “What do people currently believe this change means?” There may be several answers. That is valuable information.

Organisational change does not occur when information has been distributed. It occurs when people begin to make different decisions, behave differently and coordinate their efforts around a sufficiently shared understanding of what they are trying to achieve. That understanding is never perfectly identical across an organisation, nor does it need to be. People bring different experiences, roles, expertise and perspectives. The task of leadership is not to make everyone think the same. It is to create enough common ground for different people to move in the same direction. That is a more demanding task than communication. It is also a more useful way to think about change. Change holds when people do not merely hear the same message, but develop enough shared understanding to act on it together.