Change Doesn't Start with a Plan. It Starts with Meaning.

Strategic change rarely fails at the plan. It fails earlier, in the work of establishing what the change means to the people who have to carry it. A classic 1991 study by Dennis Gioia and Kumar Chittipeddi shows how that work actually gets done, and why it matters twice as much in an AI transformation.

You know the scene. The strategy is approved, the deck is polished, the town hall is scheduled. Leadership announces the change, and then watches, puzzled, as the organization nods politely and carries on as before. In our work with leadership teams, some version of this question comes up again and again: we communicated the change clearly, so why did nothing move?

In 1991, Gioia and Chittipeddi published a study in the Strategic Management Journal that answers it. It remains one of the most instructive things ever written about how change actually begins.

A president, a high profile institution, and a vision that had to change

The two researchers spent months inside a large public university whose new president had set out to turn it into a "Top 10" public institution. One of them worked from the inside as a participant; the other stayed deliberately outside as a skeptical second reader of the data. What they observed was not a rollout.

The launch of strategic change, they found, runs on two intertwined processes. Sensemaking is the work of constructing an understanding: the new president first had to work out what this organization was, what it could become, and how its many constituencies saw themselves. Sensegiving is the reverse motion, in their words the process of "attempting to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others" toward the new vision.

The crucial finding is that the two alternate in cycles, on both sides. The president made sense, then gave sense. Deans, faculty and administrators made their own sense of what they heard, and gave sense right back, reshaping what the vision became. Gioia and Chittipeddi describe four phases – envisioning, signaling, re-visioning, energizing – and the hinge of the sequence is the third: the vision that eventually energized the organization was not the one first announced. It had been revised through the very process of being interpreted and negotiated by the people who would have to live it.

Change initiation is not a broadcast. It is a structured conversation in which the destination itself gets co-authored.

What to learn: meaning comes before the plan

Three lessons from the study hold up well after three decades.

First, the leader's opening work is interpretive, not operational. Before the plan, the milestones and the KPIs, someone has to establish what the change means: why now, why us, what stays sacred, what is genuinely open for revision. Skipping this work does not make it disappear. It means everyone does it privately, and differently.

Second, revision is the mechanism, not a malfunction. Leaders often treat pushback on a change story as resistance to be managed. In the study, the opposite was true: the cycles of reinterpretation were precisely how an abstract ambition became organizationally real. A vision that survives contact with stakeholders unmodified has probably not made contact.

Third, people commit to what they helped make sense of. The constituencies that engaged in the negotiation did not merely comply with the change; they carried it. Ownership turns out to be a product of the sensemaking process, not of the communications plan.

How to learn it: run the sensegiving loop on your live change

Here is where we take a position. Sensegiving cannot be learned in a seminar room, because the material it works on is your organization's live, contested meaning. You learn it by doing it on a real change, which is how we think most management capability is best built.

A practical loop for a leadership team that is launching a change right now:

1. Draft the narrative as a hypothesis. One page: what is changing, why now, what it means for whom. A first stab, labeled as such.
2. Give sense deliberately. Each leader tests the narrative in two or three real conversations with the people it affects, not to sell it, but to state it clearly enough to be interpretable.
3. Harvest the sensemaking. Reconvene and collect what came back. Where did interpretations diverge? What did people hear that you did not say? What did they say that improves the vision?
4. Re-vision, visibly. Change the narrative where the organization made it better, and say so. The visible revision is itself the strongest sensegiving move available: it signals that the conversation is real.
5. Repeat until the story people tell each other matches the one you would tell. That convergence, not the town hall, is the actual launch of the change.

When should you run this? If you are in the first months of a significant change effort and the narrative has not yet been tested outside the leadership team, run the loop now; two to three cycles over four to six weeks are usually enough to converge. If the change is already announced and stalling, the loop still works, but expect the first harvest to be uncomfortable, because you will be collecting interpretations that have hardened.

Why AI transformations raise the stakes

If sensegiving mattered in 1991, it is the defining leadership discipline of the AI transition. The evidence on why AI transformations stall points consistently away from technology: RAND's 2024 interview study found the large majority of failure causes rooted in leadership and organization; MIT Sloan Management Review reports data leaders naming culture and change management as the principal obstacle; and Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, across 51 enterprise AI case studies, concludes that with comparable technology it is the organizational side that separates transformation from stalled pilots.

Underneath those numbers sits a sensemaking problem. AI unsettles exactly the things people use to understand their place in an organization: what expertise counts, what seniority means when a junior with a capable model closes the experience gap, which work is "mine". No leader can resolve that uncertainty by decree, and nobody, including the leader, gets to be all-knowing here. What leaders can do is run the Gioia–Chittipeddi loop honestly and repeatedly: offer a candid working narrative of what AI means for this organization, let the organization talk back, and re-vision in public as reality shifts. In a transformation where the ground moves every quarter, re-visioning is not a communication failure but the strategy itself.

Where the loop ends

The approach has its limits, and it helps to name them. Sensegiving is not an invitation to endless consensus-seeking: at some point the negotiation has to close, commitments have to hold, and the re-visioned narrative becomes the one you execute. The study is about the initiation of change, not a license to keep everything permanently open.

Which brings us back to the town hall. There is nothing wrong with announcing change; the mistake is treating the announcement as the beginning. By the time you stand on that stage, the story you tell should already have survived a few rounds of contact with the people in the room. Then the polite nodding means something different.

Want to see how your leadership team could work this way, learning directly on your live change rather than in a seminar? Schedule a short demo and we will show you how Management Kits supports exactly this kind of working-and-learning loop.

Reference: Gioia, D. A., & Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation. Strategic Management Journal, 12(6), 433–448.