Mark Emdin
September 2025
In my early consulting days, I thought my value was in the quality of my conclusions. I’d gather data, retreat to my office, and spend days crafting a polished deck or detailed report, the kind designed to impress, full of charts, models, and neatly packaged “key findings.” It was satisfying work. The client would nod appreciatively, maybe even praise the clarity of the analysis. And then… not much would happen.
The truth, which took me far too long to see, was uncomfortable: the insights were mine, not theirs. The report sat in my voice, born of my reasoning, fed my ego, and while it might have been accurate, it rarely became action. Clients agreed with my conclusions, but they didn’t feel ownership of them, and without ownership, nothing changed.
The Shift to Collaborative Sensemaking
At some point, I started asking myself a deceptively simple question: Who should be making sense of the data?
When I looked closely, and worked with other OD colleagues, I realised that the real breakthroughs happened not when I told the story, but when the client team wrestled with the evidence themselves. It wasn’t about me delivering the answer; it was about creating the conditions and space for them to uncover it.
I began inviting leadership teams into the interpretation process much earlier, even before all the data was “tidy.” We’d work together in rooms filled with flipcharts and sticky notes, with printouts of verbatim quotes, looking for patterns, testing interpretations, challenging each other’s assumptions. Sometimes it was messy and slow. But it was their mess. And when the “aha” moments came, they belonged to the people who could act on them.
Why This Matters in the C-Suite
Senior leaders already know that execution lives or dies on ownership. A strategy that’s simply handed down from the top, no matter how sound, struggles to take root. The same is true of insight.
When executives outsource sensemaking entirely, they may get a smart answer, but they lose something far more important: the shared understanding that makes decisive action possible. A consultant can frame the challenge, bring an outside perspective, and even provoke useful discomfort, but only the people inside the organisation can fully grasp the nuances of its politics, culture, and lived realities.
If the goal is transformation, those people must be co-authors of the story about what’s happening and what must change, and that means executive leaders involving people from across the organisation, not relying solely on the familiar few who are always consulted.
The Consultant’s Changing Role
This shift changes the role of the external advisor. Instead of being the expert behind the curtain, the consultant becomes a facilitator of discovery. The work moves from “I’ll tell you what it means” to “Let’s figure this out together.”
In practice, this means:
- Designing for participation. Structuring the process so that leaders and key stakeholders engage directly with the raw material, not just the end product.
- Creating safe challenge. Encouraging candid dialogue where conflicting interpretations are surfaced, not avoided.
- Slowing down to speed up. Taking the time to build shared understanding, so that later execution moves faster and with less friction.
Yes, it takes more patience. Yes, it can be uncomfortable. And yes, it delivers more lasting results.
Sense making is not about aligning. As the team dives into the data “multiple theories develop about what is happening and what needs to be done, people learn to work interdependently despite couplings loosened by the pursuit of diverse theories, and inductions may be more clearly associated with effectiveness when they provide equivalent rather than shared meanings.”[i]. The act of sense making is primarily social.
What Leaders Can Do Differently
For senior executives, embracing collaborative sensemaking means resisting the urge to look for “the answer” as a finished product. It means showing up not just as a decision-maker but as an active participant in shaping the insight that will guide decisions.
Some practical shifts:
- Stay close to the data. Don’t just read the summary, get involved in seeing and discussing the evidence as it emerges.
- Model curiosity. Ask questions you don’t already know the answers to. Signal that it’s safe to explore ambiguity.
- Invite diverse perspectives. Involve those who live closest to the reality you’re trying to understand, even if they’re not usually in the room.
- Own the narrative. By the time the “findings” are written down, they should already feel like your conclusions, not an outsider’s.
The Payoff
When leaders engage in making sense of their own organisation’s challenges, something powerful happens:
- The quality of the insight improves, because it’s informed by the organisation’s full intelligence, not just an external reading.
- The commitment to act skyrockets, because those who must lead the change have shaped the understanding of why it’s needed.
- The speed of implementation increases, because the shared interpretation has already been built, debated, and aligned.
A Call to Action
If you’re a senior leader, ask yourself this: When was the last time you and your team truly owned the insight that drove a major decision? Not just agreed with it, but owned it?
The next time you bring in external help, resist the temptation to hand over the data and wait for the verdict. Instead, demand a process that puts your leaders in the thick of the sensemaking. Ask your consultant not just for answers, but for the right questions to explore together.
Because in the end, the most transformative insights aren’t the ones delivered in a glossy report, they’re the ones you’ve built with your own hands, in the company of the people who will make them real.
