For a long time, leadership was treated as a problem of direction. The leader’s job was to decide, announce, align, and reassure. That model still has its place. But it belonged to a world in which information moved more slowly, institutions carried more default authority, and people were more willing to let the official version of events stand as the obvious one.

That is not the world leaders inhabit now.

The new job of the leader is not simply to deliver answers. It is to help people make sense of the moment they are in.¹

This is not a new idea dressed up in new language. Some of the most durable work on leadership has argued, in one form or another, that leaders do more than allocate resources or issue direction. They help define reality for other people. Smircich and Morgan described leadership as the management of meaning back in 1982. Deborah Ancona later put sensemaking alongside relating, visioning, and inventing as one of the core capabilities of leadership. What has changed is not the existence of that work. What has changed is its urgency.^2,3

A recent scoping review on information overload makes the problem plain: the exponential growth of digital information is affecting decision-making, productivity, and well-being. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer adds another layer. Sixty-three percent of respondents said it is becoming harder to tell whether news comes from respected media or from someone trying to deceive people, and the report shows year-over-year declines in trust across the major news-source categories it tracks. When volume rises and credibility frays at the same time, the leadership problem is no longer lack of information. It is lack of shared understanding.^4,5

That gap is easy to miss because many leaders are still operating as if more communication automatically creates more clarity. It does not. People are not only asking, What happened? They are asking, What kind of moment is this? What does it mean? What is signal and what is noise? What is actually changing, and what only looks like change because the environment has gotten louder? Those are not side questions anymore. They are the questions that determine whether people can move with any coherence at all.

Artificial intelligence makes the distinction even sharper. It makes fluent language abundant. Summaries, updates, talking points, and plausible explanations can now be generated almost instantly. Useful, yes. But abundance changes value. When decent language becomes cheap, judgment becomes more visible. McKinsey’s recent work on leadership in the age of AI makes the point directly: leaders still have to set aspiration, exercise judgment, and create the conditions for genuinely new ideas. A Harvard Business School working paper on generative AI and CEO communication reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle: respondents rated AI-labeled CEO messages as less helpful, regardless of whether the underlying answer actually came from the human CEO or the model. The issue is not whether leaders can produce more language. It is whether the language carries human judgment people can trust.^6,7

That is why sensemaking is not spin. It is not a cosmetic layer applied after the real work is done. It is not “messaging” in the pejorative sense either. In the leadership literature, sensegiving refers to the work leaders do to shape how others understand themselves, their work, and what is happening around them. Research on strategic change makes the same point in more practical terms: effective leaders do not merely hand employees a prepackaged meaning. They give them a way to make sense. Language, in that view, is not a wrapper around strategy. It is one of the places strategy becomes real for other people.^8,9

This is where many change efforts quietly fail. Leaders often assume the sequence is straightforward: make the decision, finalize the plan, then communicate it. But people do not experience leadership at the level of abstract plans. They experience it through the note from the CEO, the town hall, the speech, the reorganization memo, the offsite, the manager cascade, the Q&A that follows, and the thousand side conversations that begin the moment the official message ends. By then, people are already translating. Is this about growth or fear? Is this conviction or cover? Is this a shift in direction or just a new vocabulary for the same habits? If the leader has not made the moment more intelligible, interpretation does not stop. It simply goes elsewhere.^8,9

The older leadership model rewarded certainty. The emerging one rewards coherence. People are not asking leaders to narrate every ambiguity in public. They are asking for a frame that feels honest enough to hold. The leaders who matter most now are not always the ones who sound most definite. They are often the ones who can say, with real precision, here is what we know, here is what we do not know yet, here is what is changing, here is what is still true, and here is how we are going to move. That kind of clarity does not eliminate uncertainty. It gives people orientation inside it.^1,3

That work is social before it is rhetorical. Good sensemaking is not a lone genius producing insight at a whiteboard. It is built through observation, conversation, pattern recognition, testing, revision, and contact with people who see the situation differently. Ancona’s work is especially useful here because it treats sensemaking as a discipline. Seek different kinds of data. Involve others in the process. Resist the urge to force new terrain into old categories. Learn through small experiments. Use stories, metaphors, and images to help others see the emerging map. That is less theatrical than a lot of leadership writing, but far more useful.^1,3

Once you see leadership this way, a lot of supposedly secondary work starts to look central. A speech is not just a speech. A town hall is not just a town hall. An essay, a podcast interview, an offsite, a set of remarks, an internal note, even the choreography of a difficult meeting — these are all places where interpretation is being built or lost. This is one reason I keep coming back to the overlap between thought leadership and applied work. Real thought leadership, at its best, is public sensemaking. It names a shift, offers a frame, tests language, and gives people a way to understand what they are living through. Applied work does the same thing under pressure. It has to survive the room, the follow-up question, the internal politics, the manager cascade, the timing problem, and the lived reality of the people on the other side of the message.

So the leader is not being demoted from decider to explainer. The leader is being asked to do something harder: to become a credible interpreter of reality for other people without pretending to stand outside that reality. That means noticing more, naming better, admitting complexity without becoming vague, and helping people orient while the ground is still moving.

That, to me, is why sensemaking has become one of the defining disciplines of leadership now. Not because decisions no longer matter. Not because execution no longer matters. But because neither decisions nor execution travel very far without a shared map of what is happening and why. In a world flooded with information, thinned out by mistrust, and increasingly saturated with machine-generated fluency, the rare leader will not be the one who produces the most language. It will be the one who helps people understand where they are, what they are seeing, and how to move through it together.

That is a different kind of authority.

And I suspect it is the one that matters now.