Why agreement is not always the same as shared meaning
It usually starts with a sentence that sounds perfectly reasonable.
“We’ve already agreed this.”
We have all said it. I have said it. In a board. In a project meeting. In a corridor conversation. Sometimes to reassure others, and sometimes, if I am honest, to reassure myself.
For a moment, it works.
Heads nod. The slide moves on. The programme regains its sense of order. The decision has been made, the action has been captured and the meeting can return to the comfort of forward motion.
Then, a few weeks later, we are back.
The same issue. The same conversation. The same slightly tired feeling that something did not quite land the first time.
Nothing has obviously broken. No process has failed. The governance route may have worked exactly as designed. The decision may have been recorded properly. The action log may be up to date.
And yet the outcome feels unstable.
Not failed.
Unstable.
If the machine metaphor struggled because organisations do not behave as predictably as our plans suggest, and the organism metaphor helped us see adaptation, this is where things become more uncomfortable.
Because organisations do not just process change.
They interpret it.
We do not deliver change. We translate it.
Gareth Morgan gets close to this in Images of Organization when he describes organisations as cultures.
Not culture in the thin sense. Not posters on walls, values in induction packs or the words printed on a strategy document.
Culture as shared meaning.
That distinction matters.
Because once we see organisations as cultures, a lot of delivery frustration starts to make more sense. We are not simply taking a change and implementing it. We are passing that change through layers of interpretation.
Each team, profession and individual asks, often silently:
“What does this actually mean for us?”
And the answer is rarely the same everywhere.
A new system may mean efficiency to one group, loss of control to another and another failed IT promise to a third.
A new process may mean consistency to senior managers, extra work to frontline staff and reduced discretion to professionals who value judgement.
A new governance route may mean assurance to one person and delay to someone else.
The formal change may be singular.
The interpreted change is multiple.
The same signal, different meaning
I keep coming back to the physics of this.
A signal travelling through a medium does not arrive unchanged. It bends. It slows. It scatters. The properties of the medium shape what is received.
We saw that in extreme form with re-entry blackout. The signal was still being sent, but it could not be received clearly through the plasma.
Organisations behave in a similar way.
We send what we think is a clear message:
“This is the change.”
But what arrives is shaped by the medium it travels through.
Professional identity.
Past experience.
Local pressure.
Workload.
Trust.
Organisational memory.
Previous disappointments.
The last project that promised something similar and quietly disappeared.
So the digital team hears opportunity.
The service hears risk.
Finance hears cost.
Legal hears exposure.
HR hears capacity.
Residents may hear something else entirely.
We think we are discussing one change.
Often, we are not.
We are discussing several interpretations of the same signal.
Why agreement is fragile
In governance, we place a lot of weight on agreement.
Get the decision. Capture the action. Move forward.
There is a good reason for that. Programmes cannot endlessly reopen every question. At some point, an organisation has to decide, commit and act.
But I am increasingly unconvinced that we agree as often as we think we do.
Sometimes we agree the words.
We do not always agree the meaning.
That is why issues resurface. Not because people are necessarily being difficult. Not because the decision was fake. Not because someone is trying to drag the programme backwards.
Sometimes the shared understanding we thought we had was never quite shared.
Everyone left the room aligned enough to proceed.
But not aligned enough to sustain delivery.
That is a dangerous gap.
It is also one I have circled around in earlier pieces. In The safest decision is rarely the best argued one, I suggested that decisions often pass not because they are deeply understood, but because they are safe to agree with.
That safety can hide divergence.
The room agrees because agreement is easier than exposing the difference between what people have heard, what they have accepted and what they are actually prepared to do.
The stories doing the real work
If we are honest, organisations start to look less like clean systems and more like collections of stories.
Not only the formal story we put into the board paper.
The informal stories people tell themselves:
“This will create more work.”
“This won’t last.”
“We tried something like this before.”
“They have already decided.”
“This is really about saving money.”
“This might actually help us.”
“This will make us look bad.”
“This is another thing being done to us.”
These stories are rarely written down.
But they drive behaviour.
A project plan tells us what is meant to happen. A local story often tells people how to behave when nobody is watching.
This is where Karl Weick becomes useful. His idea of sensemaking is not abstract. It is deeply practical.
People act according to the story that makes sense to them.
Not necessarily the story we intended.
That is why the same message can produce such different responses. One team sees the change as overdue improvement. Another sees it as a threat. Another sees it as noise. Another waits quietly to see whether it will survive the next restructure, budget pressure or change of senior attention.
None of that may appear in the highlight report.
But it is happening.
We have been designing for this without quite saying it
Looking back at the Impact → Interpretation → Action work, I think we have been trying to address this without quite naming it fully.
Impact tells us what is changing.
Action tells us what we will do about it.
But Interpretation is where the change becomes real.
It is where meaning is constructed. It is where people decide whether the change is understandable, possible, desirable and absorbable.
In the language I have been using elsewhere, this is where U3C lives:
Understanding.
Capability.
Commitment.
Capacity.
Do people understand what is changing?
Can they do what is being asked?
Do they want to support it?
Do they have room for it alongside everything else?
Those questions look simple. They are not.
They are the point where formal change meets lived reality.
We often treat interpretation as a middle step in a framework.
In practice, it may be the thing the whole framework is trying to protect.
Why more communication is not always the answer
When we sense misalignment, the instinct is predictable.
Communicate more. Clarify. Repeat. Put it in the newsletter. Add a briefing. Update the slide. Send another email.
Sometimes that works.
Sometimes the problem really is that people have not heard the message clearly enough, often enough or from the right person.
But sometimes more communication misses the point because it assumes the issue is clarity.
Often it is not.
It is interpretation.
We can say the same thing more clearly and still be understood differently.
We have all had that moment where a message has been refined several times, but the response still does not shift. The wording improves. The slide looks better. The explanation becomes cleaner.
And still the organisation does not move.
That is not always a failure of communication.
Sometimes it is a signal that different parts of the organisation are constructing different meanings from the same message.
At that point, the task is not simply to broadcast harder.
The task is to listen better.
Not, “Did you receive the message?”
But:
“What did this message mean when it arrived?”
That is a very different question.
This is where AI changes things
There is an interesting connection here to the work I have been doing around AI.
If prompting AI is like photography, choosing the frame, then interpretation is what happens after the image is taken.
Two people can look at the same output and see different things.
AI does not remove interpretation.
If anything, it may amplify it.
A machine can produce a summary, a recommendation, a draft response, a risk description or a set of options. But people still interpret what that output means. Is it advice? Is it evidence? Is it a starting point? Is it a decision wearing the clothes of a draft?
The same AI output can land differently depending on the culture receiving it.
One team may see support.
Another may see surveillance.
Another may see a threat to expertise.
Another may see a way to survive impossible workload.
So organisations becoming more AI-enabled are not becoming more machine-like.
They may become even more dependent on how meaning is constructed, shared and challenged.
That is the trap in some AI conversations. We imagine that more automation means less ambiguity. But the opposite may happen. The machine may make the output faster while the organisation still has to decide what the output means.
And if we do not do that carefully, we do not remove interpretation.
We bury it.
A different question again
So the question evolves.
Not:
“Why isn’t the plan being followed?”
Not even:
“What is the system adapting to?”
But:
“What story is this part of the organisation telling itself about the change?”
That question is harder to ask.
It requires us to listen differently. It asks us to look beyond formal agreement and into informal meaning. It asks us to notice the stories people are using to make the change understandable to themselves.
But it also explains why some programmes glide while others feel as though they are constantly being reinterpreted mid-flight.
Sometimes the difference is not the quality of the plan.
It is the story the organisation is telling about the plan.
Where this leaves us
If the machine gave us structure, and the organism gave us movement, culture gives us something more elusive.
Meaning.
And meaning does not sit still.
It shifts. It fragments. It reforms. It hides inside phrases like “we’ve already agreed this” and reappears weeks later as resistance, confusion, delay or quiet reinterpretation.
This does not mean governance is pointless. It means governance has to understand what kind of thing it is governing.
A decision is not just a record.
A message is not just a transmission.
Agreement is not always shared meaning.
And change is not delivered simply because the formal system has accepted it.
The work of change is partly the work of translation. It is the work of noticing what has been heard, what has been assumed, what has been feared, what has been remembered and what story is now shaping behaviour.
That leads us somewhere slightly more uncomfortable.
Because once we accept that different parts of the organisation are telling different stories, we have to ask a more direct question.
Whose story actually shapes what happens next?
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