Snapshot 3 – sense making in leadership
This month explores leadership as the art of “seeing again” in seasons of ambiguity, using the Emmaus road story and Karl Weick’s sense-making work to show how perception is reshaped in real time. It invites leaders to notice when familiar frames no longer fit, and to treat these disorienting moments as openings for transformation rather than problems to control.
Sense-making is described as an ongoing, social process where people construct meaning together, grounded in identity, retrospection, and context. Leadership is reimagined as guiding this shared meaning-making, helping communities move from confusion to clarity through conversation, reflection, and experiment.
Mentoring and coaching are presented as twin catalysts in this work. Mentoring offers a long-term, relational space where leaders can surface assumptions, test emerging paradigms, and live with unresolved questions without rushing to tidy answers. Coaching focuses this new seeing into specific actions and behavioural experiments, ensuring that insights do not remain abstract but are tried out in concrete practices.
Identity sits at the heart of Leadership. Drawing on Weick, it argues that how leaders understand themselves shapes what they notice and how they interpret events. Transformation therefore involves reauthoring the stories leaders tell about their vocation, context, and community. Mentoring helps uncover hidden mental maps and dominant narratives, while coaching supports the embodiment of new identity through goals, habits, and accountable next steps.
This Applied Alchemy emphasises that sensemaking is inherently communal. When one leader’s gaze changes, it can ripple through networks and reshape how whole communities imagine their mission. This calls for intentional spaces of collective reflection where diverse voices and experiences can meet, question assumptions, and co-create shared meaning, echoing learning-organisation insights and the Body-of-Christ imagination of many-membered discernment.
Finally, “seeing again” is framed as an ongoing adaptive rhythm, not a one-off breakthrough. In complex, shifting environments, leaders need practices of slowing down, listening deeply, paying attention to patterns, and revisiting past experience in light of new understanding. The alchemy lies where renewed perception and embodied practice meet, allowing leadership and mission to be continually re-formed.
Applied Alchemy Prompts
When did your seeing shift recently and what sparked it?
Who can help mirror back what you might be missing in your perceptions?
Interested in taking this further check out….. Sign up at https://alchemyedge.co.uk/membership-levels/ for the next Level up DIP or SWIM if you like learning together. Theres also a limited number of FLOW spaces for one to one support.
DIP – A monthly Applied Alchemy Leadership, Systems and Change space that examines the free content with relevant theory with practical application leadership ideas.
It’s built on tried and tested approaches and reflection on 30 years of pathfinding in the faith sector and aims to build a level leadership fluency where you naturally use all the tools in your kitbag and can grab the right one without even thinking about it!
Therefore a key part of DIP is that it also includes Applied Alchemy Questions prompts, Postures and Practices to adopt, and an Accountability Checklist for you to embed in your situation and at your own pace.
Heres and example of the expanded prompts there are 4 others to support your growth through the DIP level.
| Prompting Question | Practices and Postures | Applied Accountability Checklist |
| When did your seeing shift recently? What sparked it?. | Notice moments of disruption and surprise as invitations to re‑seeing. | I can name a recent experience where my assumptions were unsettled. |
| Who can help mirror back what you might be missing in your perceptions? | Cultivate a humble posture that welcomes feedback without defensiveness. | I intentionally ask for perspective on how others experience my leadership. |