Why People Resist Change: The Untold Role of Sensemaking — And How Leaders Can Guide It
By Dr. Khutso Madubanya
Two weeks after immigrating to the United States from South Africa with my children, I unexpectedly lost my job. With no safety net and three little ones depending on me, I accepted the first role I was offered — a job that created immediate cognitive dissonance.
On day one, I felt completely disoriented.
Practices I had taken for granted in South Africa were suddenly different. Even the definition of arriving “on time” to work felt foreign. I had moved from being a solopreneur — running my own agency, making every decision, setting every standard — to becoming a tiny cog in the vast machinery of a mega-agency.
I had to surrender authority I once held effortlessly as a business owner. I had to learn highly specialized systems that don’t exist when you do everything yourself. Even the language felt destabilizing: industry jargon used words I already knew but assigned them entirely different meanings.
I thought I had been hired to run digital marketing. But in this organization, “digital” meant something completely different — digital media buying, a category of work I didn’t even know existed. What I called “digital marketing,” they called “social.”
Buried under cultural differences, professional mismatches, and a mountain of new terminology, I found myself overwhelmed, confused, and fighting the creeping sense that I suddenly didn’t know anything at all.
In that moment of chaos, I realized I needed a cognitive anchor — something to help me make sense of the world I had just stepped into. I needed a way to stay positive, to not lose myself, and to keep from shrinking under the weight of feeling lost, overwhelmed, and unintelligent.
So, I started watching my mind. I paid attention to the thoughts that strengthened me and the ones that made me spiral. Through trial and error, I quietly began sorting them — keeping the thoughts that grounded me and intentionally rejecting those that didn’t.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was instinctively leaning on the same sensemaking theory I had studied during my doctoral research — echoing the insights of scholars like Karl Weick, who argue that people act on the meaning they create, not the information they receive.
I wasn’t just trying to understand the change around me.
I was trying to reconstruct meaning inside it.
The Psychology of Sensemaking
When organizational change begins, most leaders focus on strategy, communication, and execution. But underneath all of those visible steps is a quieter, more powerful process — one that determines whether people adapt, resist, or shut down entirely.
That process is sensemaking.
Sensemaking — a concept widely shaped by organizational theorist Karl Weick — is the internal, moment-by-moment way people interpret reality, especially when they encounter something unfamiliar. It is how the mind answers questions such as:
What is happening right now?
What does this mean for me?
What am I supposed to do next?
When life is stable, sensemaking is automatic and almost invisible. But under change, it becomes conscious, effortful, and fragile.
Organizational change disrupts three psychological anchors:
1. Orientation
People lose the “rules of the game.” What used to be predictable becomes ambiguous.
2. Identity
Change quietly threatens the question, “Who am I in this new environment?”
3. Meaning
When the familiar story dissolves, the brain scrambles to create a new narrative. If no clear meaning emerges, fear fills the gap.
This is what leaders often misread as resistance.
When employees can’t make sense of what’s happening, communication feels confusing, training feels rushed, confidence drops, learning stalls, and resistance grows. It’s not irrational — it’s simply the mind trying to reorient itself.
Before people can adopt new behaviors, they must rebuild their internal map of reality. Sensemaking is the bridge between knowing about the change and being able to live it.
How Leaders Misread Resistance
In organizations, resistance is one of the most misinterpreted signals in the entire change process. When employees hesitate, push back, disengage, or appear emotionally reactive, leaders often interpret it through a behavioral lens:
- They’re not committed.
- They don’t support the strategy.
- They’re change-averse.
- They’re refusing to adapt.
But resistance is rarely about unwillingness.
It is about disorientation.
When sensemaking collapses — when people cannot interpret what is happening or what it means for them — their nervous system does what it’s designed to do: it protects them.
What looks like resistance is usually a mixture of cognitive overload, uncertainty about expectations, fear of incompetence, identity confusion, and quiet grief for the loss of the familiar.
None of these are behavioral flaws. They are psychological signals.
Most organizations respond by doubling down on process — more meetings, more slides, more timelines. But pressure doesn’t restore meaning. It deepens confusion.
People aren’t resisting change.
They’re resisting the loss of meaning that change brings.
The Missing Ingredient: Mental Recalibration
Organizations often treat change as a sequence of tasks: build a plan, communicate the plan, execute the plan. But even the most carefully designed initiatives overlook a critical truth:
People cannot follow a plan if their minds are in survival mode.
In the early stages of change, employees are not struggling with skills — they’re struggling with meaning. They are asking:
- Will I still be competent?
- Will I still belong here?
- Am I falling behind?
Traditional training and communication don’t resolve these questions because they are not informational questions; they are identity questions.
Mental recalibration restores emotional steadiness, cognitive clarity, and learning confidence — the prerequisites for meaningful adoption. It doesn’t replace training; it enables it.
And this is where the P.I.V.O.T.™ Method enters — not as a program, but as a simple, human-centered way to help people regain their footing during change.
How the P.I.V.O.T.™ Method Strengthens Sensemaking
1. Pause — Regulating the Emotional System
Pause interrupts emotional spirals and restores cognitive clarity. It reduces overwhelm, prevents reactive decisions, and creates the mental spaciousness required to absorb new information.
2. Introspect — Reorienting Identity
Introspect helps people explore who they are becoming within the change. It surfaces identity-based concerns — the real drivers of resistance — and turns insecurity into insight.
3. Vector — Reconnecting With Strengths
Vector reassures people that they are not starting from scratch. It reframes learning as an extension of existing strengths, reducing anxiety and accelerating adoption.
4. Overcome — Releasing Perfectionism
Overcome helps people let go of the fear of looking incompetent, unprepared or making mistakes. It normalizes the learning curve and builds psychological flexibility.
5. Travel Forward — Reattaching to Meaning Without Looking Back
Travel Forward shifts attention from what is ending to what is emerging. It removes the backward-looking rumination that keeps people stuck and reanchors them in possibility, purpose, and momentum.
Travel Forward is not about forgetting the past — only about not living in it.
What Leaders and HR Professionals Can Do Today
Leaders can begin supporting sensemaking immediately by:
- Starting meetings with a grounding “Pause”
- Asking introspective questions that surface real concerns
- Using Vector language to highlight skill transfer
- Normalizing imperfection to reduce fear
- Ending conversations with forward-focused meaning — without rehashing the past
- Protecting thinking time during transitions
- Coaching managers to become sensemaking guides
These small behaviors create disproportionate impact.
Closing: A More Human Approach to Change
Resistance is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of disorientation. People don’t resist change — they resist losing the meaning that held their world together.
When leaders help people regain their internal orientation — when they steady the emotional system, acknowledge identity shifts, reconnect strengths, normalize imperfection, and anchor the path ahead without looking back — they transform change from something people fear into something they can navigate with confidence.
The pace of change won’t slow down. But our capacity to guide it can grow.
When leaders learn to support the sensemaking journey, not just the strategic one, people stop resisting and start moving — not backward, but forward, with clarity, capability, and renewed courage.
Further Reading
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.
About the Author:
Dr. Khutso Madubanya is a global business scholar-practitioner and founder of Dance With Change™, integrating research in leadership, learning, and organizational change with lived experience across eight countries. She equips leaders and teams with practical, human-centered tools to navigate uncertainty with confidence, clarity, and emotional resilience.
