Organisations often seek a single version of the truth.
There are good reasons for this. Leaders need a reliable basis for decisions. Teams need enough common understanding to act together. Conflicting accounts can create delay, uncertainty and frustration.
So evidence is gathered. Data is compared. People are interviewed. The aim is often to resolve the differences and arrive at an agreed explanation.
Sometimes that is possible.
But in a complex organisation, different accounts do not necessarily mean that one person understands the situation and another does not.
People encounter the organisation from different positions. They see different information, experience different pressures and have authority over different parts of the work. Each perspective may reveal something that is difficult to see from elsewhere.
The differences are therefore not separate from the evidence.
They are part of it.
The same organisation can produce different experiences
Consider a service in which work is repeatedly delayed as it moves between teams.
One team may experience the problem as poor-quality information arriving from elsewhere. Another may describe changing requirements and late requests. A manager may see a lack of adherence to process. People using the service may experience repetition, uncertainty and long periods in which nothing appears to happen.
These accounts may seem contradictory.
They may also describe different parts of the same pattern.
Information may arrive incomplete because the first team does not have access to what the second team needs. Requirements may change because important questions are asked only after the work has moved. The formal process may be followed, while the process itself separates decisions that need to inform one another. People using the service encounter the combined effect.
No single perspective provides the whole explanation.
Together, they may reveal how the delay is produced.
Difference is information
When accounts diverge, organisations often treat the variation as something to correct.
Further data may be commissioned to establish which view is right. A senior leader may decide which explanation carries most weight. A workshop may seek wording everyone can support.
Each response can be useful. Each can also close down inquiry too early.
A difference in perspective may point towards:
- Information that is available in one part of the organisation but absent in another.
- Conflicting priorities or measures.
- Different interpretations of purpose.
- Boundaries across which work, authority or accountability do not travel easily.
- Consequences experienced by one group but created by decisions made elsewhere.
- Assumptions that have become established within a team or profession.
The useful question is not only, “Which account is correct?”
It is also, “What does the difference between these accounts tell us about the system?”
Not every perspective is equally reliable
Taking different perspectives seriously does not mean treating every account as equally complete or accurate.
People can be mistaken. Memory is selective. Organisational politics influence what is said and what remains unspoken. Formal data may challenge a widely shared belief. A strongly expressed view may still rest on limited experience.
Sense-making therefore needs both openness and discipline.
Accounts should be examined alongside other forms of evidence: performance information, observed practice, organisational history, formal responsibilities, workflow, decisions and the experiences of people affected by the outcome.
Patterns should be tested across sources. Contradictions should be explored rather than smoothed away. Explanations should distinguish what is known, what is inferred and what remains uncertain.
The aim is not to assemble enough opinions to confirm a preferred story.
It is to develop a better-supported explanation of what is happening.
Shared understanding does not require complete agreement
Organisations sometimes delay action while seeking consensus.
But people can understand a situation together without interpreting every part of it in the same way.
A finance team and an operational team may continue to view a resource decision differently. A national body and a local service may hold legitimate but competing priorities. Leaders may disagree about the level of risk that is acceptable.
These differences may not disappear through better facilitation. They may reflect real tensions that need to be managed rather than resolved.
Shared understanding means that people can see:
- Where their accounts overlap.
- Where and why they differ.
- How their separate actions interact.
- Which explanation is sufficiently supported to inform a next step.
- What uncertainty remains.
That can be enough to make a deliberate intervention possible.
The standard is not unanimity. It is a sufficiently credible shared account from which people can act and learn.
Making sense together
Collective sense-making requires more than presenting people with findings.
It involves creating a process in which evidence and perspectives can be examined together.
A practical inquiry might begin with a recurring outcome: decisions that repeatedly stall, work that moves back and forth between teams, variation that persists despite standardisation, or a change programme that generates activity without altering day-to-day experience.
The people involved can then explore five questions.
1. What are we each seeing?
Describe the situation from different positions before trying to combine the accounts. What happens? What information is visible? What pressures matter? What consequences are experienced?
2. Where do the accounts converge?
Identify the events, patterns and conditions that appear across several sources. Convergence does not prove an explanation, but it provides a stronger basis for further inquiry.
3. Where do they differ?
Make the disagreements visible. Ask what information, incentives, responsibilities, experiences or assumptions might explain the difference.
4. What connections can we now see?
Look beyond individual events. How might decisions in one part of the organisation create pressures or consequences elsewhere? What sequence, feedback or dependency connects the different accounts?
5. What explanation is useful enough to test?
Develop a working account of what may be sustaining the outcome. Be clear about the evidence supporting it, the uncertainties within it and what an intervention could help the organisation learn.
This process does more than improve the diagnosis.
It changes the conversation from defending separate positions to examining how those positions may have been produced.
Power shapes what can be known
Inviting different perspectives does not automatically make them equally influential.
Some accounts carry authority because of the role, status or professional expertise of the person offering them. Others may be discounted as anecdotal, resistant or insufficiently strategic.
People closest to the work may see recurring difficulties that remain invisible in formal reporting. People receiving a service may experience the cumulative consequences of decisions made across several organisations. Those with less formal power may also face greater risk in challenging an accepted explanation.
The design of the sense-making process therefore matters.
Who frames the initial question? Who is invited? Which evidence is considered legitimate? Who interprets it? Whose explanation is most likely to shape the decision?
These are not peripheral questions. They influence what the organisation becomes able to see.
Leaders do not need to surrender judgement. They do need to understand the limits of the view available from their position.
From separate accounts to more useful action
Complex situations cannot be understood from everywhere at once.
Every assessment remains partial. Every explanation leaves something out. Waiting for a complete picture would prevent action indefinitely.
The practical task is to bring together enough of the relevant evidence and experience to improve the quality of the next decision.
That means remaining curious when accounts differ. It means testing explanations rather than selecting the most convenient one. It means noticing whose experience is absent and being honest about what is still uncertain.
When this happens, people may begin to see that the difficulty does not sit neatly within one team, one individual or one part of the structure.
They can see how the organisation produces different experiences of the same work, and how those experiences connect.
That shared understanding does not solve the problem by itself.
It makes a more thoughtful intervention possible.
When people describe the same situation differently, do not ask only which account is right.
Ask what the differences are helping the organisation to see.