The 'how' of multiple leader sensegiving and strategic change Dr Karl Anderson and Professor Robert J. Galavan For organizational leaders, managing strategic change is a primary management activity (By, 2005). Reflecting its significance as a management function, there is now a substantial body of literature and many dynamic models and ‘recipes’ advising managers how to lead and implement strategic change. These models present an ordered macro approach to what, in reality, is a highly complex, recursive and messy process. In this chapter we eschew these neatly packaged change management processes and explore the micro level arguments of leaders as they grapple with the uncertainty of strategic change and seek to give primacy to their sense of the change and related issues. Based on the findings of our extensive micro level study, we present a theoretical model which explains the mechanisms that underpin this important activity. Keywords: Sensegiving, sensemaking, leadership, change, strategy, uncertainty Introduction The literature on organizational change is vast and “abounds with complexities, including multiple and conflicting theories and research findings and a good bit of inconclusiveness” (Fernandez and Rainey, 2006: p. 168). It is underdeveloped (Pettigrew et al., 2001 p.697) and “it is difficult to identify any consensus” (By, 2005 p. 370). In a withering critique, Wetzel and Van Gorp (2014) argue that organizational change research is in “a state of helplessness” (p. 132) because it has held on to its rationalistic views and not kept up with developments in organizational theory. Even with these criticisms, rationalistic models of strategic change are widely used by practitioners as they attempt to put order on the gnarly process of change management, replete with many moving parts, often pulling in opposite directions. Kotter's (1995) eight-step model “remains a key reference in the field of change management” (Appelbaum et al., 2012: p.765) and provides a rationalised comfort to those leading change. Despite the attraction of these models for practitioners, they offer an extremely limited lens. They focus primarily on change agents (Bartunek et al., 2006) and they inadequately account for factors that influence actor meaning making (Weick, 1995) and sensegiving (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991). They fail to engage with the unpredictability of actor behavior (Plowman et al., 2007), the nature of resistance (Jansson, 2013) and the overall messiness of change (Rowland and Higgs, 2008). They also struggle to take sufficient account of the social, cultural and contextual forces which remain active “despite attempts to produce “top-down” and authoritative renderings of the change management process” (Collins and Rainwater, 2005: p. 19).