The Model

The Leadership Sensegiving–
Readiness Heuristic.

A research-grounded model of how GenAI adoption actually unfolds: a recursive interpretive cycle of three phases, held inside two contextual fields that either propel or constrain it. Readiness is not a gate to pass before adoption begins — it emerges from use, and can stall or reverse.

Frameworks Leadership Sensegiving–Readiness Heuristic

One loop. Three phases. Held inside two fields that constrain or propel it.

The LSRH at a glance Cyclical model
Tilted orbit · Two field bands
01
Phase 01

Leadership Sensegiving

  • Framing purpose
  • Signalling legitimacy
  • Modelling behaviour
  • Setting provisional boundaries
The leader gives meaning before the system can hold it.
02
Phase 02

Collective Sensemaking

  • Trust in leadership
  • Cultural norms
  • Identity and role meaning
  • Emotional responses
Meanings diverge, converge, or fragment.
03
Phase 03

Emergent Organisational Readiness

  • Confidence to experiment
  • Informal diffusion
  • Normalisation of use
  • Acceptance of imperfection
Readiness is partial, and unstable.
→Interpretive cues
→Local enactments
↺Experiential feedback
The three phases
01
Phase 01

Leadership Sensegiving

  • Framing purpose
  • Signalling legitimacy
  • Modelling behaviour
  • Setting provisional boundaries
The leader gives meaning before the system can hold it.
↓Interpretive cues
02
Phase 02

Collective Sensemaking

  • Trust in leadership
  • Cultural norms
  • Identity and role meaning
  • Emotional responses
Meanings diverge, converge, or fragment.
↓Local enactments
03
Phase 03

Emergent Organisational Readiness

  • Confidence to experiment
  • Informal diffusion
  • Normalisation of use
  • Acceptance of imperfection
Readiness is partial, and unstable.
↺Experiential feedback to Phase 01
The two fields the cycle runs inside
The cycle Phase 1 sends interpretive cues to Phase 2; Phase 2 initiates local enactments that feed Phase 3; Phase 3 returns experiential feedback to Phase 1. One loop, not three orbits.
The fields Two visible bands envelope the loop. They are not stages. They are the conditions the cycle runs inside — they slow it down, or they speed it up, continuously.
The reframing Readiness is not a gate to pass before adoption begins. It develops through use, and can stall or reverse if trust, time, or boundaries collapse.
Page 2 of 2 · Commentary
Commentary The model in plain terms

The argument behind the loop, and why constraints are the field, not the gate.

From research findings 20 senior leaders · 18 UK SMEs
Stephen Harley · Jan 2026
The reframing Carry this sentence first; everything else follows from it.
Readiness is not a gate you pass before adoption. It develops through use — and can stall or reverse if trust, time, or boundaries collapse.
Phase 01 · Leadership Sensegiving

The leader sets the interpretive conditions.

Adoption is shaped less by strategy documents and more by an ongoing stream of leader signals: what is framed, modelled, permitted, and bounded. Leadership proximity magnifies these cues — silence does not stay neutral, it becomes an implicit signal that the topic is risky or premature.

The work here is to define why GenAI matters here, model use from the top, and set good-enough guardrails that evolve with learning.

↓ sends interpretive cues
Phase 02 · Collective Sensemaking

Employees convert those cues into lived meaning.

Different groups form different meanings about GenAI at the same time. Trust, cultural norms, identity, and emotional response decide whether the leader's frame is taken up, contested, or ignored. Anxiety and curiosity coexist; "this replaces me" sits beside "this could help me".

This is where meanings diverge, converge, or fragment — and where the cycle either picks up momentum or stalls.

↓ initiates local enactments
Phase 03 · Emergent Readiness

Readiness emerges, partial and uneven.

Confidence to experiment, informal diffusion, normalisation of use, acceptance of imperfection — these accrete through practice rather than arriving as a delivered state. Capability becomes organisational only when learning is shared: champions, show-and-tell, prompt libraries, playbooks.

Readiness can stall, fragment, or reverse if any of the above collapses. That is why the loop must close.

↺ returns experiential feedback
Field A · Sociotechnical Constraints
The conditions every phase runs inside.

Time and capacity, data quality, infrastructure, governance capability. These are universal. Higher-perceived-success organisations did not eliminate them; they treated them as design parameters — scoping carefully, standardising tools, keeping humans in the loop.

Lower-success firms experienced the same conditions as blocking conditions, and deferred or restricted action. The constraint did not change. The relationship to it did.

Field B · Risk & Trust Dynamics
The reliability questions the loop must hold.

Hallucinations, accountability, professional judgement. These do not get solved before adoption begins; they get held through validation routines, clear ownership of outputs, and explicit human-in-the-loop norms.

Governance, in this view, is a trust signal — not just compliance. Early guardrails enable safe experimentation. Their absence reads as silence.

Why this loops
— and never resolves into a finished state.
Readiness feeds back into leadership sensegiving.

What people experience in Phase 3 — the wins, the failures, the workflows that quietly stuck and the ones that quietly didn't — re-enters the leader's frame for the next cycle. New cues are issued. New meanings get made. The cycle does not close because the work is done; it closes because experience requires meaning to be given to it again. The fields keep acting throughout. Constraints can tighten or loosen. Trust can deepen or fracture. The same loop, run under different field conditions, produces different organisations.