Reports and research · Research series

The Leadership Sensegiving–Readiness Heuristic.

A research-grounded model of how AI adoption actually unfolds inside a firm: a repeating cycle of three phases, shaped by the conditions surrounding it — which either speed it up or hold it back. Built from interviews with 20 senior leaders across 18 UK SMEs, conducted at Warwick Business School.

Stephen Harley · Warwick Business School · 20 senior leaders, 18 UK SMEs

The reframing

Readiness is not a gate you pass before adoption. It develops through use — and can stall or reverse if trust, time, or boundaries collapse.

The cycle

One loop. Three phases. Two fields around it.

Phase 1 sends signals from leaders to Phase 2; Phase 2 is where people try things out, feeding Phase 3; Phase 3 returns what they learn to Phase 1. One loop, not three orbits.

The LSRH at a glance — one orbit, three phases, two field bands. Readiness is not a gate you pass: it emerges from use, and it can stall or reverse, so the loop does not close.

The phases in detail

Phase 01 · Signals from leaders

Leadership sensegiving

Leaders set the tone: what they frame, model and permit. Adoption is shaped less by strategy documents and more by an ongoing stream of leader signals — silence does not stay neutral; it reads as a signal that the topic is risky or premature. The work: define why AI matters here, model use from the top, and set good-enough guardrails that evolve with learning.

Phase 02 · People try things out

Collective sensemaking

People make their own sense of it: trust, fear and identity decide whether they buy in. Different groups form different meanings at the same time — 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 picks up momentum or stalls.

Phase 03 · What they learn feeds back

Emergent readiness

Readiness grows through use: confidence to experiment, informal diffusion, normalisation, acceptance of imperfection — accreting through practice rather than arriving as a delivered state. Capability becomes organisational only when learning is shared: champions, show-and-tell, prompt libraries, playbooks. It is partial, and unstable.

The loop closes because experience requires meaning to be given to it again: what people live through in Phase 3 — the wins, the failures, the workflows that quietly stuck and the ones that quietly didn't — re-enters the leaders' frame for the next cycle.

The two fields

The conditions the cycle runs inside.

They are not stages. They act on every phase, continuously — they slow the loop down, or they speed it up.

Field A · Acts on every phase

The practical limits

Time and capacity, data quality, infrastructure, governance capability. These are universal. Higher-success firms 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 · Acts on every phase

The trust questions

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

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.

Sensegiving, sensemaking and emergent readiness are the three handles we use for this cycle in client work — handles for understanding what is happening in a firm, never a delivery sequence. How we help →

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