(2026-05-26) Brodmerkel The Story Forms Before The Meeting Starts

Sven Brodmerkel: The Story Forms Before the Meeting Starts. Part 3 on why (smart) organizations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional Picture the aftermath of something that went wrong....a project that didn’t land the way it was supposed to, or a meeting that went sideways, or a decision that produced consequences nobody had planned for

In the days that follow, something interesting happens.
A narrative forms. Not through any deliberate process — nobody calls a meeting to decide what the official story will be. But somehow, through a series of corridor conversations and Slack threads and one-to-ones that you may or may not have been part of, a coherent account emerges: what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, what it means, and what should be different next time.

By the time the postmortem meeting arrives — if there is one — the story has largely already solidified. The meeting is less a truth-finding exercise than a ratification of the narrative that formed before anyone sat down.

And something about that narrative doesn’t quite match your experience of events.
Not dramatically. Not in a way you could easily challenge without sounding defensive, or paranoid, or like you’re relitigating something everyone else has already moved on from. Just — the story that’s now circulating isn’t quite the story you were in. Some things are missing. Some things are weighted differently. The causal chain runs in a direction that doesn’t quite map onto what you observed happening in real time.

There is a name for the process that produced it.

Enter Karl Weick

He spent decades investigating a question that sounds, on the surface, almost trivially simple: how do people in organizations figure out what’s going on?

His answer, developed across a body of work that is by turns rigorous, surprising, and occasionally a little vertiginous, is sensemaking.

Weick’s core insight is this: organizations don’t simply discover reality; they actively construct what counts as it.

When something happens — especially something ambiguous, unexpected, or threatening — people don’t simply observe what occurred and report it accurately. They reach, often very quickly and largely unconsciously, for the most plausible story that makes the events hang together coherently. And then they act as if that story is what actually happened.
The operative word is plausible. Not accurate. Not true. Plausible.

Sensemaking, he argued, is not primarily a truth-seeking process. It is a coherence-seeking process. The goal is not the most accurate account of events. The goal is a story that reduces the uncertainty, aligns the group, and allows everyone to move forward with enough shared understanding to keep functioning.

This sounds reasonable until you ask the question Weick’s framework makes unavoidable.

Plausible to whom?

The politics hiding inside “what just happened”

What counts as a plausible account of events depends — entirely, and consequentially — on who is doing the counting. On their position in the hierarchy, which shapes what they were able to observe and what was reported to them.

And on their access to the moments and channels where the story actually gets made.
That last one matters more than almost anything else.

The official organizational narrative does not form in the formal postmortem. It forms in the conversation between the senior leader and their trusted deputy on the way back from the meeting where things went wrong. It forms in the message sent at 6pm by the person who got there first with a frame. It forms in the corridor, in the coffee run, in the three-minute exchange that nobody minuted because it wasn’t a meeting.

By the time the postmortem convenes, the story has a first draft

If you weren’t in the corridor, you weren’t in the first draft.

Narrative fluency and who benefits from it

Here is where Weick’s framework becomes, for many readers of this newsletter, uncomfortably recognisable.

Sensemaking rewards speed. The story that gets told first — confidently, coherently, by someone with the social position to have it heard — has an enormous structural advantage over the story that arrives later, more carefully, with more caveats and more complexity.

Sensemaking also rewards what I’ll call narrative smoothness: the ability to take a genuinely messy set of events and render them into a clean causal story with identifiable actors, legible motivations, and a clear lesson. The smoother the story, the more easily it travels. The more easily it travels, the more quickly it becomes the official account. (memetic, fiat news)

Narrative fluency of this kind is unevenly distributed. And it is distributed in ways that correlate, with uncomfortable consistency, with existing hierarchies of status, confidence, and social centrality.

The person who is good at telling a confident, emotionally legible story about what happened has an enormous advantage in the sensemaking process — regardless of whether their story is the most accurate one.

The person who experienced the events more complexly — who noticed more, who is more reluctant to flatten the ambiguity into a tidy lesson, who wants to sit with what actually happened before committing to a narrative about it — tends to arrive at the story-forming moment a beat too late, with an account that’s too nuanced to travel easily through the channels where organizational narratives move. (anti-memetic)

a process that was never designed to reward complexity

A particular word about neurodivergent professionals

Neurodivergent professionals often process events differently from the neurotypical majority. More detail. More pattern recognition. A stronger awareness of what doesn’t fit the emerging story. A genuine difficulty — sometimes experienced as a moral difficulty, not just a stylistic one — with committing to a narrative that irons out the complexity before the complexity has been properly understood.

These are significant structural disadvantages.
Not because the ND account of events is less accurate. It is often more detailed, and in some cases more closely aligned with the actual sequence of events — more attentive to the actual sequence of events, more honest about the multiple factors that contributed, more resistant to the post-hoc rationalization that passes for analysis in most lessons-learned exercises. What The Thinker Thinks, The Prover Proves

But accuracy, as Weick would remind us, was never quite the point. Plausibility was the point.

People who are often not primarily asking what is the truest account of what happened but what is the most coherent story I can believe and repeat.

The specific experience this produces — the sense that the official story of something you were directly involved in doesn’t reflect your experience of it, in ways you can’t easily challenge without sounding difficult or paranoid — is one of the most quietly demoralizing features of organizational life for people who think this way.

Getting written out of the story

There is a specific kind of professional invisibility that comes not from being overlooked in the moment — not from the meeting that moved on without you, or the idea that got attributed to someone else — but from being written out of the narrative of events after the fact.

You were there. You saw what happened. You may have been one of the people most centrally involved. But the story that formed in the aftermath — the one that now circulates as the official account, the one that shaped what got learned and what got changed and who got credit or responsibility — doesn’t include your experience of it. Or includes a version of it that you don’t quite recognise

This is disorienting in a way that’s hard to articulate without sounding like you’re making a bigger deal of it than it is. After all, organizations simplify. Narratives compress. Nobody’s full experience of any event makes it into the official account. That’s not gaslighting; that’s just how stories work. (all models are wrong)

But there is a difference between the inevitable compression of complexity and the systematic exclusion of certain kinds of complexity.

Weick’s framework doesn’t make this exclusion go away. But it does give it a name and a mechanism, which is the first step toward doing something about it.

What grounded confidence looks like here

Four things that I think actually help

Know that sensemaking is happening, and when.

The story forms early and socially, in the conversations before the formal process. If you’re not in those conversations, you’re not in the first draft of the narrative

It means being more deliberate about where you show up and when — and understanding that the corridor conversation after the difficult meeting is not optional small talk. It is, often, where the story gets made.

Develop your narrative fluency without flattening your account.

There is a difference between telling a simpler story than the one you experienced, and telling the most important parts of your story clearly and early. The latter is a skill — a translation practice, really — and it is worth building deliberately. Not because complexity doesn’t matter, but because a complex account that doesn’t travel is less useful than a clear account that does, and that can be complicated later when the ground has been prepared for it.

Document your own sensemaking.

Your own record of events as they unfolded, made at the time rather than reconstructed afterwards.... for your own clarity

When the official story starts to diverge from your experience of events, having a contemporaneous record of what you actually observed is the difference between knowing you’re not imagining it and merely suspecting you’re not imagining it. That difference is significant.

Name the process, not just the outcome

“I think we might have constructed slightly different stories about what happened here” is a different conversation from “that’s not what happened.” The first opens an inquiry. The second starts a dispute. (I don't see that working.)

Back to the postmortem

The narrative has solidified. The story of what happened is now, for all practical purposes, what happened — because organizations run on shared stories, and the shared story is the one that got made.

Your experience of events is still your experience. It didn’t stop being real because it didn’t make it into the official account. But it’s sitting outside the narrative now, which means it’s sitting outside the learning, outside the accountability, outside the version of events that will shape what happens next time.

This is the cost of losing the sensemaking game

Weick’s gift — and it is a genuine gift, if an uncomfortable one — is the reminder that reality, in organizations, is always under construction. (orientation)

Make sure that the story that forms has, at minimum, had the chance to encounter your experience of events before it solidifies.