This article is an extended exploration of this Greek myth as sensemaker, first introduced in a previous article.
Penelope tells her suitors she will choose a husband once she finishes weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. What she doesn’t tell them is that she unpicks by night what she weaves by day, so the shroud never gets finished, for three full years, until a disloyal servant betrays her. She isn’t stalling out of confusion about what she wants. She knows precisely what she wants. She simply isn’t in a position to say it plainly to a hall full of armed men, so she manufactures a project that never resolves, and calls it grief.
Twenty years after Odysseus first left for Troy, he finally returns, in disguise, and even then Penelope doesn’t take the news on faith. She has one more test in her, saved for exactly this moment. She orders their marriage bed moved out of the bedroom. Odysseus, without thinking, flares up at the impossibility of the request. The bed cannot be moved because he built it around a living olive tree still rooted in the ground and only he, Penelope and one servant have ever known that. The detail is proof of his identity. Only then does she embrace him.
The weaving and the bed test look like different ruses, evasion in one case, suspicion in the other, but they share a single instinct underneath – refusing to treat a question as closed before it has actually earned closure. What differs between them is whose question it is. In the weaving, the open question is Penelope’s own, “Who she will choose, and when?” Nobody is offering her a resolution that she’s rejecting. She is the one under pressure to produce a resolution, and she refuses to let that production be rushed, manufacturing a project that visibly continues so nobody can mistake her silence for indecision, or her patience for consent. In the bed test, the open question belongs to someone else. Odysseus is the one offering the resolution, he’s home, it’s over, and Penelope declines to accept it on his word alone, because a plausible story and a certain one are not the same thing when getting it wrong means opening her house, her marriage, and her bed, to a stranger. One is a discipline of not finishing your own sentence too early. The other is a discipline of not finishing someone else’s sentence for them. They’re the same instinct, held open, applied in two different directions, not the same claim made twice.
That instinct translates directly into practice for a team, in the same two directions. Pointed inward, at a team’s own position, it’s what holding a position under pressure actually requires – not evasion, but a rhythm of visible, ongoing work that buys time for a decision that genuinely isn’t ready yet. A team stalling on a call it can’t yet make often looks, from outside, exactly like a team that’s lost the thread. The loom moving is the proof otherwise.
Pointed outward, at somebody else’s claimed resolution, the same discipline looks like verification rather than patience. A team that has been burned before, by a change program that didn’t stick, a promise that wasn’t kept, a return to normal that turned out to be temporary, is entitled to ask for its own version of the olive-tree bed. That is, some specific, unfakeable detail that only genuine change would produce, before it accepts that anything has actually changed. Relief that the crisis has passed is not evidence the crisis has passed, and the team that confuses the two is falling prey to Penelope’s weaving trick without meaning to, mistaking the appearance of resolution for the real thing.
This has a familiar shape in organisational life. A restructure is announced as complete, and the team is asked to simply move on. A new leader arrives promising a different way of working. The surface signal, the announcement, the promise, the returning face, asks to be believed on its own authority. Penelope’s answer is to keep asking for the load-bearing detail nobody could fake: not “has this changed,” but “show me the one thing that would only be true if this had, in fact, changed.”
Weick’s account of sensemaking is built on plausibility rather than accuracy, because accuracy is unlikely to be available early on, and a team, like Penelope, has to decide what’s plausible enough to act on without being able to confirm it outright. What sharpens this into something closer to Penelope’s own instinct is the recognition that plausibility has degrees. A story can be plausible and still not be tested, and a team under real pressure is entitled to test it before it commits.
One practice worth trying.
Before treating any “we’ve changed” announcement as done and dusted, ask the team to name one specific, concrete signal that would only be true if the change were real, something a genuine shift would produce and a cosmetic one couldn’t fake. An ineffective meeting finally being cancelled. A budget line actually moving after robust and rigorous conversation. Someone whose voice is usually ignored finally having a seat at the decision table. Agree on it before the announcement is tested, not after, so the standard can’t be quietly reverse engineered.
The point isn’t suspicion for its own sake. It’s giving a team that has been disappointed before a way to tell the difference between a genuine olive-tree detail and a bed that’s simply being described convincingly. A team that asks for its own version of that detail can trust what it eventually accepts. A team that accepts the first plausible story is only postponing the moment it discovers whether the bed could really be moved or not.
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Sources
Fry, S. (2024). Odyssey. Penguin/Michael Joseph.
Homer. (1996). The Odyssey (R. Fagles, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.
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