The Stakeholder Problem No One Wants to Talk About

I’ve watched a lot of transformation initiatives fail. They fail in different ways and for different-sounding reasons — but when you pull them apart, the same thing is underneath almost all of them.

The Root Cause

Leadership makes a decision. They brief the next layer down. That layer cascades it further. By the time the people who actually have to do the new thing hear about it, the window for meaningful input has closed.

What Changes When You Do It Right

The best transformations I’ve seen started with 10-20 conversations with people two or three layers below the decision-makers. Not to gather “buy-in” (gross) — to actually understand what they knew that leadership didn’t. Every single time, at least one of those conversations surfaced something that changed the plan.