We’ve been part of enough programmes to recognise the point where everything suddenly looks settled. When the plan has been communicated, questions have dried up, and meetings that used to run over finish earlier, it can be tempting to take that as a sign that everyone’s on board.
But in our experience, that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes people are still working out what a change actually means for them in practice. Maybe they’ve assumed someone else already raised the concerns they’re having, or they’re hoping that’s the case because they don’t want to be the one who looks like they’re being difficult when everyone else seems to have ‘got it’.
A lot of that won’t show up in a status update, but it still shapes how the programme works out.
Things get easier to miss the longer a programme runs
Early on, challenges tend to come naturally enough because people are still forming their viewpoints; so questions are expected and disagreement is welcomed as part of the process.
That changes as things move on. Meetings get more functional and the conversation moves to topics like progress, actions, and next steps; that means there’s less time spent checking whether people still actually agree with the direction. Because nobody’s pushing back, it’s easy to see that as shared understanding, when really it might just mean nobody’s said anything yet.
The change doesn’t happen overnight. You can go from having genuine debates about an approach to, a few months later, the same people nodding things through because everyone assumes those conversations have already been had.
And that’s where assumptions start to creep in. Everyone understands the priorities. Different teams have interpreted the decisions in the same way. If something isn’t working, somebody will say so.
They are all perfectly reasonable assumptions to make when people are busy and there’s pressure to keep things moving. But they’re also exactly the sort of assumptions that can cause problems later.
Misunderstandings don’t usually come from nowhere
Misalignment rarely shows up as one big, obvious problem.
Two teams can walk out of exactly the same meeting with genuinely different interpretations of what was agreed. Neither necessarily realises there’s a gap because, from their perspective, they’re getting on with what they were asked to do.
It might not matter immediately either. But then decisions are made based on those different interpretations, work starts happening and more people get involved.
By the time somebody realises there’s a problem, something that could have been cleared up with a quick conversation three weeks ago can suddenly be much more complicated, and potentially much more expensive, to fix.
The challenge is catching those differences while they’re still small, particularly when nobody is actively telling you there’s a problem.
So how do you get people talking?
You probably can’t remove this challenge completely, but you can make it easier for people to say what they’re thinking before it becomes a bigger issue.
For a start, don’t assume that no objections means everyone agrees. And asking ‘does anyone have any concerns?’ isn’t always enough. It’s an easy question to answer with silence, particularly when nobody wants to be the first person to speak.
Try asking something more specific instead:
‘What could make this harder in practice than it looks on paper?’
‘What are we assuming here?’
‘What will your team actually have to do differently if we go ahead with this?’
You’re much more likely to uncover something useful when people have something concrete to respond to.
Timing makes a difference too. It’s far easier to challenge an idea while you’re still shaping it than it is once everybody has agreed it and moved on. Give people room to question things before you ask them to commit. And pay attention to who you’re hearing from. Not everybody needs to have an opinion on everything, but if a decision is going to have a significant impact on a particular team and you haven’t heard much from them, that’s probably worth exploring.
Good reporting isn’t the same as understanding
None of this means more meetings, or longer sign-off chains. It means treating the absence of disagreement and the presence of understanding as two different things worth checking separately, because very often they aren’t the same thing at all.
The most useful conversations I see in a transformation programme are the ones that catch a misunderstanding while it’s still small enough to sort out in five minutes rather than five weeks. That rarely happens by accident. It happens because someone made it a little easier to ask the question in the first place.
Silence is comfortable. It just isn’t the same as agreement.
