Five mistakes teams make with stakeholder buy-in

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit stakeholder buy-in.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Late objections cost the most
• Involve the sceptics early rather than presenting to them
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Frame decisions in their terms, not in design terms. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to do next

The short version

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about stakeholder buy-in before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Frame decisions in their terms, not in design terms — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.