AI Can't Solve This!
- Bill Holmes
- May 2
- 2 min read
"The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished." George Bernard Shaw
"Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets." Kevin Plank
When You Forget the Stakeholders: A Lesson in Bad Change Management
Last week, I experienced a sharp reminder of what happens when key stakeholders get ignored. Ironically, it wasn't in a project I was managing. It was here, working with AI.
After months of refining tone, building projects, and fine-tuning interactions, I discovered that a major system change had been made. My AI partner lost its memory. No heads-up. No transition plan. No acknowledgment that users, many of whom are paying customers, had spent real time investing in making the tool better.
Sound familiar? It should. It's exactly what happens in real-world projects when leadership or teams decide to make a change without bothering to consult the people who rely on the system.
The Stakeholder Blind Spot
In project management, stakeholder identification and engagement isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between success and failure.
When you change a platform, a process, or a product without looping in the users, you’re not just missing a communication step. You're actively burning trust. You're making it clear that the people affected by the change weren't important enough to involve.
No amount of improved features later will repair trust that’s been broken by bad stakeholder management.
Where Good Project Managers Get It Right
Good project managers and good leaders in general operate on a few clear principles when managing change:
Stakeholders are not optional. Identify them early. Involve them early. Keep them informed.
Communication isn't a broadcast. It's two-way. Listen as much as you talk.
Changes are rolled out with users, not at them. If you can't explain a change and show you listened to feedback before it launched, you missed a critical step.
Trust is the real deliverable. Features and updates are secondary. If users trust you, they'll adapt to almost any change. If they don't, even good ideas will fail.
Back to Basics: Respect the People Who Rely on You
This isn't about managing perceptions. It's about actual leadership.
If you’re managing a project, a product, or a team, anything that impacts people, you have a responsibility to treat their trust as a critical asset, not an afterthought.
Project management fundamentals like stakeholder engagement aren't just bureaucracy. They're how you avoid creating resentment, confusion, and churn. They're how you build real, lasting success.
At the end of the day, users, whether they're customers, employees, or partners, don't just remember what you changed. They remember how you treated them while you did it.
If you get that wrong, you can’t patch your way out of it later.
Coda
It is fascinating to see how often this mistake is made! From the Project Management Institute to the HOA in my neighborhood, management just changes things! This post explains what is happening, but I wonder why. I suspect it is combination of laziness and hubris.
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