Why Stakeholders Nod then do the Opposite

Most stakeholder engagement doesn’t fail loudly. It's a more quiet kind of fail.

Meetings seem to be constructive. The workshops were well attended. Questions are asked and answered. Heads nodded round the table, actions logged and next steps agreed. From the outside, everything looks aligned. And then...nothing changes. Decisions stall and behaviours don’t shift. Resistance surfaces later, sometimes indirectly. The organisation moves forward on paper, while stakeholders move sideways- or backwards, in practice.

A council consulted staff and unions ahead of a planned change to how housing repairs were managed. The proposal was to centralise scheduling and reporting into a single system, replacing the more informal, locally managed arrangements that have built up over time. there were workshops, briefings to explain the rationale of consistency, oversight and cost control. Stakeholders asked lots of good questions and concerns about responsiveness and local knowledge were noted. By the end of the process, there were no formal objections. Heads nodded, some said or did nothing. The change is recorded as “consulted on”.

Once the new system went live, progress slowed almost immediately. Repairs were taking longer to book. Front-line teams bypassed the central system to deal with urgent issues directly. Tenants started to complain about delays, while managers point to improved reporting on paper. Staff claim they support the change when asked, but continue to rely on the old ways of working wherever they can.

No one's openly resisting. But many of them never believed the new model would work in practice, particularly for vulnerable tenants or out-of-hours issues. Challenging it openly felt risky, or pointless, because the decision appeared settled before anyone was even in the consultation room. Engagement therefore took a compliant and orderly path but it didn't actually surface the gap between how the service looked in a spreadsheet and how it would actually functioned on the ground.

This pattern is far more common than most organisations like to admit, and it’s usually not because people are just being awkward or obstructive. In many environments, nodding has become a learned behaviour. It signals politeness, cooperation, and an understanding of what's expected of them in the room. It keeps meetings moving and avoids uncomfortable conversations. It's also a form of self-protection- open disagreement carries risk; visible compliance feels safer.

The risk is reading visible agreement as genuine alignment. Much stakeholder engagement is designed to optimise smoothness. Agendas are tight and time is limited. Sessions may feel like there are predefined outputs and people are being steered toward consensus. Difficult conversations are softened or deferred in the name of progress. Engagement looks successful because it avoids friction. But the things that actually shape behaviour doubt, mistrust, fatigue, competing priorities, or a sense that something doesn’t make sense, rarely surface in that kind of setting. And when they aren’t acknowledged, they don’t disappear. They simply resurface later, once the formal engagement process has moved on.

People don’t act on what they’ve heard. They act on what they believe.

You can explain a decision clearly and still fail to convince people it makes sense in their context. You can listen without people feeling heard. You can consult without people believing their input had any real influence. When that happens, nodding becomes a courtesy not a commitment.

Behaviour follows belief, not attendance.

When stakeholders nod and then do the opposite, organisations can misread the situation. They assume the communication wasn’t strong enough, or that the message needs repeating. So they explain again, perhaps make some video explainers- often with more certainty and less curiosity. Over time, trust erodes. Engagement begins to feel performative, something to get through rather than something that shapes outcomes. The next time people are asked for input, they nod even faster and disengage earlier.

Engagement that actually holds once the meeting ends feels different and it takes longer. It's comfortable allowing uncertainty to sit in the room. It tolerates discomfort and doesn’t rush to fix. Real engagement distinguishes between politeness and belief, and treats resistance as important information rather than obstruction. And the problem with that kind of engagement is that it doesn’t really feel productive in the moment. It can feel messy, unresolved, uncomfortable and even that there are more issues to address than there were in the first place. But, it produces alignment that lasts way beyond the workshop, beyond the presentation and the formal process.

If stakeholders are nodding and then doing the opposite, the issue is rarely motivation. It’s meaning.

People are trying to reconcile what they’ve been told with what they know, what they’ve experienced, and what they believe will actually work. Until those things line up, no amount of engagement activity will translate into action. Engagement doesn’t succeed in the moment it feels agreed. It succeeds when the reasoning continues to make sense once people return to their day-to-day reality.