Recovering Judgment: A Series on Practitioner Judgment in Change Management – Article 2

I was brought in after the second failure. A large global manufacturer had been implementing SAP HCM. By any formal measure, the project had been well-managed. Status reports were produced. Stakeholders had been engaged. Communications had gone out. Training had been planned. The dashboard was green.

Then they pulled the trigger. And the system failed. They regrouped. They addressed what they could identify. They tried again. It failed again.

By the time I arrived, the technical problems were almost secondary. What had been destroyed was trust. The client had concluded, not unreasonably, that the system integrator had been painting a picture that did not reflect reality. Whether that was deliberate or a failure of awareness almost didn’t matter anymore. The damage was the same.

There had been no change practitioner on the project. I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it is easy to read it as a simple lesson about the value of change management resources. That is not the lesson I draw from it. The project had not lacked for methodology. It had structure, governance, workstreams, and reporting. It had all the visible apparatus of a well-run program. What it lacked was someone whose job was to stay connected to reality; to notice the gap between what the dashboard said and what was actually true on the ground, and to have both the standing and the judgment to say so.

Project dashboards are supposed to reflect reality. In practice, they often reflect something else: the version of reality that the people producing them are willing to report, that the people receiving them are willing to hear, and that the culture of the engagement has made it safe to surface.

This is not always dishonesty. It is sometimes optimism. It is sometimes the understandable reluctance of a project team that has worked hard and does not want to be the bearer of bad news. It is sometimes the result of measuring the wrong things. Tracking activities completed rather than outcomes emerging, counting communications sent rather than understanding built, reporting training attendance rather than capability developed.

And it is sometimes, as I believe it was in this case, something closer to deliberate. Not necessarily a conscious decision to deceive, but a pattern of presenting the most favorable interpretation of ambiguous signals until the ambiguity resolves into crisis. The people at the client saw a green dashboard. The people in the cafeteria knew something different.

My first intervention was not a workshop. It was not a stakeholder assessment or a revised communication plan. For the first few weeks, I spent most of my time in the cafeteria, drinking coffee and listening.

I was not gathering data for a report. I was trying to understand what had actually happened. Not the official version, but the version that lived in the organization. What had people experienced? What had the two failures cost them, not just operationally, but in terms of their willingness to believe that this would ever work? What did they understand about why it had gone wrong? What would it take for them to try again?

This kind of listening is not passive. It requires you to be genuinely curious, to resist the urge to explain or defend or solve, and to create enough psychological safety that people will tell you what they actually think rather than what they believe you want to hear. It also requires patience, because trust that has been broken does not come back quickly, and there is no template for rebuilding it.

What I learned in those months could not have been captured in any survey or assessment. It lived in the pauses before people answered, in the stories they chose to tell, in the frustrations they had stopped bothering to raise through official channels because raising them had never seemed to make any difference.

Eventually, the two sides were brought together. Not through a structured mediation process, but through the slower and less legible work of helping each party understand what the other had actually experienced. The client needed to understand that not everything that had gone wrong was the product of bad faith. The system integrator needed to understand the full cost of the trust they had lost, and what it would take to earn it back.

New communication protocols were established. A daily standup that did not replace the dashboard but became the place where real communication happened. Where people could say what they were actually seeing, flag what was worrying them, and raise problems early enough for them to be addressed rather than managed. The dashboard stayed green, as dashboards tend to do. But it was no longer the only story being told.

I tell this story not to argue that every project needs a change practitioner in the cafeteria for three months. I tell it because I think it illustrates something important about what change work actually is, and what it requires.

The project had failed twice not because it lacked methodology, but because no one was doing the work underneath the methodology. No one was reading the room. No one was tracking the gap between the formal narrative and the lived experience. No one had both the role and the disposition to surface what the dashboard was hiding.

That work is not about tools or templates. It is about judgment: the capacity to interpret what you are seeing, to distinguish between a stakeholder who is genuinely on board and one who is simply compliant, to recognize when resistance is a problem to be overcome and when it is information to be understood.

A green dashboard is easy to produce. Understanding what it is not telling you is harder. And staying connected to that harder truth, especially when there are real pressures to look away, may be the most important thing a change practitioner does.

The dashboard was green the whole time. Everything was wrong the whole time.

Those two things were always both true. The work, the real work, was in the gap between them.