Consulting friends swear by role-play exercises to uncover unspoken stakeholder issues, but how does this translate to product environments? Had a major launch delayed because legal quietly opposed features they never mentioned in 8 meetings. What structured techniques actually work to surface hidden objections before they derail projects?
We do ‘pre-mortems’ where stakeholders role-play the product failing. Last session revealed engineering’s unspoken scalability fears that never made the risk register. Gave us 3 months headstart on infrastructure upgrades. Sometimes you need to gamify paranoia!
Recommend implementing a weighted objection matrix: Score stakeholders’ engagement (1-5) across key dimensions anonymously. Discrepancies between public support and private scores flag silent dissenters. Follow up with 1:1s using neutral business cases to probe concerns indirectly.
protip: silence = disapproval 90% of the time. set up ‘failure insurance’ meetings where teams get rewarded for spotting flaws. better to hear it from interns early than CEOs late. still sucks, but less than redoing q4 roadmaps.