A project team can spend six months on a piece of work. But the people who have to support it, or deliver it, may only see it three or four times in that period.

That can be a problem later. When someone asks why you haven’t looked at the other options. Only, you did, months ago. Then someone else has only seen an earlier update and lots has changed since then. Sign-off meetings that are meant to be fairly straightforward end up dragging on, answering questions about work the team finished weeks ago.

Project teams often call this resistance. Usually it isn’t. It’s often because certain stakeholders haven’t received the level of detail they need.

Why sending more updates does not close the gap

Running projects and managing stakeholders is tricky. Two pieces of research help explain some of what happens when managing stakeholder engagement in retail projects.

The first is called the curse of knowledge. Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber demonstrated it in 1989, and it has been repeated many times since. Once someone knows something, they can no longer judge accurately what it is like not to know it. They assume other people share more of their context than they do.

For a project lead, this shows up as compression. Six months of decisions become three slides. The conclusion stays in, but the reasoning might come out, so do the options that were rejected, what the customer research said, the supplier problem that forced a change along the way. But those details are probably the parts that would have made sense to some of the people reading about the project later.

The second is Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking. Weick found that people build understanding by picking up information, talking about it with colleagues, working out what it means in their own situation, and then acting on it. Reading a status report here and there isn’t enough.

He also found what people do when they lack context. They don’t wait; they build a story that makes sense in their own setting, then act on it. If it sounds plausible, they’ll run with it.

Neither study was carried out in retail environments, and neither measures what a context gap like this could cost a business. But they do explain that simply sending out more updates does not close the gap. People can be told, and still not understand.

What better stakeholder engagement in retail projects looks like

When managing a project, instead of asking who the stakeholders are, ask these five questions.

1. Who needs to know?

This group need to not be surprised. A short, regular update is enough.

2. Who needs to understand?

This group have to explain it, or make a judgement about it. They need the reasoning, not just a status.

3. Who needs to contribute?

This one is about expertise, not opinion. What does the project actually need: Legal, IT, supply chain, finance, someone who knows how the stockroom runs? Check you have the right specialisms involved at the right time.

4. Who needs to decide?

This group makes the decisions before you can move on. Know the difference between this group and those who are only advising. (Make sure your advisers don’t behave like deciders.)

5. Who will have to deliver the end result and make it function day to day?

This is the group most often missed. Store colleagues, contact centre teams, whoever is closest to the customer. Remember that this group also impacts what the customer actually gets.

Each question needs a different communication approach.

• If they need to know, a short written update is enough. That is all an update does.

• If they need to understand, they need the details and reasoning. A decision log can do that: the problem, the options, the evidence, the trade-off, what got decided along the way. Keep the log as the project runs, so it’s available whenever you need to share it.

• If they need to contribute, they need a way to get involved. A workshop. A workstream. A specific task, or a considered opinion.

• If they need to decide, they need a decision forum, and they need to know what you need a decision on. A steering group is for that, not for bringing people up to speed.

• If they have to deliver the end result, they need to see the actual thing and use it, or understand it well before it is finished. That could be a demonstration, or a test in the store, not a cascade deck.

Use a one-to-one if you need to get individual buy-in, but don’t make it the default.

If you only do one of these, do the decision log. It is the record that carries on regardless of people leaving or joining the project, and it stops sign-off meetings from turning into a reconstruction of the detailed work you’ve already done.

Turning that reasoning into a commercial case is a separate job, covered in Making the Business Case for Customer Experience in UK Retail.

Why a RACI does not answer question four

Some project teams create a RACI; a matrix that sets out who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who should be Consulted, and who should be Informed. It is basic project management practice, and it does its job. It stops two people from doing the same task and stops an important task from being missed.

But it records a person’s relationship to a piece of work. It does not record what that person needs to understand, by when, or in what form. The “Informed” label means updates will be sent to this group. It is, effectively, a distribution list. But it doesn’t account for the ‘so what’ after the information has been received. What will the informed stakeholders do with the update?

The bigger problem is the Consulted column. In practice, people often read “I’m being consulted” as “I get a say in whether this goes ahead”. So a project ends up trying to get agreement from people who were only meant to advise or support. Trying to gain broader consensus when you didn’t actually want it slows everything down.

McKinsey’s analysis of decision-making found that around 80% of organisations say they struggle with the quality and speed of their decisions, and names this as one cause.

Then, when the work gets challenged late, the usual fix is to consult more people.

What stakeholder engagement in retail projects costs, and who pays

Changes usually start in a central team like CX, commercial, operations or IT. But to reach the customer, the project details have to cascade through functional leads, then regional managers, then store managers, then the colleagues working the shop floor.

Background detail and context-setting are the first things dropped at each stage, because explaining ‘why’ takes longer than explaining what is expected. What gets delivered at the end is an instruction with the reasons removed. Frontline teams, however, often need the details to implement the changes or deliver the designed experience.

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace puts manager engagement at 22%, down from 27% the year before. Global employee engagement is at 20%. These are global figures rather than UK retail specifically, but the direction is consistent. The stakeholders that every engagement plan relies on are typically the ones with the least capacity to take part.

That is not an argument for involving store teams less. They are usually the people the change depends on. Rather, it is an argument for making space for them.

Marks and Spencer reported one way of doing this in 2026. They implemented AI to take rota building, labour planning and sales analysis off store managers. That comes from the company’s own annual report. They removed work to create time for managers to implement improvements and spend time with customers.

Where the stakeholder gap does close in projects, it is usually because the people who will deliver the end goal are involved in the project team early enough in the design stage.

When the challenge is not a context gap

But a late question by a stakeholder is not always a context gap. There are 2 possibilities.

The stakeholder has not seen the work. (The option you dropped. The research. Why it changed three months ago.) Show them.

Or they have seen the detail, and they’ve spotted a problem or something you may have missed. (It will not work in stores. It breaks a process, etc.) This is useful feedback. It means your design may be wrong, and you need to make changes.

After months in a project, a team can both overestimate what other people know and underestimate what people outside the project can see.

Key takeaways

• The quickest way to find the stakeholder gap is to ask someone outside the core team to explain the project back to you. Can they do it? Do they have enough information to do it? Do they know what you need them to?
• A plan setting out who gets what and how often is a distribution schedule, not an engagement plan.
• Start the decision log at the beginning of the project, not as a summary at the end.
• Find ways to take something off a store manager’s week before adding more engagement activity.

Resources mentioned

• Do We Need to Change Our Understanding of Change? — Mark Hughes, Journal of Change Management (2011). The review that looked for the source of the “70% of change programmes fail” claim and could not find one.
• Change management roles and responsibilities matrix — Prosci on separating governance roles from change roles.

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