I’ve gotten more done in hallway conversations than in most stakeholder meetings.

That’s not an argument against stakeholder meetings. If you’re leading work that crosses functions, you need them. People need access to the same information, decisions need the right expertise behind them, and responsibilities need to be clear.

But the thing someone brings to a stakeholder meeting isn’t always the thing you actually need to solve.

Consider a fairly ordinary higher ed marketing problem. You’re trying to bring some consistency to how the institution presents itself.

On paper, this is a branding project. In practice, you’re dealing with departments, centers, institutes, and programs that have accumulated their own ways of presenting themselves over the years.

And I do mean accumulated. Few organizations set out to create six logos, four taglines, three shades of the same color, and a website that requires a family tree to navigate. These things happen one perfectly reasonable decision at a time.

So, you convene the stakeholders.

Almost immediately, the conversation reveals something that has little to do with logos, colors, or typography: people inside an organization see things outsiders don’t.

That’s not necessarily a problem. Institutional knowledge is enormously valuable. The people who have been around know why things exist, what has been tried before, and where the landmines are. They can see blind spots I can’t.

They can also see meaning an outsider never will.

Spend enough time inside an institution, and its internal distinctions become second nature. You know which department has the national reputation. You know why a particular phrase matters. You know what that symbol represents and why people fought to preserve it 15 years ago.

Eventually, it becomes difficult to remember what it was like not to know those things.

An insider can look at a small visual element and see history, professional identity, and institutional meaning. A prospective student may see a shape. A dean can look at the name of a department and immediately understand everything it represents. A prospective student may be wondering what the department actually teaches.

Both are looking at exactly the same thing. They are not seeing the same thing.

That distinction gets lost remarkably quickly in a stakeholder meeting. A dean argues that the department needs to retain some visual element because “people recognize it.” Someone else says a particular name carries enormous weight. Another stakeholder insists an internal distinction must be preserved because it’s central to the department’s identity.

They may sincerely believe all of it. The problem is that familiarity is doing some of the work.

Prospective students and the general public may know the institution perfectly well, but they aren’t studying your organizational chart, decoding your visual hierarchy, or learning why something that happened during a reorganization in 2009 means there absolutely must be a second logo.

Nor should they have to.

Every additional symbol, sub-brand, tagline, descriptor, and organizational distinction asks the audience to figure out what matters. Each may have a perfectly reasonable constituency arguing for its importance. Collectively, they can bury what everybody actually needs to understand.

Clarity gets sacrificed one reasonable request at a time.

Around the table, everyone can explain why their thing matters. The conversation becomes a negotiation: keep this, add that, make this bigger, move this up, mention this, preserve that.

Eventually, everyone has been accommodated.

The audience has not.

That’s when I want the hallway conversation.

Not because I’m trying to work around the stakeholder. I’m trying to find the thing behind the thing.

You say the logo needs to stay. Why? What are you actually trying to protect? Recognition? Prestige? Professional identity? Recruitment? History? A fear that your department will become less visible?

Sometimes the answer has almost nothing to do with the thing we just spent 45 minutes discussing.

That’s the point. What someone asks for is information. Why they’re asking for it is insight.

Once I understand that, we can stop arguing about the artifact and start talking about the objective. Maybe there’s a better way to achieve it. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe that institutional knowledge has surfaced something I hadn’t considered. I’ve been known to be wrong once. There were witnesses.

But now we’re working on the actual problem.

The hallway conversation hasn’t solved it. It has made the problem more accurate.

I’ve seen versions of this throughout my career. A concern about messaging turns out to be a concern about who was consulted. A debate about a webpage is partly about whether a department feels visible. Resistance to a campaign has less to do with the creative than with what happened during the last campaign. Someone who appears to oppose the strategy actually supports it but sees an implementation problem nobody else does.

So, I work the hallways.

The hallway, of course, doesn’t have to be a hallway. It might be a phone call, a Teams message, five minutes before another meeting, or sticking your head into someone’s office. What matters is having room to talk without requiring every thought to become a formal position.

Put someone in a stakeholder meeting, and you’ve changed their job. They’re representing Academic Affairs, Enrollment, Finance, IT, Advancement, or whatever function put them in the chair. They’re thinking about their team, their resources, their boss, and what they’ll have to explain when they leave.

That isn’t dysfunction. It’s how organizations work. But it means the answer you get in the room may be only part of the answer you need.

This is where stakeholder management often goes wrong. We treat it as a process problem. Identify the stakeholders. Create the RACI. Schedule the meetings. Circulate the deck. Solicit feedback. Capture the action items. Repeat every other Tuesday until morale improves.

All of that may be necessary. None of it tells you whether you actually understand the people whose cooperation the work depends on.

Stakeholder meetings manage participation. Stakeholder management manages understanding.

If someone objects in a meeting, and I don’t understand why, I don’t necessarily need another meeting. I need a conversation.

If someone sees a blind spot in my thinking, I’d rather find it while the idea is still cheap to change. If the resistance is really about something else, I’d rather deal with that than spend three meetings solving the wrong problem.

Then the formal meeting can do what it’s actually good at: evaluate, decide, and commit.

When work gets stuck, our instinct is often to add process. Another meeting. Another review. Another committee. Another person copied on the email. We increase the amount of formal communication and assume we have increased understanding along with it.

Those two things are not the same.

Before you add another meeting, another slide, or another round of revisions, it’s worth asking whether the thing everyone is arguing about is actually the thing.

Sometimes you just need to catch someone in the hallway and find out.