Stop Downloading. Start Involving.

You held the town hall. You opened the floor to questions. That's not consultation. That's theatre. And your people know it.

Keith Laplante

Thirty-five years leading inside organizations (TD Waterhouse, BMO, HomeEquity Bank) and advising alongside them (Accenture, ExperiencePoint, The Refinery Leadership Partners). Facilitated leadership programs at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford. Read more about Keith

"Consultation is when the people affected by a decision help shape it, and know their input actually mattered. Everything else is downloading."

I want to describe a scene you've probably been part of, from one side or the other.

A leader stands at the front of a room. Sometimes a physical room, sometimes a virtual one. They've prepared a presentation about a change the organization is about to undertake. They walk through the reasoning. They explain the strategy. They talk about what it will mean for the business, and, in more polished versions, what it will mean for the people in the room.

At the end, they invite questions. They may explicitly say something like, "I really want to hear from you. This is a conversation, not a monologue. Please push back if there's something you disagree with."

And then, for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, a handful of relatively safe questions get asked. Nothing particularly challenging. Nothing that puts anyone on the spot. The leader answers thoughtfully, the room nods appreciatively, and everyone leaves believing that consultation has happened.

I've watched this scene play out more times than I can count. And I want to name what it actually is, because I think most leaders genuinely believe they're doing something they're not.

That's not consultation. That's downloading. And your people know the difference, even if you don't.

The download disguised as a conversation

When a leader stands at the front of a room and presents a fully formed decision, invites questions, and then answers them well, what's happened is a one-way transfer of information dressed up in the vocabulary of dialogue.

The decision has already been made. The strategy has already been chosen. The direction is already set. Nothing that happens in the next twenty minutes is going to change any of that, and everyone in the room understands this at a level they may not even articulate to themselves.

So the questions people ask are the questions you can safely ask when the decision is already made. Logistical questions. Timing questions. Questions about what it means for their specific role. What they don't ask, because there's no point, are the questions that would matter. Do you have this right? Have you thought about this angle? What if the assumption underneath this whole plan is wrong?

Those questions require a genuine belief that they could still affect the outcome. And in a download disguised as a conversation, no one believes that.

The leader, meanwhile, often walks away with the opposite impression. They asked for questions. They got some. They answered them. They opened the floor. Nobody raised any real concerns. That must mean the plan is solid and people are on board.

It doesn't. It means people made the entirely rational decision not to push back against something that had already been decided.

The problem-first alternative

There's a fundamentally different way to bring people into a change, and it starts much earlier in the process than most leaders think.

Most change initiatives are solution-first. Leadership identifies a problem, works through possible solutions, chooses one, and then communicates the chosen solution to the organization. The engagement question is framed around: how do we get people on board with our decision.

The problem-first alternative flips the sequence. Leadership identifies that there's a problem worth solving, but before deciding on the solution, brings the people who will have to live with it into the conversation. Not to be informed. Not to give feedback on a decision. To actually help figure out what the right answer is.

This isn't the same as running the organization by committee. Leaders still lead. Decisions still get made. Timing still matters. But the fundamental posture is different. You're saying, "we've got a real problem here, we have some ideas about it, but we don't have all the answers, and we want to work through this with you."

That kind of invitation produces a completely different response than the download. Because it's genuine. Because people can tell it's genuine. Because the questions people ask, and the ideas people offer, might actually influence the outcome.

I've watched leaders make this shift and be genuinely surprised at what happens. Not just at the quality of the ideas that come up, though the ideas are often better than what leadership alone would have produced. What surprises them more is the shift in ownership. When people help shape the solution, they don't need to be persuaded to support it. They already do.

The desk that told me everything

I want to share a small story that stayed with me.

I was walking through the office of an organization I was working with, in the middle of a significant change initiative. The initiative had been announced with the usual fanfare. Town hall, presentations, communication cascade, the whole apparatus.

Walking past one of the workstations, I noticed something on the desk. A printout of the change announcement, the polished version that had been sent to everyone. And someone had, quietly, drawn a small doodle in the corner of it. Not anything hostile. Just a little cartoon that made it clear the person at that desk had a view about the announcement that wasn't reflected in any of the feedback leadership had received.

That little doodle told me more about what was actually happening in that organization than the entire feedback survey leadership had commissioned. Because the survey asked people to respond to a decision that had already been made. And the doodle was the private, quiet, honest response the survey was never going to capture.

I've come to think of that image as a kind of shorthand for what happens when leaders download instead of involve. There's a version of the response you get, which lives in the surveys and the town hall Q and A and the polite email replies. And there's the real response, which lives on the desks and in the hallway conversations and in the quiet decisions people make about how much of themselves to put into the change.

The gap between those two responses is where change initiatives quietly fail.

What real involvement looks like

There's no formula for this. But there are patterns I've seen in leaders who do it well.

They ask before they tell. Before the strategy is set, before the announcement is drafted, they're already in the field, talking to the people closest to the work about what they're seeing. They're not asking for endorsement. They're asking for information.

They separate the problem from the solution. They come to their people with, here's what we're seeing, here's what we think we need to address, and here's why. What they don't do, at least not yet, is come with the answer. They know that the moment they present a fully formed answer, the conversation stops being genuine.

They're transparent about what's decided and what isn't. There are usually parts of a change that leadership has to decide unilaterally, for reasons of strategy, risk, or timing. That's fine. What matters is that leaders are honest about which parts those are, so people don't waste energy pushing back on things that aren't actually open, and so they know their input on the parts that are open will actually matter.

They act on what they hear. This is the part that separates real involvement from theatre. If you ask people what they think, and then you demonstrably ignore what they told you, you've done more damage than if you'd never asked. Real involvement means that when people offer ideas that turn out to be right, those ideas visibly influence the outcome. Everyone in the organization is watching for the signal about whether input actually matters. Give them the wrong signal once, and it takes a long time to give them a different one.

The uncomfortable question for leaders

The reason downloading is so common isn't that leaders are cynical. Most of the leaders I've watched do this genuinely believe they're consulting. They've done town halls. They've opened the floor to questions. They've commissioned feedback surveys. From their vantage point, they've done all the engagement the situation called for.

The question I'd ask is this. When was the last time your involvement of your people actually changed the outcome? Not the timing. Not the communication plan. The actual decision.

If the honest answer is that it hasn't, in a long time, then what you're doing isn't consultation. It's communication. And your people already know that. They've adjusted their behaviour accordingly.

Real involvement is uncomfortable. It requires giving up some control. It requires being willing to be influenced by what your people tell you, which means you have to enter the conversation genuinely open to changing your mind. It requires the discipline of asking about the problem before you present the solution.

But it's the only way to build change that lasts.

The town hall isn't consultation. The open floor isn't consultation. The feedback survey isn't consultation. Consultation is when the people affected by a decision help shape it, and know their input actually mattered.

Everything else is downloading.

And your people can tell the difference.