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Client Empathy and the Importance of Stakeholder Interviews

When a new partnership begins, most teams rush to tasks, timelines, and tools. That's understandable. Work needs to start. But strong work doesn't begin with deliverables — it begins with people.

I use a process fellow colleagues (Kristofer Widholm and Lina Calin) and myself named mise en scène. It’s a way to set the stage so everyone knows what matters, who matters, and why the work exists in the first place. Think of it as putting every piece in the right place before the story begins.

This early step builds trust, reduces confusion, and helps teams move forward with confidence.

Mise en Scène: Setting the Stage

In film and theater, mise en scène means arranging everything you see in a scene so the story makes sense. Lights. People. Space. Mood.

In project work, it means preparing the human side of collaboration:

Before building anything, I prepare the environment where good decisions can happen.

Great work happens when the process supports people — my partners, the communities we serve, and the relationships that connect them. These aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re the foundation of success. They provide the context for every decision, every design, and every outcome from the signing of the contract to the retrospective after the final invoice has been paid.

Why Stakeholder Interviews Matter

Even a short stakeholder interview can change the course of a project.

These conversations help me learn:

Many project risks aren’t technical. They’re human. Interviews bring those risks into the open while trust is still forming.

Making the Invisible Visible

We often talk about the “knowns” and “unknowns” of a project. However, we often forget about unknown unknowns — often manipulated and skewed by bias which no one of us are immune to in this life. The phrase “There are unknown unknowns” became unfortunately popularized by Donald Rumsfeld’s when reporting on Iraq’s storing/supplying WMDs in 2002:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

One my favorite philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, added a powerful read on this “unknown knowns” that Rumsfeld haphazardly threw around as if the DoD wasn’t already horribly poisoned by a deep-seeded, centuries-long bias and Bush’ean hyperbole.

Žižek emphasized that there are beliefs/assumptions people hold but don’t realize they hold (watch a snippet of him discussing this). A good example of this can be often found within zero-day security vulnerabilities. The vulnerability was always there, but no one knew it existed until it was exploited. In the context of project work, these unknown knowns can be assumptions about how things should be done, what has been tried before, or what won’t work — all of which can hinder progress if not surfaced or properly processed at a conscious level.

When working with people in client work, unknown knowns can sometimes be illustrated by the following statements:

No one hides these ideas on purpose. They simply live beneath awareness.

Stakeholder interviews bring these hidden assumptions into the light. When we can see them, we can decide what to keep, what to question, and what to change.

This turns uncertainty into clarity.

Confidence Through Relationship-Based Goals

Contracts define deliverables. Relationships define success.

When teams only focus on outputs, they may finish the work but miss the meaning. Early conversations help define goals rooted in people and the better experiences, clearer communication, stronger collaboration, and shared ownership that make those outputs successful.

When everyone sees how their voice shaped the direction, confidence grows. The work feels grounded, not imposed.

The Mise en Scène Process in Practice

My approach unfolds in three connected phases that guide expectations and create a high-quality experience from start to finish.

Project Setup & Team Onboarding

I establish communication channels and collaboration tools. If a partner already has trusted systems, I use them (however, plot twist, most orgs don’t have them). If not, I create a simple shared hub for tracking, discussion, and transparency.

A focused setup meeting with core team members ensures the larger kickoff is purposeful and efficient.

Stakeholder Mapping

I learn the landscape of the organization by identifying who makes decisions (and at what levels), who influences direction (and at which heading), and who is ultimately affected by those outcomes (and in what ways).

This map ensures I hear from the right voices during discovery, and more importantly, that the appropriate voices are attached to the right context of the project. For example, a project focused on improving internal communication should include voices from across departments, not just the communications team. Or a project focused on improving the customer experience should include voices from both customer support and sales.

Goals & Priorities

Together, we identify both big-picture ambitions and practical objectives. Then we prioritize them. This creates a shared compass for decision-making throughout the project.

Sometimes this step extends through surveys or additional conversations to include a broader community of stakeholders.

Kickoff Meeting

This is the moment everyone comes together. Teams meet, expectations align, and excitement builds. I share insights, clarify direction, and address any conflicts early — before they grow.

Insights & Interviews

I conduct focused conversations with key voices across the organization. These interviews surface opportunities, risks, existing assets, hidden tensions, and hopes for the future.

They also reveal gaps — areas where more learning is needed before moving forward. (There are more definitions to words like “design” and “platform” than you might expect.)

The Human Foundation of Good Work

Projects succeed when people feel seen and heard. Alignment comes from seeing and hearing and not simply document sharing.

Therefore, stakeholder interviews shouldn’t merely be formality. They are an act of respect that declares to the client that their perspective matters before begining any project/relationship.

When you invest in understanding first, everything that follows becomes clearer, calmer, and more collaborative. Prepare the work by preparing the relationship.

Conclusion

Cool, you did all of this and hopefully it is stored somewhere that the working team has access to as video recordings, transcripts, or notes. Now what?

The next step is to ensure this content makes its way — without your analytic input, just yet — to the discovery stage that should immediately follow. I aim to write a follow-up multi-part article on discovery soon. Stay tuned!