Who’s Missing from Your Strategy Table? Why Frontline Voices are Key to Lasting Impact

Some problems are too complex, too systemic, or too urgent to solve with top-down strategies or siloed solutions. And yet, far too often, that’s exactly how we still try to tackle them—by gathering decision-makers in a room, setting priorities, and launching initiatives without fully engaging the people who live the reality every day.

This isn’t just a development sector issue. Whether it’s redesigning a product, improving working conditions, reimagining community safety, or shaping climate resilience strategies—when we exclude frontline insight, we compromise the effectiveness of our efforts.

Exclusion doesn’t just lead to inefficiency—it breeds misalignment, mistrust, and missed opportunity.

I’ve written before about why we need to shift how we collaborate, especially in systems undergoing rapid change. But three practices continue to rise to the top, not only in my consulting work but across sectors and settings: listening as a discipline, building relationships as infrastructure, and centering trust as a non-negotiable.

Listening is not a step. It’s a stance.

Too often, listening is framed as a one-time activity—through focus groups, stakeholder surveys, or community consultations. But real listening requires repetition, reorientation, and response. It means actively seeking out insight not just at the start, but throughout the lifecycle of a program or strategy.

The most effective organizations treat listening as embedded, not episodic. It is integrated through feedback loops, shared decision-making forums, or co-led strategy cycles. When people on the ground are heard and their insights visibly shape direction, the whole system becomes more responsive.

Relationships aren’t soft. They’re strategy.

In nearly every project I’ve advised that’s yielded long-term results, strong relationships played a central role. Not just between donors and implementers or employers and workers—but across sectors and roles: private sector actors, community leaders, government counterparts, and field practitioners.

These relationships take time to build, and they aren’t always easy. But they create the connective tissue needed for coordinated action, adaptive learning, and shared accountability. When the going gets tough (and it often does), relationships are what hold things together.

Trust is the foundation we often forget.

It sounds simple, but it’s where so many efforts falter. Trust is earned over time through transparency, consistency, and mutual recognition. And once earned, it allows us to move faster, ask harder questions, and make better decisions—together.

You can’t generate trust without listening well and showing up in good faith. And you can’t fake it through branding or buzzwords. The good news is that it’s something we can build, if we’re willing to invest.

These insights aren’t theoretical. They’re drawn from years of supporting cross-sector programs, coalitions, and community-led initiatives—from large-scale social impact campaigns to more targeted advisory roles. The specifics may vary, but the patterns hold.

And they’re at the heart of an important conversation I’ll be joining later today, hosted by Business Fights Poverty. The theme? Connecting decision-makers with those closest to the issues.

If we want lasting impact, it’s time to bridge more than just ideas—it’s time to connect power with perspective and strategy with lived experience.