By Dean Benard
In the world of investigations, we talk a lot about procedural fairness, and for good reason. It’s the backbone of any credible process. People should be heard, the approach should be balanced, and conclusions should be grounded in evidence. Most organizations understand that. They’ve built policies, created templates, and mapped out step-by-step processes to make sure investigations are done “properly.”
But there’s a pattern I see increasingly often. Some investigations are very good at looking fair, without being fair. The process is followed, the documentation is complete, and everything appears orderly from the outside. And yet, when you step back and look at the outcome, it’s clear the process didn’t do what it was supposed to do. That’s what I would call procedural theatre.
The issue usually starts with where the focus lands. When I review investigations, the conversation often centres on whether the right steps were followed, whether the letters went out, timelines were met, and everything was documented. Those things matter, but they’re not the real question. The real question is whether the process helped us understand what happened. You can follow every step, check every box, and still miss the truth entirely. When process becomes the goal instead of the tool, the outcome may feel defensible, but it won’t necessarily be fair.
Part of the problem is that structure is inherently comforting. It creates consistency, it signals professionalism, and it gives people confidence that they’re doing things the “right” way. But structure can also get in the way if it’s applied too rigidly. I’ve seen interviews that are so tightly scripted that the person being interviewed never really gets to tell their story. The investigator is focused on moving through a checklist instead of listening. When that happens, you lose context, nuance, and the parts of the story that don’t fit neatly into a predefined format. And those are often the parts that matter most.
A similar issue shows up with how neutrality is interpreted. Neutrality is critical, without it, the process loses credibility. But there’s a version of neutrality that’s become more about appearance than substance. You see it when investigators ask the same questions in the same way, regardless of context, or avoid follow-up questions because they don’t want to seem like they’re challenging someone. You see it when all statements are treated as though they carry equal weight, even when they clearly don’t. On the surface, that looks balanced, but it’s passive. Fairness doesn’t require that everything be treated the same; it requires that evidence be assessed properly. That means probing where necessary, testing what doesn’t hold up, and being willing to make judgment calls. If you’re not doing that, you’re not being neutral, you’re avoiding the difficult part of the work.
There’s also a growing reliance on external investigators as a kind of shorthand for fairness. In many cases, bringing in an external party is absolutely the right decision. Independence matters. But sometimes the thinking becomes overly simplistic, if it’s external, it must be fair. That’s not how it works. An external investigator can still run a rigid process, miss important context, or fail to ask the right questions. Fairness isn’t determined by who conducts the investigation; it’s determined by how it’s conducted.
You see the same dynamic with over-reliance on templates and scripted interviews. These tools are useful, and most investigators rely on them to some degree. But they’re meant to guide the conversation, not replace it. When interviews become too structured, people tend to give shorter, safer answers. Important details don’t surface, and opportunities to explore what matters get missed. Some of the most valuable evidence comes out when people are given space to explain events in their own way. If the investigator is too focused on getting through a list of questions, that evidence never emerges.
What’s interesting is that procedural theatre is rarely intentional. It’s often the result of organizations trying to fix something that went wrong. Maybe there was a flawed investigation, or legal exposure, or a process that didn’t hold up under scrutiny. The response is predictable: add more steps, more documentation, more oversight. Individually, those changes make sense. But over time, they can create a process that is heavy, slow, and disconnected from its purpose. At that point, the investigation becomes something to manage rather than something to understand. And when that happens, people can feel it, even if they can’t quite articulate why.
Good investigations don’t come from perfect process. They come from effective process. That means using structure without being constrained by it, asking the questions that matter, testing evidence where it needs to be tested, and clearly explaining how conclusions were reached. Most importantly, it means staying focused on the purpose of the work. We’re not here to prove that a process happened, we’re here to figure out what happened.
Procedural fairness matters, but it only works when it’s real. When it becomes something performative, something used to demonstrate credibility instead of creating it, the entire exercise starts to lose value. People can tell the difference. They can tell when they’re being heard, and they can tell when they’re just being processed. And once that distinction becomes visible, trust starts to erode.
At that point, it doesn’t matter how clean the process looks on paper. If it didn’t lead to a genuine understanding of the facts, it didn’t do its job. And a process that looks right but gets the outcome wrong isn’t fair, it’s just well-documented.
