The Stakeholder Management Toolkit

If a stakeholder is placed in area 1, 2 or 3 they are called Latent Stakeholders . These are stakeholders with only one of the three characteristics. For example, an animal rights group can have an urgent issue but, with neither power nor legitimacy, they can have demands but not get the management attention they need. Stakeholders in area 4, 5 or 6 are called Expectant Stakeholders and have two of the three characteristics. These stakeholders are typically employers and investors. The stakeholders that have all three characteristics in 7 are called Definitive Stakeholders and always take top priority.

Tapping Into The Power Of Visualisations

In reference to the previously introduced stakeholder maps, one may enhance the power of visualisations. Why not, using…

• Lines – between mapped stakeholders to indicate their relationship (e.g. solid = strong, dotted = weak, none = none) • Circle Size – equals the relative size of importance/power (or another variable of your choice) of the stakeholder • Circle Colour – equals, for example, how stakeholders think about the subject (e.g. decision, change, project) • Images – for example, using similes to indicate current satisfaction.

Think about how you visualise as many variables, without making your stakeholder map too complex, and thus incomprehensible.

Stakeholder Strategy

Scenarios are imaginative pictures of potential futures, but the future they picture is just a means to an end. These conversations around scenarios are designed to help you to ‘imagine’ a strategy, by bringing on board your insights from your stakeholder map.

The aim of Scenario Planning is to:

Envision ‘alternate extreme futures’ (worst/best case) Create a strategy that works for all extreme futures

Please follow these steps:

Step 1: What problem are you trying to solve?

Please define a clear and concise problem statement. It can be very beneficial for you to specify the “stakeholders” in the problem and solution. In regard to you stakeholder map:

Who experiences the problem? Who causes the problem? Who pays for the problem? Who supplies the solutions? Who pays for the solutions?

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