solution

Question: From the passage below, Do you think that the techniques presented can improve stakeholder engagement?

Our present approach to stakeholder management starts with identification and then moves on to sorting, prioritizing, and rationally analysing their wants and needs. Perhaps, it is time for us to venture towards more emotionally enlightened and dynamic models. At times, this means looking at a situation from a different angle.

The success of the project would probably correlate with the amount of enthusiasm it stimulates (if one could measure enthusiasm objectively). In turn, enthusiasm also determines the level of stakeholders’ engagement and, although not often used in the project management world as a stakeholder analysis decision-making tool, the “force field analysis” model (Lewin, 1951) can be enlightening to cast light on a “go/no go” decision. Briefly described, the tool is used by listing all of the stakeholder factors (forces) for and against the project. Then, each factor is scored based on its influence; scores are added to find out which of these win.

As project managers, we are aware that once the intended product or project result has been through the iterations of different stakeholder needs negotiations, sometimes, to our stakeholders, it does not look or do what it was intended to look like or do at the start. In fact, it does not match their initial primitive mental image that we can call the “limbic image.” Even if we have all the right justifications for the modified version, it does not feel right to them. This is a very common event for project managers. In order to satisfy our many stakeholders, our scope definition can end up looking and sounding quite different from the initial mental image that both the pro and con stakeholders had on the final scope.

As illustrated in the best seller, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation by Steven Johnson (2011), there is no Eureka moment and good ideas typically stem from a long and somewhat unconscious incubation in our brain that happens over a period of time. This long incubation period tends to combine inputs of many different forms and content to create a good idea. The context of this birth does not follow a carefully developed rational plan, nor is it devised when we formally sit at our desk to work. If anything, the context where good ideas develop is rather messy, in a café, over a cup of coffee, in our kitchen, and so on.

In effect, research shows us that we have long left the den of the lonely creative “artist” as more and more studies demonstrate that change and innovation rate is increased where there are strong social networks (Jaruzelski, Dehoff, & Bordia, 2005; Taatila, 2005) and even among artists, most movements of change and innovations were the product of group interactions such as surrealism, impressionism, cubism, etc., hence, reinforcing the social network theory. It has now become widely accepted that when ideas meet and information comes together, you bring about both change and innovations to market smarter and faster and it would seem that the diversity of ideas and opinions generated through stakeholder engagement lead to higher quality solutions.

It is this discrepancy between the stakeholders’ initial mental image (what the result should look like and do) and the final result (what it ends up looking like and doing) that will create either disappointment or awe about the project result and decide, in the long run, if the project was a success or a failure. Did it end up exceeding stakeholder expectations, or did it let everybody down?

The real measure in project success or failure is not the difference between what it should cost and how much it did or how much time it should have taken compared to how much time it took. The real measure of project success is how much disappointment or awe the project result created for the stakeholders whilst “remaining within the given time and cost constraints.” Only stakeholder analysis can answer this question because this means measuring the difference between initial expectations and results.

The mental image or mental picture is the representation in our stakeholders’ minds of the physical result of the project. It is how they perceive the project result without it being actually present to the senses. According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinkers (1999), our experiences of the world are represented in our minds as mental images that can then be associated, compared, and used to synthesize completely new images. In general, researchers agree that although no specific site in the brain has been identified in viewing these mental images, our brains form and maintain mental images as image-like wholes and different people report large individual differences in the vividness of their images. Laboratory studies have shown that the variations in imagery are associated with different cognitive competences such as the ability to recall information in the pictures and the ability to verbalise their content.

For project managers, it might be important to work with stakeholders to help their mental image of the project gradually evolve. Research on how visual imagery might influence the customer appeal of a product output is not a new approach. Already, in the late 1990s, findings show that including stakeholders in imagination visual imagery during the design process has a greater effect on the usefulness of the product than including the customer in memory visual imagery. The results also show that imagery based on imagination results in more original designs and products than imagery based on memory. Most important, the use of bounded imagination, which results from the incorporation of the visual images of the customer in imagination imagery, leads to the creation of products that are more appealing to the customer (Dahl, Chattopadhyay, & Gorn, 1999).

In contrast, ever since the term “stakeholder” became more familiar to the project community, we have seen different stakeholder analysis grids surfacing from the research world. Like Mendelow, Mitchell, Agle, and Wood developed another stakeholder analysis grid that looks at three variables: the “power to influence,” the “quality of the relationship,” and the “urgency of the stakeholders’ claim(s)” from the organization. Their overall goal was to help managers determine priority in terms of attending and responding to different stakeholders and they labelled the concept “salience.”

In the grid-like framework, the whole idea is to try and produce an ordered classification that simplifies a complex problem. More often than not, the suggested grid is a simple, two-dimensional matrix where the problem is reduced to the analysis of two variables as in the “Power/Interest” matrix. In other cases, the problem is presented as three-dimensional and then three variables are looked at. Given that the 1990s were years when the quantitative paradigm was the most, if not the only, acceptable avenue for funded research, these grids are one of the popular by-products of the time. In order to maintain credibility, researchers and their students were explicitly expected to isolate, control, and measure sets of variables in order to produce statistically valid data and many of these projects lead to the development of a grid. This was the side of theory that was packaged for practitioner use and sometimes became marketable and sold. Most of these grids are the by-product of a quantitative research paradigm and rarely address the qualitative aspects of stakeholder management.

Over the years, stakeholder grids continued to emerge throughout the project literature, to name but a few:

• Fletcher, Guthrie, Steane, Roos, and Pike developed a process to map stakeholder expectations based on another set of two variables: “value hierarchies” and “key performance areas” (KPAs) (Fletcher et al., 2003).
• Lynda Bourne (2005) developed the concept of the “Stakeholder Circle” in her doctoral thesis and then further developed a tool to map the top 15 project stakeholders into a symbolic stakeholder community. This process depicts their relative importance through color coding, and the size and placement of the segments of the Circle. In this case, the assessment of each stakeholder’s importance to the project is based on ratings from the project team members of the stakeholder’s “perceived power,” “proximity,” and “urgency.”
• Murray-Webster and Simon (2006), noted that the most commonly used grids use either the “Power versus Interest” or “Interest versus Attitude” approach, and suggested another three-variable model for stakeholder analysis. As they readily admitted that this might be more difficult to picture, they felt it mapped out most of the things that needed to be considered and gave some hopefully useful descriptive labels that could be checked out during the overall process of stakeholder analysis and subsequent stakeholder management.