10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping

Once stakeholders are identified, analysis digs deeper into who they are and what they need. CM3 covers segmentation, interests and empathy mapping.

Segmenting stakeholders

It can be useful to segment or group stakeholders in a way that helps differentiate between the differing needs of stakeholder groups.

The rationale is explicit: segmenting means more specific and relevant communication and engagement strategies can be planned for them. Targeting and prioritising effort in this way makes better use of time and resources and increases the chance of successfully engaging with stakeholders through change.

Ways in which segments or groupings can be considered:

Segmentation is the discipline that prevents the single all-staff email. It is worth noting that the right segmentation depends on the change: a change to a global process may segment best by location because the regulatory and cultural contexts differ; a change to a shared system may segment best by how each department uses it, cutting across geography entirely.

What shapes a stakeholder's response

Stakeholder responses to change depend on factors such as:

• Where they are on the change journey
• Their attitudes to change
• Their past experiences of change
• Their level of change readiness
• Whether they are likely to benefit or not from change

The first factor connects straight to the change curve: two people can be equally committed and respond very differently because one is at anger and blame and the other at acceptance. Treating a difference of position as a difference of attitude is a common analytical error.

The third factor connects to the history of change context factor, at individual scale. Someone whose last three change experiences were poorly handled brings that to this one, and no amount of assurance about the current change addresses it directly.

WIIFM: what's in it for me

A key aim of stakeholder analysis is to dig deeper and gain a better understanding of the stakeholders' level of interest in change. This can be done by stepping into their shoes, to understand their perspective and their WIIFMs — their 'what's in it for me'.

WIIFM is often dismissed as cynical, but it is simply an accurate account of how people evaluate a proposal. A change that is genuinely good for the organisation and neutral-to-negative for a particular group will be resisted by that group, and no amount of organisational benefit messaging changes that arithmetic.

The honest applications of WIIFM analysis are:

1. Find the genuine benefit for this group and lead with it. It often exists and is simply not being said, because the communication was written from the organisation's point of view.
2. Where there is no benefit, say so and address the loss. This is the dis-benefit conversation. Manufacturing a benefit that a group can see is not real destroys credibility more thoroughly than acknowledging the loss would.
3. Where the group bears cost for others' benefit, make that visible and recognised. People will accept a lot when the sacrifice is acknowledged rather than pretended away.

Empathy mapping

An empathy map is a useful tool to gain insight and consider another person's perspective. CM3 illustrates it with a specific example: a stakeholder called Bill, a plant manager in a utility business, who has been asked to introduce new reporting systems as part of new safety regulations for the plant.

An empathy map structures perspective-taking around what the person is seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling, saying and doing, and what their pains and gains are. Its value in change work is that it forces a shift from what we need Bill to do to what Bill's world actually looks like — including the pressures on him that have nothing to do with your change but entirely determine how he responds to it.

In practice, empathy mapping is most useful for a small number of critical stakeholders rather than for every group. Building one properly takes a facilitated session, and it earns its cost where a single stakeholder's response materially affects the change.

From analysis to engagement

Analysis is only useful if it changes the engagement. The output of this stage should be, per segment: what they care about, where they are on the change journey, what their WIIFM is, and what that implies for how and when to engage them. That feeds directly into the stakeholder engagement strategy, which records for each stakeholder or group their level of interest and influence, the potential impact of change on them, their potential level of resistance, the desired engagement outcomes, and the high-level approach for engaging them.