10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification

The Stakeholders and communication syllabus area opens with definitions, and CM3 draws them from the Change Management Institute's body of knowledge.

The definitions

Stakeholder: "someone who has an interest in or influence over the outcome the change is intending to achieve" — Change Management Institute, The Effective Change Manager: The Change Management Body of Knowledge, 2nd edition, 2022.

Two features of this definition matter:

• Interest or influence. Either qualifies. Someone with high influence and no interest is still a stakeholder — and often a dangerous one to overlook, because their disinterest can turn to opposition the moment the change touches them.
• The outcome the change is intending to achieve. The definition is anchored to the outcome, not the project. People who are not in the project's scope but who are affected by the outcome are stakeholders.

Stakeholders can be internal or external to the organisation. External stakeholders — customers, suppliers, regulators, partners, unions, sometimes the public — are consistently under-identified in internal change work, and their omission is one of the more expensive kinds of oversight.

Engagement, in the context of change, is defined by Julie Hodges as "the means by which an organization increases involvement of its employees and other stakeholders with organizational change."

The five identification questions

Effective stakeholder engagement begins with identifying stakeholders. Useful questions:

1. Who will be affected by this change?
2. Who will be responsible for making it happen?
3. Who will be accountable for it?
4. Who will benefit from the change?
5. Who can influence the change?

Each question surfaces a different population, and using only one produces a partial list. Question 1 catches the impacted; question 5 catches the powerful; question 4 catches beneficiaries who may be your strongest advocates and who are frequently forgotten because they are not causing any trouble.

Question 1 in particular should be answered with systems thinking, not with the project scope. Who is affected extends to the teams downstream of a changed process, the people who currently absorb exceptions, and the external parties who interact with the changed part of the organisation.

Identification methods

CM3 names two:

• Facilitated workshops
• One-to-one conversations

Both are conversational rather than analytical, which is deliberate. A stakeholder list produced by one person reading an organisation chart reflects that person's mental model of the organisation and will miss the informal, the external and the unexpected. A workshop with people from different parts of the business produces a materially better list because each participant knows a different part of the network.

What conversations should explore

Conversations with stakeholders can explore:

• Their views on change — this change specifically, and change in general given their history of it
• Who they believe will be impacted or could impact change efforts — using each stakeholder as a route to identifying more stakeholders, which is how you find the ones no chart shows
• Their thoughts on the potential positive and negative consequences of involving or not involving other stakeholders, and in what ways to do so

That third item is unusually sophisticated and worth dwelling on. It asks stakeholders to advise on engagement design, not just to be engaged. Someone who knows a department well can tell you that involving a particular group early will help, or that involving another group prematurely will generate an objection before you can answer it. This is co-design applied to the engagement approach itself.

Identification is not a one-off

Stakeholder identification runs continuously, for the same reason discovery does in the continuous change cycle. New stakeholder groups emerge as impacts become clearer — CM3 notes explicitly that as the change network identifies new impacts or stakeholder groups, impact profiles may change.

The practical discipline is to revisit the stakeholder list at defined points: after impact assessment, after each delivery phase, and after any organisational change that alters who does what. A list compiled at initiation and never revised will be materially wrong by mid-delivery.

Common identification failures

Three recur often enough to check for deliberately: