Stop Ignoring Your Stakeholders
“There’s a wide spectrum between ignoring stakeholders and delegating decisions to them. Visualizing levels of engagement as steps on a ladder helps leaders make better choices about who to include and when.”
Building trust between employees, partners, and suppliers is always tricky. To run functional organizations, leaders can’t just make decisions unilaterally - nor can they share decision-making power equally with everyone. Who should have input, and when is the central challenge of stakeholder management, and AI is shaking things up.
AI tools can now serve as advisors, idea generators, and sounding boards. Such capabilities in AI systems might mean that leaders might not need as much input from people. But does that mean they should leave others out?
MAP IT OUT: AI is changing a lot about how we work together and communicate. Often, experts will say, “stakeholder engagement is the solution.” But how can we tell if we’re doing it correctly?
In VentureBeat, we worked with Steven Mills and Kes Sampanthar to figure it out, starting with a model that leaders can use to evaluate their strategies.
The ladder model (below) was first designed in the ’60s by housing policy analyst Sherry Arnstein, and we’ve updated it for modern times.
It captures the dichotomy between delegation and neglect with many intervening shades.
Left: original stakeholder ladder model from Arnstein, 1969
Right: The ladder redesigned for leaders today.
BREAK IT DOWN: Think about where your stakeholders should be on this ladder.
Where should your partners be?
Your direct reports?
Front-line employees?
INCLUSION IS ATTRACTIVE: It can be easy to use AI tools to make decisions and inform others afterwards. But responsible leadership means swimming against the current. And the payoffs for engaging stakeholders well are significant: attracting talent, assuaging investors, and boosting trust. Getting there isn’t easy, so we broke it down into four steps.
CLIMB THE LADDER: We can select, educate, evaluate, and integrate to make more meaningful stakeholder engagement in the age of AI.
Selecting means choosing which rung of the ladder each stakeholder group needs to be on. Marketing, communications, and HR can help break down audiences in nuanced and thoughtful ways.
Education helps prepare stakeholders to get involved. Behavioral design insights are helpful here - for example, the framework that explains how to move people from awareness to alignment to action.
Evaluating your plan to engage stakeholders should be thorough, even ruthless. Try to find holes in the method by investigating who has a voice, if you accord it importance, who is not, and what failure modes are most likely.
Integration happens at the end when you’ve decided how to engage stakeholders and gathered all inputs. Including more people can create more work on the back end to synthesize their voices into a plan of action.
GO GALAXY BRAIN: Another frame of mind to think about stakeholder engagement is to practice first, second, and third-order thinking - considering how your actions will affect individuals, teams, and the external environment. Role models for this are UX designers, board game designers, and economists (respectively).
REMEMBER THE LADDER: As AI capabilities increase, they can perform more tasks–changing how we act and relate to each other at work. And remember - everybody loves inclusion, but they don’t know yet how to do it well! Before launching new systems, leaders should return to the ladder model and ask who will be a part of this decision and to what extent.
GO DEEPER: Some interesting papers to further explore what works well and doesn’t in effective stakeholder engagement:
1. Schelings, C., & Elsen, C. (2022). Assessing Participation: Toward Long-Term Experiences, Trajectories and Maturity. Architecture, 2(3), 518-543.
2. Romariz Peixoto, L., Rectem, L., & Pouleur, J. A. (2022). Citizen Participation in Architecture and Urban Planning Confronted with Arnstein’s Ladder: Four Experiments into Popular Neighbourhoods of Hainaut Demonstrate Another Hierarchy. Architecture, 2(1), 114-134.
3. Schelings, C., & Elsen, C. (2019). “Smart” Participation: Confronting Theoretical and Operational Perspectives. International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, 12(1&2).
