For this half credit Stakeholder Analysis skills workshop class, there were three required readings. One of them was a resource section from John Bryson’s Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations which I read last semester in Prof. Bryson’s Strategic Planning course. I’m not summarizing that one here, as it covers techniques for practice rather than research and concepts. Of the other two readings, one was also a required reading in Management and Governance of Nonprofit Organizations, Week 4. The outlines posted here and for that class week are identical.

Table of contents

• Nutt, P. C. - Decision-making processes prone to success and failure (2002)
  • Real world application of the idea-imposition process model
• Bryson - What to do When Stakeholders Matter (2004)

Nutt, P. C. - Decision-making processes prone to success and failure (2002)

• Five decision-making stages emerged from a comparison of these prescriptions and findings:
  • collect information to understand the claims calling for action
  • establish a direction that indicates the desired result
  • mount a systematic search for ideas
  • evaluate these ideas with the direction in mind
  • manage social and political barriers that can block the preferred course of action during implementation
• Understand claims
  • Claims identify the “arena of action” or topic the decision maker expects to address
  • Claimants may have different takes on what is important. These different takes prompt different views of what should be done, which can lead to very different claim
  • Claims can be self-serving or symptomatic when dictated by the claimant’s power
  • Faulty claims and self-serving ones pull the decision maker away from pressing issues
  • In the claim stage, overlooked concerns and considerations of stakeholders are sought
  • Decision makers take one of two paths to identify an area in which to take action. They can choose among claims and claimants, or they can explore claims to increase their understanding
  • The decision maker who elects to choose among claims and claimants moves into an idea-imposition process
  • Decision makers who take steps to expand the pool of claims before selecting one begin a discovery process
• Set a Direction
  • How the direction is set provides decision makers with two additional procedural option
  • can be opportunistic and latch onto a ready-made idea, or it can identify a need embedded in the claim and offer a problem or an objective.
  • A problem identifies what is wrong that needs fixing
  • An objective indicates the desired result
• Uncover Ideas
  • People who study decision making recommend that you uncover multiple options and innovative ideas
  • Innovation requires a new idea
  • Some call for “radical innovation,” ideas that are new to an industry.
  • Radical innovation is credited with giving many organizations a decisive advantage
• Evaluate Ideas
  • Information such as costs, benefits, and acceptance is often collected to judge the merits of an idea.
  • also used to assess the amount of risk in each option
  • Evaluation information provides a basis to select among ideas
• Implement the Preferred Idea
  • acceptance of stakeholders can be promoted by involving them
  • Involvement entices stakeholders to go along with the decision
  • Another approach, called networking, guides stakeholders
  • Edict and persuasion can also be used
    • In persuasion the decision maker marshals arguments to sell the decision
    • An edict prescribes the behavior necessary to realize the decision
  • Implementation can be initiated early in the decision-making effort by using participation or networking
  • Using persuasion and edicts pushes implementation to the end
  • Let’s turn our attention to two process types, one notable for its success and the other for failure.
• A decision-making process lays out the sequence of activities
• process stages identify what decision makers worry about
• A tactic indicates how managers go about uncovering the things
• Directions can take shape as a need or as an opportunity
• Implementation can be proactive and pushed to the front of the process
• Two of these paths are of particular interest. One produces a discovery process offering a “think first” approach that increases the chance of being successful. The other, called an idea-imposition process, is linked to failed decisions and decision debacles.
• The Discovery Process
  • Decision makers who use a discovery process work their way through a process that stresses claim validation, implementation, and direction setting
  • These three stages are considered early on because they have the greatest impact on success
  • A premium is placed on learning through the discovery of decision topics, barriers to taking action, and desired results
  • The successful decision maker looks beyond the initial claim. Claims made by a cross section of informed people are uncovered to reveal concerns and considerations that are hidden or have yet to be disclosed
  • When decision makers ask “Who can block action?” they bring social and political issues to the forefront
  • Directions guide the search for ideas by indicating what is wanted as an outcome
  • If claim implementation and direction have been attended to, the remaining stages are easier to carry out and less controversial.
  • Evaluation is straightforward in a development process.
  • Trends and events and the claims they provoke are handled much differently in an idea-imposition process
  • In the idea-imposition process, a claim is selected after a review of the information gathered
  • Decision makers who use an idea-imposition process skip some stages and change the order of others
  • An orderly path is seldom followed because decision makers jump to conclusions and then try to implement the solution they stumbled upon
  • bias for action causes them to limit their search, consider very few ideas, and pay too little attention to people who are affected, despite the fact that decisions fail for just these reasons
  • Decision makers following an idea-imposition process uncover an idea early on, which limits search and in most cases terminates it.
  • Because managers latch onto an idea early on and use most of their resources to test its merits, learning is limited
  • several stages that play an important role in the discovery process are skipped and important activities are deferred.
  • Decision makers prone to failure select among competing claims according to the power of the claimant.
  • danger in ignoring a claimant is believed to be more important than the claim’s message
  • alienated stakeholders who were not given a chance to offer their views erect barriers.
  • A fatal flaw in all of the debacles was the unwillingness to think about any information unless it supported the decision maker’s claim and its implied arena of action
  • In each of the debacles, the core idea that made up the decision was available early on and seldom changed.
  • commitment becomes a trap in which “new ideas” are always variations on old ones. No one dares to challenge the status quo, fearing that key players have too many vested interests to back away
  • This perception of sunk cost, the fear of failure, and the reluctance people have to starting over keeps the decision maker focused on making things work. Coaxes them to carry on even when their cause is doomed
  • Once an “opportunity” is found, evaluation soon follows.
  • A “defensive evaluation” runs up the bill for analysis, seldom turns up anything of value.
  • Such evaluations offer little beyond shallow and predictable observation
  • When there is but one idea, evaluation can still be useful if the idea is assessed against expectations
  • Such an evaluation can uncover the wisdom of installing the idea, but it will be controversial
  • Decision makers in the debacles spent little of their time or money on implementation until near the end of the process. The tactics available at this point are failure prone
  • People who see themselves as disadvantaged and lacking the power to openly resist resort to tokenism and withdraw
  • After a power play, people will only tell you what they think you want to hear and will no longer tell you what they believe to be true
• Shifts to the Idea-Imposition Process
  • dual pressures of pragmatism and timeliness can intensify to the point that they can persuade you to shift tactics
  • shift in tactics can occur in any process stage and lure an unsuspecting decision maker into the idea-imposition process
  • Let’s trace the pressures that can cause you to shift your tactics
    • One motivation arises when a quick fix pops up. If the idea is adopted, there is a shift to an “idea tactic” that abandons best practice
    • A contention that time or money is being misused can push you to alter how things are being. Studies show that they are neither cheaper nor faster
  • Once the move to the idea-imposition process is made, no one in my studies was able to get back to the tactics called for by the discovery process
  • There is some good news. Moving to an idea-imposition process is less damaging if it occurs further along in the discovery process.
  • All debacles follow such a process. A claim suggested by a powerful claimant is adopted. The arena of action implied by the claim is never questioned, and the idea called for by the claim or offered by a powerful claimant is identified, evaluated, and installed
• Process depicts how decision makers stage the activities thought to be crucial
• Both the stages of activity and the order of these stages are important.
• A discovery process puts the more important stages early in the effort and is more apt to be successful
• All of the debacles studies used an idea-imposition process. Failure is four-times more likely when this process is used

Real world application of the idea-imposition process model

As I read this, and (as always) paid attention to the headlines of the day, this somewhat tongue-in-cheek timely example of an idea-imposition process came to mind:

• Select a claim: The investigation into foreign election interference is a partisan sham
• Ready made plan: Discredit the investigators
• Defensive evaluation: Declassified memo which omits material facts
• Installation: “This memo totally vindicates me”

Time will tell whether that particular idea-imposition process leads to success or failure

Bryson - What to do When Stakeholders Matter (2004)

This outline also appears in Management and Governance of Nonprofit Organizations, Week 4

• This article focuses specifically on how and why managers might go about using stakeholder identification and analysis techniques in order to help their organizations meet their mandates, fulfill their missions and create public value.
• The article argues that wise use of stakeholder analyses can help frame issues that are solvable in ways that are technically feasible and politically acceptable and that advance the common good.
• The term stakeholder refers to persons, groups or organizations that must somehow be taken into account by leaders, managers and front-line staff
• The decision about how to define stakeholders therefore is consequential, as it affects who and what counts
• Failure to attend to the information and concerns of stakeholders clearly is a kind of flaw in thinking or action that too often and too predictably leads to poor performance, outright failure or even disaster
• Figuring out what the problem is and what solutions might work are actually part of the problem, and taking stakeholders into account is a crucial aspect of problem solving
• Said differently, we are moving into an era when networks of stakeholders are becoming at least as important, if not more important, than markets and hierarchies
• meeting the mandates and fulfilling the mission should result from ‘producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what the organization is, what it does, and why it does it, which is also a definition of what strategic planning is
• people often need to be convinced that there is something that can be done about a problem before they will participate
• success for public organizations depends on satisfying key stakeholders according to their definition of what is valuable
• Because attention to stakeholders is so important, stakeholder analyses become important.
• strategic management processes that employ a reasonable number of competently done stakeholder analyses are more likely to be successful
• fifteen stakeholder identification and analysis techniques, grouped into four categories:
  • organizing participation
    • Stakeholder analyses are undertaken for a purpose and that purpose should be articulated as clearly as it can be before the analyses begin – while also understanding that purposes may change over time. The purpose should
    • purpose should guide the choices concerning who should be involved in the analyses and how
    • In general, people should be involved if they have information that cannot be gained otherwise, or if their participation is necessary to assure successful implementation
    • Five stakeholder identification and analysis techniques are particularly relevant to helping organize participation:
      • a process for choosing stakeholder analysis participants
      • the basic stakeholder analysis technique
      • power versus interest grids
      • stakeholder influence diagrams
      • the participation planning matrix
  • creating ideas for strategic interventions
    • Creating ideas for strategic interventions involves problem formulation and solution search, but also depends on understanding political feasibility
    • Six additional techniques are particularly relevant to creating ideas for strategic interventions. They are:
      • bases of power and directions of interest diagrams
      • finding the common good and the structure of a winning argument
      • tapping individual stakeholder interests to pursue the common good
        • Techniques discussed so far have approached problem or issue framing in terms of the “common good” searching for themes, concerns or goals shared among key stakeholders. The analyses have downplayed the significance of opposition. The techniques discussed next begin to highlight how opposition needs to be taken into account.
      • stakeholder-issue interrelationship diagrams
      • problem-frame stakeholder maps
      • ethical analysis grids
  • building a winning coalition around proposal development, review and adoption
    • Once stakeholders and their interests have been identified and understood, it is typically still advisable to do additional analyses in order to develop proposals that can garner adequate support
    • Three techniques considered here:
      • stakeholder support versus opposition grids
      • stakeholder role plays
      • policy attractiveness versus stakeholder capability grids
  • implementing, monitoring and evaluating strategic interventions
    • still important to focus directly on stakeholders during implementation
    • Technique: policy implementation strategy development grid
• policy analysis is a kind of art in which problems must be solvable, at least tentatively or in principle, in order to be understood and addressed effectively
• stakeholder analyses are a key to identifying problems that can and should be solved
• whether the practice really is smart depends on which techniques are used for what purposes, when, where, how, by whom and with what results.
• stakeholder analyses must be undertaken skillfully and thoughtfully, with a willingness to learn and revise along the way
• Stakeholder analysis never should be seen as a substitute for virtuous and ethical practice, although they may be a part of promoting such practices.