Seeing Stakeholders Differently
I’ve been thinking a lot about the people who are selected to participate in collaboration recently.
It might be because I was recently reading an article by Max Hardy called It’s Time to Do Stakeholder Mapping Differently! Max points out that the traditional stakeholder mapping approach where one uses influence and interest is likely missing stakeholders who aren’t interested (yet) and have no influence or power. Instead, he suggests an alternative where we look more deeply at our stakeholders to see what interests they may have in the project, how they might be able to contribute, and how to make engagement effective. What Max suggests, that I really like, is the idea of shifting away from seeing our stakeholders as “risks to manage” and toward seeing stakeholders as “assets to work with and utilize”.
Then I had a great conversation with Tai Lake, of the Hawaii Artists Collaboration, for a Cool Collaborations podcast episode coming out in a couple of weeks. Tai mentioned that the people who are self-selecting into the artist’s Colab are those who are masters in their craft and have basically ‘hit the ceiling’, because there isn’t much left to explore artistically in their chosen media. So, for a furniture builder or a weaver, they reach the top of their game and through something like Colab, they are suddenly exposed to new ideas, new techniques, and the possibilities of combining media. The conversation with Tai was more about ideas and bringing together people to share ideas or create ideas. The Colab model is one where participants self-select into the collaboration, because they want to grow as artists.
And then there was another podcast conversation (this one released on 30 Nov) with Dr. Lyn Carson of the newDemocracy Foundation. Carson and I explored the connections between deliberative process or deliberative democratic process and collaboration. One of the key aspects of deliberative democracy is that participants in the process are randomly selected. This one attribute of deliberative process is so incredibly important, because it is fundamentally what allows us (those outside the process) to have trust in the process. Randomly selected participants mean that whatever the product or decision coming from the work, it’s been done by ‘people just like me’, as opposed people involved because they have a stake in the outcome.
There’s another podcast episode coming out tomorrow, in which I have another great conversation, this time with Jorgé Avilés who is a cross-cultural ambassador with Canada West Land. Jorgé and I talked through the idea of labels that we all assign to people, thinking that those labels actually describe those people. We assign them based on whatever attribute we want to focus on, such as culture, colour, and gender. Or maybe it’s more aligned with our particular project, where we’re interested in those affected, their interest, and their influence. Jorgé’s point was that those labels limit us, and they limit the potential of the ideas and solutions.
You’re reading this and thinking there will be some grand summation of these various thoughts into a ‘solution’ (imagine solution said in a deep, resonating, radio announcer voice), but there isn’t. Max Hardy was right to open the hood on how we think about stakeholders, but I would suggest that we can go further yet. Why not include a random selection of citizens inside a specific collaborative problem? Or, as Tai Lake mentioned, why not include artists in technical or government collaborations as a way to make the thinking of everyone more creative?
And beyond all of it, we all collectively need to think about the ideas and interests that can be brought to the table, instead of the labels we apply to people, however benign they might be. Labels simply don’t serve us in collaboration because, as Jorgé put it, they serve to divide us instead of bringing us together.
Happy collaborating!
Scott Millar often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. Through Collaboration Dynamics, he offers a program in High Performance Collaboration, where he guides groups to explore the nature of collaboration, inclusivity, and innovation, and acquire new abilities to create the conditions that enable groups to contribute and thrive in challenging environments.
Scott is also the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
