In this video, we'll take a deep dive into stakeholder analysis. This is a critical piece of the change management process, but it's one that people often move through quickly in a non-structured or systematic way. By stakeholder analysis, we mean really seeking to understand the groups of people and the specific individuals in your organization that will have some influence over your work. What do they think about your change effort? What are they feeling about the change effort? Are they supportive or are they not? Why? And we want a systematic approach to this to make sure we understand how to address their needs and their concerns upfront, so we're increase our odds of being as successful as much as possible. This really is an assessment of your organization at any one point in time. You're trying to come up with a map of what the social lay of the land looks like. So, do you have allies for this effort? Who are they and where are they? Do you anticipate resistors? And also who are they and where are they? These can be groups of people, but also very specific individuals within those groups, be the providers, administrators, technicians, physicians, nurses. There's many different people involved in the change. You're going to get some variability within those different groups, so it's really important to understand the group as a whole and what their concerns might be, but also specific influential people and what their concerns may be. So, do these stakeholders have issues with your initiative? Do they have ideas on how to improve it? Do they have concerns? We want to know broadly who are the people that are going to impact our success and what they think about our effort, and can we engage them in making it better? And as you progress through a change process, there's a saying, "You can do anything, but you cannot do everything. " So at some point in time, we need to prioritize our effort and energy within a change effort. Who do we focus on? Whose needs, whose concerns, whose ideas do we absolutely need to address? Whose, if we run out of time or other resources, may we save for another day and still meet the goals of our project? One way to think about this, is to look at stakeholders in terms of their influence and their level of support. And you may actually want to graph people out. So as you go through your organization and have conversations with people, and this is really the only way to do. We can't sit in a room and make assumptions about what we think people feel and what their ideas are. We need to have good conversations with them. So as you do that, you might try mapping them out. So, a level of influence we mean, can this person impact positively or negatively the outcome of our change effort? Are they holding resources that we need? Are they holding influence of their peers that can help us or hurt us? Those types of issues. Level of support, of course, is what are their thoughts and feelings around the initiative? Do they believe in it? Do they believe it has value, or they're more ambivalent, or do they have negative perceptions? And why? Of course, as we move through why. So, when we get to the issue of prioritizing stakeholder needs, of course, we want to focus on people who have a high level of influence on the outcome of our project first. But who do you focus on in terms of levels of support? Do you focus on the needs of people who are already on board, because they may be investing effort and energy into the work? Or do you focus on the people who are either ambivalent or have some negative perceptions about the project, or some concerns about the project? Thinking about adoption curves can help us think through who to focus our efforts on. There's a lot of research on the diffusion of innovation and knowledge, and what they found is that across organizations, there tends to be a set of innovators and early adopters. One to two out of 10 people in an organization are going to love new ideas because they're new, and they're different, and they create an opportunity. About one to two out of 10 people in any given organization will really dislike a change initiative because it's new, it's different, and it requires change. So, there are some people who will not move. There'll be resistance because it's resistant. So, where do you focus? Of course, we want to address everyone's concerns if we can, but there's a real risk for change efforts. We tend to focus on the laggards, or the heavy resisters who are resistant for the sake of resistance sometimes, and there may be no addressing their needs. And a change project can be derailed if we spend all of our effort and energy on those people. The literature is very clear here. If we want to move the entire organization, we can address the needs of the early adopters and innovators, and have them help us move the bulk of the organization, which are people in the middle that may be a little just ambivalent, on the fence, waiting to decide which way to go. Do I expend the effort to do something differently or not? If we can engage the early adopters to help us move the early majority and the late majority, then the laggards will take care of themselves over time. So, absolutely, address any and all real concerns of people, but do not get derailed if there are people with a very low level of support for your initiative, spend your time on those a little more positive, and that can help you move the organization. So over time, the goal of our stakeholder analysis process is to understand the needs and the concerns of everyone in the organization, and do what we can in a systematic fashion to bring them onboard. To address those concerns, to strengthen our change initiative and the solutions we're proposing, to make sure they meet as many people's needs as possible, as effectively as possible. So that's really what we're after, is more engaged people through the stakeholder analysis process. And the key component to generating a good stakeholder analysis is asking good questions. And the types of questions, or how we ask questions, can really influence the answers we get. If you're in a leadership position, people may be hesitant to tell you what they really feel or what they really think. They may be more interested in telling you what they think you want to hear, and that's dangerous in a change management process. So, here are some different types of questions you could hear asked within a stakeholder analysis. For example, if you're reaching out to engage someone who seems resistant in joining a project team, "You seem hesitant to join the project team, is that true?" You can also talk about, how would your patients benefit from this project? Or, from your perspective, do you see anything that will make success difficult in this project? Or, based on what you've heard so far, what do you think about this project? So, those are a mix of some good, some bad, some in the middle. But what we see at the top is that's clearly someone inserting their perspective, their ideas, and asking for confirmation of that. That's generally not what we want to do. We don't want people to tell us what we think we know. We want them to get their true insight. So, questions down towards the bottom that are a bit more open-ended, or inserting less of ourselves into the question, and really asking for people's honest answers, can help us get good ideas and good insights into where different stakeholders are. So, there are many different ways to ask questions and to get information from people. Many styles you can pursue. We'll talk about two right now, that are very important for this idea of stakeholder analysis, and really getting to the truth of someone's experience. The idea of humble inquiry and confrontational inquiry. Humble inquiry or trying to do is maximize your own curiosity, your own interest in someone else's experience. You're trying to minimize your own bias, eliminate as much as you can your own preconceptions about what that other person may feel or what their experience is. Because honestly, at the end of the day, we don't know what it's like to work in someone else's shoes. We want their honest opinion about what their work is like, and what the change may mean to them. So, we want to ask open-ended questions. We don't want confirmation of what we think we know. We want them to tell us what they think and feel. Use your ignorance and not to play ignorant of the facts of the change, but to play ignorant of their experience. You really don't know what it's like day in, day out for other people in the organization. This tends to help provide more honest answers in which are, of course, more useful and more helpful in planning for a change initiative and also helps build trust, which is very important moving down the road, and build stronger relationships with people, which is a critical piece of making change happen as well. And of course what we're trying to avoid are more confrontational aspects of communication, or confrontational style. Here is where we're asserting our own ideas, our own perspective, in the form of questions. We're really looking for validation that what we're thinking is correct. We're asking leading questions. We're telling people, we're not truly asking them. And this is going to put people in a mode of giving what the socially acceptable answer. And this is not helpful for what we want to do. So, really think about the nature of the interactions you're having. What can you do to elicit a more honest answer from people, that can go a long way towards building trust and getting you good information that you can use to plan your change more effectively. So in sum, some things to think about from a stakeholder analysis perspective and what to do with that. What's your plan for engaging the stakeholders? First, mapping out, who are those critical groups and the individuals within those groups that you need to engage? In your communications, thinking, what are effective ways to measure what you're trying to do for them, for this group? What are the benefits? What are the risks that they might perceive? What challenges do they see as you describe what it is you're trying to do? Next, how are you going to build your change team? This goes hand in hand with building a stakeholder analysis of understanding who has influence over the effectiveness of your project. You want representation from all of those groups on the change team that you build. You need the roles represented, and you need to think through who's going to be an effective representative of that discipline. And finally, how are you going to build consensus on the solution? This gets back to understanding what the different group's needs and concerns are, and working through those in a prioritized fashion based on who can influence your project, and who can engage, and support, and move it forward.
