The anthropologist's approach to Stakeholder Engagement

As a project or programme manager, you might get confused to think that you are mainly dealing with scope, time and budget. In fact, you are dealing first and foremost with people.

There are the people in your team, who do the actual delivery (or the actual work, some would say). Then you have the users, the people that will work with your deliverables the day-to-day operations. On top of those two groups, you have the people that provide you with money and other resources, whom you have to deal with as well. And finally, there is a large and diverse group of people who are in various ways indirectly impacted, or who influence your initiative in any other way.

Whether you deliver your initiative on time, within budget, and with all expected quality and scope, will not matter as much as the perception of all those people, whom we collectively call "stakeholders". Some of these stakeholders you "manage", they are put under your control, at least partially. But the majority of these stakeholders you cannot manage. However, your job is to "engage" them in your project, because the success of your project is determined by their acceptance of the result.

Most training courses and best practices on project management will point out the need to engage your stakeholders. This is then quickly linked to communication, which is indeed a primary way to reach your stakeholders. But most stakeholder identification, analysis, and engagement is still too often an inside-out pursuit with a too-narrow focus.

By inside-out, I mean that the team driving the initiative will hold some sort of brainstorm to identify the stakeholders, to determine their power, influence, attitude and whatever other characteristics that are deemed important. Based on this analysis, the brainstorming team defines what communication and engagement needs these stakeholders have and how these are best met by the project or programme. This exercise is filled with assumptions, of course, because at no point the stakeholder as such is involved.

The second issue with typical stakeholder analysis concerns the too-narrow focus. The team investigates how the initiative will impact the stakeholders by looking at the direct effect on the stakeholders: they look at how a deliverable will change the way of working or how a change will impact the span of control of the stakeholders. There is often also an indirect effect, which is linked to the informal structures in an organisation. For example, someone who sponsors another project might have a negative attitude towards a project that competes for the same resources, as it is a risk for their primary interest. Or someone might have a non-professional relation to a negatively impacted stakeholder, which turns them into a blocker. In a similar way, supporters for the project might be missed.

In some cases, the stakeholders are asked for input. Usually, this happens when evaluating the effectiveness of the engagement actions. And the preferred technique is to use surveys. This is an easy and quick way to gather a lot of information. However, there are also quite a few drawbacks.

First, people do not like surveys. So with some bad luck, you suffer from a kind of observer effect where the attempt to measure stakeholder engagement negatively influences the engagement. Moreover, when people do not see any results from filling out surveys, they often stop bothering about participating. It is really important to keep people informed about what actions have been taken based on the survey results to keep them motivated to fill out the next survey. But a more important problem with surveys is the so called belief-behaviour gap: there is a difference between what people say and what people do. People have a tendency to tell you what they think you want them to tell you. And people do not always know what they want or what their real beliefs are. People have a self-image that does not necessarily correspond to reality.

It is important to be mindful of all these things. Therefore, I advise to approach stakeholder engagement like an anthropologist investigates cultures and societies. Specifically, the anthropological method of participant observation and its holistic perspective-understanding are elements to integrate in your stakeholder analysis.

You need to observe how your stakeholders are behaving, what their usual way of working is. This is best done in person, rather than through proxy observations like surveys. Anthropologists don’t ask the subjects of their research questions, but rather immerse themselves into the culture and learn by participating. The same should be done if you want to properly understand your stakeholders. By being a member of the community, you will also quickly notice the effect of any stakeholder engagement actions that have been initiated.

The second element of anthropology you should incorporate into your stakeholder engagement approach is the analysis from a holistic perspective. Anthropologists know that biology, history, language, political organisation, technological evolution etc. cannot be understood in isolation. Everything is related and needs to be considered when trying to understand the culture. The same should be kept in mind when you analyse the stakeholders of your project. You should look further than the direct impact on the way of working of a stakeholder, and consider elements like social networks, symbolic recognition, incentives, personal beliefs, indirect power, etc.

This might look like a lot of (extra) work, but stakeholder engagement is time well spent. It deserves the necessary effort and pays for itself many times over.