The Influence Agenda

A Systematic Approach to Aligning Stakeholders in Times of Change

M. Clayton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137355843
• eBook ISBN: 9781137355850
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

This book sets out a systematic way to understand who you need to influence, how to evaluate the priority you give to each person, what tactics will work the best, and how to plan and execute your campaign. It provides powerful tools and processes which use the psychology of influence and grounds them in experience of managing projects and change.

chapter 1

The Process is Trivial: The Implementation is Not

In December 1994, the UK Government gave approval for the deep water disposal of a redundant oil storage platform owned by Shell and Esso, and operated by Shell. That platform was Brent Spar.

Shell, which had responsibility for the decommissioning, approached the project carefully. It reviewed options, carried out impact assessments, commissioned reports, consulted and finally sought formal approval from regulators and from the UK Government.

Brent Spar was big: 137 metres tall and displacing 66,000 tonnes. The plan was to tow it into deep water in the North Atlantic and use shaped explosives to sink it. Analysis suggested damage to the deep sea marine environment would be minimal.

In February 1995, however, the environmental campaigning organisation Greenpeace learned of the plan and organised a worldwide campaign. In support of this, 23 activists and journalists occupied Brent Spar. Their campaign led to widespread boycotts of Shell service stations and rapidly growing damage to Shell’s international reputation.

The end result was that Shell felt compelled to reverse its decision and radically alter its plans for disposal. It put the eventual cost of disposal at £60 million, but this fails to account for loss of business and reputational damage. In an article for the magazine Greenpeace Business in April 2005, James Smith, the Country Chairman of Shell UK, referred to the public outrage, writing:

We had learned that, while good science and regulatory approval are essential, they are not sufficient. We needed to engage with society – understanding and responding to people’s concerns and expectations. We had to be clearer and more transparent about our plans and actions.

What is the Influence Agenda?

Put simply, the Influence Agenda is the process of engaging fully with all of your stakeholders. As the Brent Spar case illustrates, the Influence Agenda must dominate your thinking, your planning and your actions whenever you seek to make important changes in your organisation. This is the reason why Stakeholder Rule Number 2 is true: projects and change would be easy if it were not for the people involved.

FIGURE 1.1 Stakeholder model

Your stakeholders

If your success depends on the positive participation, endorsement or, at the very least, support of your stakeholders, we need to understand who they are. At its simplest, a stakeholder model needs to account for ten constituencies.

Each party to this model has its own agenda: its own wants, needs, perceptions and prejudices. And often these compete, leading to friction and conflict, not just with your organisation or project, but with one another. This means that, often, satisfying one stakeholder can alienate another, as you seek to address different personalities, clashes of goals and competition for influence.

Stakeholder management?

We frequently hear the term ‘stakeholder management’. However, managing relationships with and between diverse people and groups is unlikely to ever succeed. Indeed, the attempt itself may be perceived as disrespectful and manipulative. At best, stakeholder management is little more than a tick-list approach to scheduled communication – often more focused on giving to than on receiving from stakeholders. The Brent Spar case showed us that this cannot work.

What makes far more sense is to engage with stakeholders to build collaborative relationships at the right level. This requires an integrated approach that takes full account of all of your stakeholders and how they inter-relate with one another. This is a long-term strategy that begins at the very start of your project and will often persist beyond its formal completion and handover.

Stakeholder engagement

Giving up the certainty of developing the solution, deciding what to do, doing it and then, if necessary, defending it is hard. The poverty of this ‘Four-D’ approach, however, is clear from the Brent Spar example given above and the alternative ‘Three-D’ approach is, in the end, often quicker as well as more certain: dialogue, decide and do. Your investment in dialogue at the outset will obviate the need to defend and then, frequently, start again.

FIGURE 1.2 Five things to understand deeply

Engaging openly and respectfully with stakeholders is a genuine act of leadership: it empowers others to participate in a process and to feel a genuine commitment to its outcomes. This can only enhance your own leadership status and effectiveness, as well as strengthen the delivery of change to your organisation.

Effective engagement requires a depth of understanding of five things:

1. People and how the relationships between them work.
2. Organisations and how power and influence work within them.
3. The context within which you are operating and its political, social, commercial, technological, economic, environmental and regulatory constraints.
4. The situation you want to change and the implications that this change will have.
5. The tools and process of influence, and how to apply them effectively.

The benefits of the Influence Agenda

Setting aside the time and resources needed to engage actively with a wide range of stakeholders is a big undertaking, so you need to be confident that the investment is worthwhile. There are two directions from which to develop your business case for engagement, asking:

1. what if we do engage fully with stakeholders (the positive benefits and the costs of engagement)?
2. what if we don’t engage fully with stakeholders (the savings and the adverse risks of not engaging)?

Whilst quantifying these is not going to be straightforward, you might like to start by estimating the value of engagement under the headings of benefits and risks that can be averted.

Table 1.1 The benefits of the Influence Agenda

How does The Influence Agenda differ from other influence or persuasion books?

There are a lot of books on the market (including one of my own: Brilliant Influence) on the general topics of influence and persuasion. Each offers ways to influence individuals, using approaches as diverse as plain common sense at one extreme, such as Dale Carnegie’s evergreen How to Win Friends and Influence People, via Robert Cialdini’s business psychology classic Influence: The Science and Practice to the other extreme of surprising insights from more recent (2010) advanced research, such as Kevin Dutton’s popular analysis of split-second persuasion, Flipnosis.

The Influence Agenda is not just about influencing an individual – it is about how to plan and execute a campaign to engage with and influence a wide variety of different individuals and groups. Along the way, you will learn how to identify who to engage with, and how to assess each stakeholder and how prioritise your efforts. You will learn the different strategies to apply and a wide variety of tactics that will work. And we will consider stakeholder engagement in a wide range of contexts.

These contexts are set out in Appendix 1, which lists 45 typical scenarios under eight headings:

• Business projects
• Business transformation
• Process change
• Cultural transformation
• Cyclical change
• Community projects
• Governmental projects
• Crises

The strategic scope of ‘the Influence Agenda’

It is very easy to quickly get caught up in tactical, day-to-day stakeholder communication, focusing your attention on responding to immediate problems or, at best, on planning how to take the next step. These tactical skills are important, but The Influence Agenda also offers a strategic context, which sets a direction and purpose for your stakeholder engagement.

Think of strategy as a compass bearing, selecting where you want to go and why. We start our strategic journey by thinking about our reasons for, and the outcome we want to generate from, engaging. This leads us to set out what results, or outputs, we need to achieve. Only from here can we start to plan how we will achieve them.

As such, this book is strategic in its scope:

FIGURE 1.3 Strategy development and deployment cycle

• It places stakeholder engagement at the heart of projects, change and, indeed, ‘business as usual’ activities, recognising that stakeholders are a vital part of creating successful change and running an effective business or operation.
• It sees projects and change themselves as strategic tools for developing your organisation and propelling it towards a designed future. Consequently, stakeholders need to be active participants in selecting and developing projects from the outset.
• It places stakeholder engagement as a core role of an organisation rather than as a specific function of a few individuals within it. Indeed, in Chapter 9, we will consider how to go about creating a stakeholder engagement culture in your organisation and how to measure its maturity.
• Finally, it takes a strategic approach to the way we engage with groups and individuals, selecting which to prioritise and creating strategies for long-term engagement and relationship development.

The evolution of power in organisations

There was a time when organisations would not have contemplated engaging with stakeholders. In the command and control corporations of the nineteenth century, everything was subordinate to the desires of the owners, who exerted a high degree of ‘coercive power’ over labour. To the extent that these organisations considered their wider communities, it was usually out of self-interest or, at best, a paternalistic sense of obligation.

There were exceptions, however. Many Quaker-run businesses in the UK, like Cadbury, took a socially oriented approach to providing amenities for their staff and the communities around them. They recognised that, by instilling the right values, they could access greater levels of loyalty – and therefore performance – than a coercive approach could achieve.

Today, there remain a few businesses and organisations which primarily wield what Amitai Etzioni called ‘normative power’; securing compliance through shared beliefs and values. Most of those that do are in the voluntary, campaigning and caring sectors, although there are some in the commercial sector too. In the UK, these include the Co-operative Society and the John Lewis Partnership. Most businesses and public sector organisations prefer what Etzioni termed ‘utilitarian power’. Put simply, they exchange rewards for compliance, establishing a trading relationship with their employees.

Etzioni’s three forms of organisational power are reflected in three principal approaches to stakeholders – compulsion, reciprocation and genuine engagement – which he described in his 1961 book A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations: On Power, Involvement, and their Correlates. There is a role for each of these, but here we shall focus ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Templates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why You Need The Influence Agenda
• The Origin of Stakeholders
• 1 The Process is Trivial: The Implementation is Not
• 2 Who are Your Stakeholders?
• 3 More than Just Power: Analysing Your Stakeholders
• 4 What are You Doing? Craft ing Your Message
• 5 Gentle Persuasion: Soft Power
• 6 Hidden Power: Behavioural Economics
• 7 A Dozen Reasons Why You’re Wrong: Handling Resistance
• 8 Your Influence Agenda: Campaign Planning
• 9 Making it Work: Campaign Management
• A Call to Action
• Appendix 1: Scenarios for the Influence Agenda
• Appendix 2: Stakeholder List
• Appendix 3: Additional Stakeholder Analysis Tools
• Appendix 4: Stakeholder Engagement Communication Methods
• Appendix 5: Ethical Stakeholder Engagement
• Appendix 6: Rules, Rules, Rules
• Appendix 7: Selected Glossary
• Appendix 8: Learn More: Bibliography
• Appendix 9: Hear Mike Clayton Speak about The Influence Agenda
• Appendix 10: Also by Mike Clayton
• Index