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| Credit Dreamstime.com |
Not the most localised of articles (I mean, we don’t see a lot of
frogs in KL, except in a claypot), but something that proves an excellent point
to consider.
Stakeholders.
Those entities which have a vested interest in our actions.
Growing up in New Zealand, I was consciously aware of Maori
mythology. It came as no surprise that during a rather large motorway
construction exercise – the project was halted at a bridge because a Taniwha
(troll, spirit) was deemed by local Maori tribal elders, to be blocking the
way.
All-to-oft, what we look at, is people, but we forget that
stakeholder interests go deeper than that. Yes, people are the decision-makers
(and those that have to live with the ramifications of decisions), but stakeholder
identification goes way beyond that. I’m not advocating reaching out and having
a focus group with mythical creatures or four-legged creatures, but I do
support developing an awareness and understanding of additional perspectives on
an issue – that stakeholders genuinely go beyond people and corporations.
The following article by Linda Agyapong sums up nicely the need to
re-examine our viewpoint on stakeholders, and thus, encourage us to take a
deeper perspective on stakeholder relations.
____________________
"Who" really is a stakeholder?
Today I’d like to focus on “stakeholder”—one of the
most buzzworthy terms.
For this discussion, let’s check in with our three
favorite project managers: Jim, Mary and Alex. They have been tasked with a
major construction project in Europe. On the first day of their kickoff
meeting, as they were documenting their project charter, they got stuck because
the three of them could not agree on identifying all the stakeholders for the
project.
Turns out the targeted site for the construction
project had a natural habitat for a specific kind of protected species—the moor
frog.
Jim and Mary jointly agreed that moor frogs should
never be considered as stakeholders of the project—after all, they were not
humans. But Alex maintained that they should be considered as stakeholders
because the frogs would either be significantly affected by the project, or
they would significantly affect the project.
Alex then explained that the classic definition of
a stakeholder—from the legendary business theorist R. Edward Freeman—did not
segregate animals from humans, nor living things from non-living things. In his
award-winning book, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, Mr.
Freeman defined a stakeholder as “any group or individual who can affect, or is
affected by the achievement of the organization's objectives.” He subsequently
clarified that this definition can be expanded further to cover anything that
the organization significantly affects, or is significantly affected by it.
Alex added that the very issue had been argued in
the journal article Project Temporalities: How Frogs Can Become Stakeholders by
Kjell Tryggestad, Lise Justesen and Jan Mouritsen. These authors took the stance that the
natural habitat of the frogs provided some benefits to people in the community,
such as via food, recreation or entertainment. Because of that value, the moor
frogs should be classified as stakeholders.
Robert A. Phillips and Joel Reichart
argued the opposite in their article, The Environment
as a Stakeholder? A Fairness-Based Approach. They said
that this natural habitat cannot be classified as a stakeholder because, “only
humans are capable of generating the necessary obligations for generating
stakeholder status.” Their basis was that stakeholders can only impact a
project when they “make themselves known as part of the empirical process to
develop the project.”
Tryggestad, Justesen and Mouritsen,
however, advised that non-living things could be actors of the project if they
make a visible difference within the project, such as significantly impacting
any of the triple constraints of the project (namely time, cost and scope).
Their rationale was that “an actor does not act alone. It acts in relation to
other actors, linked up with them.” The frogs were then considered to be “an
entity entangled in a larger assemblage consisting of both humans and
non-humans.” At the end of their research, the frogs were classified as actors
or stakeholders of the construction project.
To bring it home, Alex calmly advised his
colleagues that the frogs have peacefully lived in that part of the community
for several years. To avoid incurring the residents’ wrath, they should
classify frogs as stakeholders and subsequently make the necessary arrangements
to appease the community accordingly.
In the end, Jim and Mary unanimously agreed to this
great suggestion.
I encourage you to think outside the box to
identify all the potential stakeholders for your upcoming projects. Good luck!
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