Main elements
What is the Stakeholder 360® ?
The Stakeholder 360® (S360) is an assessment process for developing stakeholder strategies. Strategies for gaining or maintaining a social licence emerge from combining three types of information: (i) the social licence level granted by each stakeholder, (ii) the concerns, preoccupations, and narratives expressed by each stakeholder, and (iii) the strength of the social ties among all the stakeholders.
The first step in the S360 is to define which organizations should be studied, which often means interviews with them. In that case, the leaders of the organizations are then interviewed about their relations with other organization and their interests in the focal activity (e.g., fracking) or focal organization (e.g., a fracking company). The interview data is converted into graphs showing the socio-political network among the stakeholders and the issues. These graphs immediately suggest strategies for moving towards a pattern of social capital that better promotes collaboration towards mutual goals.
What is a Stakeholder ?
Traditionally, stakeholders are defined as those who have an interest in the activities of an organization. They are potentially or actually affected by the actions of the organization, or can have an affect on the organization. Lately the term ‘stakeholder’ has also been used to mean those people or groups who have an interest in a problem or project domain, like the pollution of a river or the revitalization of a town’s economy.
The potential or actual impacts can be positive and negative. The table below shows examples of the kinds of impacts that could define a stake in a company.
360 of what ?
The ‘360’ refers to the 360 degrees of a circle. It is a metaphorical way of saying that every stakeholder is encircled by a network of other stakeholders., Because each stakeholder also has its own own stakeholders, the whole set of relationships forms a network.
The Stakeholder 360® is intended to measure all of the relationships of all of the stakeholders in the network with each other — everyone with everyone — therefore, ‘360’. However, to avoid including the whole world in the network, a Stakeholder 360 limits itself to one organization (i.e., the ‘focal’ organiztaion) and its stakeholders.
The stakes, or interests, can be in an organization (e.g., a municipal government) or they can be in a shared concern (e.g., community economic development, pollution of a shared lake).
There are several criteria that indicate the boundaries of a focal organization’s stakeholder network. The single best way to define the boundary is to get out and ask questions. In the “snowballing” technique, interviewers ask each stakeholder who else they think is a stakeholder. Then they try to talk to those people. Eventually they encounter nominees whose stakes are so small that they do not want to be interviewed. By that point the interviewers have probably already interviewed the core of the network.
Examples of how a company has impacts on stakeholder groups:
- Company gives health promotion agency access to company facilities
- Company helps local suppliers plan explansions to outside markets
- Employees of government of developing country get administrative training from company
- Company's purchase of local land precludes uses favored by other groups
- Unsafe workplace causes employee injuries
- Community water supply polluted by company's emissions
Examples of how stakeholder groups have impacts on a company:
- Stock analysts rate company's earning potential highly
- University places sought-after tech students in company's co-op work/study program
- Local governments speeds up a development permit approval
- Organized crime or terrorists operate near company and raise security costs
- Opportunistic groups make false accusations in a bid for financial compensation
- Politicians who promised too much raise business taxes to cover their vote purchases