The personnel in your organization each deal with different stakeholders, which include customers and suppliers, government and NGOs, to shareholders and unions. To deal with the influence they have on your organization, you need to understand the coalitions and influence dynamics among them. This requires a map of the stakeholder network. By bringing together your personnel in an online workshop, you can get a quick picture of the sociopolitical landscape and develop provisional strategies for resolving conflicts and improving your social licence.
The steps in the workshop are:
1. Join together on a meeting platform
2. Break into small groups
3. Use a web app to draw nodes representing stakeholders
4. Using the app, color the nodes to indicate what level of social licence your group thinks each stakeholder grants
5. Add lines to represent collaborative or conflictive relations among the stakeholders
6. Rearrange the nodes to see who is more influential and which ones are clustered in coalitions
7. Interpret the graph’s implications for your social licence.
By bringing in participants from diverse parts of your organization you can (a) get a broader picture of who all the stakeholders are and how they affect each other, and (b) build commitment to stakeholder relations initiative.