So, when we analyze the stakeholders, as I said, previous video, the key thing is to find out as much as we can about it. But for our purposes, we start by doing a very simple assessment, a triage a sorting out of which stakeholders priority. And there are a lot of tools that people use, and some have their strengths and their weaknesses. But for me, one tool is more often valuable than any other. And my former stakeholder triage looks at stakeholders in terms of what I think are usually the two most important characteristics and the first is their attitude to the project that you're doing. And crews They may be supporters, or they may be opposes.

The second criteria is the level of impact that they can have on your project. So in this, I'm conflating things like influence and power. But we know there are some people who have a lot of power, very little influence. But there are also people with a little power and a lot of influence who can impact your project quite highly. So impact and attitude are two primary criteria. And we're going to keep it nice and simple.

The stakeholder can have high or low impact on your project on can have a positive or negative attitude towards it. That gives us how four quadrants. Now as well as believing These are two particularly salient characteristics of a stakeholder. If we choose these characteristics, then the great we get also gives us four fundamental stakeholder engagement strategies. Let's start in the bottom right hand corner. Because here are often our top priority stakeholders, they clearly have a lot of impact.

Therefore, we need to prioritize them. And we also know that human beings who disapprove of something who oppose something, tend to be far more incentivized to act than those who support it. So these are our potential troublemakers, these people we need to engage with and positively to turn them around. And our strategy is quite simple. Therefore, it is to work, when to do everything is lawful and ethical to persuade them about the merits of our projects and therefore move them up the chart. There are of course, many, many tactics and many, many ways we can implement these strategies.

And that's for you to find out. When is our first strategy let's move to the opposite corner. So the Top left these people who like what we're doing, they are minded to support us, but they don't have a lot of impact over the project. So what do we want to do? Well, we want to keep them informed. So they can continue to support us.

But ideally, we also want to consult to coach them into how they can be more effective in more impactful in supporting us and therefore, move them from the left to the right of action. And that right hand top right hand position, these are our natural supporters who are also highly impactful, we love them. So what are we going to do, we can engage them and employ their advocacy, because there is nobody who is going to be more effective, advocating for our project and helping us to work and when the opposes because we ourselves, our voice is not going to be as influential as he perceived Objective third party, the final group are in the bottom left hand corner. They don't like what we're doing, but they don't have a lot of impact, and you will be sorely tempted to ignore them. But don't. Firstly, of course, it's just plain disrespectful to ignore people.

And secondly, there is nobody in society and nobody in your organization who is wholly without impact and influence and some sort of power. And critically, I may think that this person has very little impact over the project. But what if I discovered they've been talking to that person who has little impact and this person and that person, and all of a sudden, I've got a whole group of people who together can advocate powerfully and I need to take them from the bottom left hand box and move it to the bottom right handbooks. Or maybe one not very influential person Receive, I later discover they have good contact and good relationship with someone who does have a lot of influence. So again, I need to move my perception of them from bottom left to the bottom right. I need to keep an eye on, I need to monitor them and be prepared if I can't persuade them, but if they are sufficiently low impact, to help both.

So I use this kind of grid drawn up on flip chart or drawn up on a whiteboard with post it notes. Work with the team to identify my stakeholders and work together to place them as best we can where we perceive them to be now we've got our strategies, and then we can build a plan for each one to move them in the right direction. And I will give more priority to the stakeholders on the right. And I will give less priority to stakeholders on the left. This triage approach allows me to pull together my plans document my plans is a stakeholder engagement plan. I could put it into action, and I can constantly review it in my action, analyze, plan, and more action analysis cycle.

Stakeholder triage, a basic, highly effective, very practical approach to creating a bedrock for your stakeholder engagement.