Impact is the half of the matrix that is most underestimated. Influence is usually visible: someone has a position, a budget, a voice in a body. Impact is more often hidden. A local resident with no formal influence at all can be more heavily impacted by a decision than a supervisory body that merely reports on it. Anyone who scores impact without that distinction ends up measuring influence twice.
Impact is not the same as involvement or vocalness. It concerns the degree to which a decision actually changes a party's daily life, operations, or position. A score is an estimate of consequence, not of sentiment. That means that for each stakeholder you look at what concretely changes: income, health, employment, living environment, reputation, access to something that was previously taken for granted. The closer that change lies to the core of someone's existence or business, the higher the score.
The score is an estimate made by your organisation, not a statement on behalf of the stakeholder. That distinction is the limit of what scoring can deliver: you record what you think the impact is, not what the stakeholder thinks about it themselves. The two can coincide. They can also diverge, and that very difference is valuable information, not an error in the score.
Impact is not fixed. The same reorganisation can be a marginal matter for a supplier and a upheaval for a local community. How you score impact when multiple projects are running is therefore a different question from scoring impact for a single standalone decision: cumulation counts. A stakeholder who is impacted three times in quick succession by separate projects experiences a cumulative total that none of the individual scores shows. Anyone who scores per project separately and treats the projects independently of one another structurally underestimates what is happening to that stakeholder.
That is also why scoring is never a one-off exercise. Impact shifts with the phase of a project: at announcement, uncertainty is often the largest part of the impact; during execution that shifts to concrete inconvenience or loss; at completion it shifts to the lasting consequences. A score that was determined at the start and is never revised, at some point measures something that no longer exists.
Impact only gains meaning alongside influence. What an influence-impact matrix involves when multiple projects are running shows how those two axes together determine which quadrant a stakeholder ends up in, and that quadrant determines what is expected of your organisation. High impact with low influence is the quadrant where organisations fall short most often, because there is no formal pressure to act on it. What you do with a stakeholder who has high influence and low impact is a different question, requiring a different kind of attention.
The score itself changes nothing. A matrix that stays in a document is a snapshot of a moment, not an instrument. What a score does do is force a conversation about who is responsible for what. High impact without an owner is one of the most common blind spots in stakeholder work: everyone sees the score, no one feels addressed.
Scoring impact immediately raises a follow-up question: who is responsible for this relationship once the score is set. Who becomes the owner of a relationship is not an administrative assignment made afterwards, it is the question that makes the score useful in the first place. A score without an owner remains a number on paper. An owner without a score does not know where the urgency lies. Only together do they form a reason to act, and to keep acting as circumstances change.
With multiple ongoing projects, that ownership question becomes more complicated, because a single stakeholder may be approached by different teams at the same time. Who becomes the owner of a relationship when multiple projects are running concerns that overlap: who has the final say when two project teams speak to the same party independently of one another, and who is the first to notice that commitments from one project create tension with another. Without a designated owner, that tension usually only becomes apparent after the stakeholder points it out themselves, and by then it has already become a matter of trust rather than coordination.
The Trust Baseline from impact-promise.com builds on this principle: an internal survey of how your organisation estimates impact and influence, alongside an external survey of the stakeholders themselves. The difference between those two pictures is the first outcome, supplemented with a commitment tracker that keeps track of what has been promised to each owner, and a signal rhythm that monitors whether those commitments are being kept. The instrument makes no statement about what a stakeholder thinks; you only know that once the stakeholder says so themselves. The instrument is still under construction. Anyone who wants to use it once it becomes available can sign up for the waiting list.
An impact score tells you where attention is needed. It does not tell you how much of the resulting work needs to be done by people and how much can be supported by a system that keeps track of scores, signals shifts, and monitors commitments. That question belongs to a different instrument: the work scan from FTE TO AI calculates per task what portion of it can be taken over by AI, making visible where human work remains necessary in the kind of stakeholder work described on this page.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
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