Anyone who creates a stakeholder overview will sooner or later end up with a matrix: influence on one axis, impact on the other. The idea is appealing because it promises order. Practice is more stubborn, because the question "how do you score influence" assumes there is a fixed standard. There isn't one. Influence is not a property of a person or organization in itself; it is a relationship between a party and a specific topic, at a specific moment.
A score of high or low on influence is a summary, not a measurement. Behind that summary lie assumptions: about who has access to decision-makers, about who can mobilize a network, about who can put a topic in the public eye. Some of those assumptions can be substantiated with facts, such as formal authority or shareholding. Others are estimates that may turn out differently next year than they do today. A score is therefore always a snapshot of what a team knows and suspects at this moment, not a fixed fact about the stakeholder.
That is precisely why the score only has value if it is revised. A matrix that has been filled in once and then left untouched for years tells you more about the assumptions of that time than about the situation now. The same applies to how you score impact: a stakeholder who was barely affected by your decisions two years ago may well be affected now, without anything in your scoring system indicating this if no one keeps track of it.
A common simplification is that influence is a fixed property of a party, independent of the topic. A regulator with a lot of influence over permit issuance does not automatically have equal influence over a reorganization. A local action group with little influence over national legislation can have considerable influence on a specific construction project in its area. This becomes harder to oversee once multiple projects run simultaneously: then not only does the impact differ per project, but also how influence shifts when multiple projects are running. Anyone who blindly carries over a score from one project to another risks confusing influence with reputation, or with the last time a party made itself heard.
The same nuance applies to impact across multiple simultaneous projects: a stakeholder who, on its own, has little bearing on project A can be cumulatively heavily affected by the sum of A, B and C. That insight only emerges once scores are tracked separately per project and then compared side by side, something further elaborated under the matrix with multiple ongoing projects.
The quadrants of the matrix are never equal in urgency. The quadrant that requires the most attention is not the quadrant with high influence and high involvement — those stakeholders are usually already on the radar and already in dialogue. More difficult is the stakeholder with high influence and low involvement: someone who can intervene heavily the moment it suits them, but remains invisible in the process until then. How to deal with that is a question that is not answered by a score alone; it is addressed under what to do with influential stakeholders who are little involved.
Filling in a matrix is not neutral. Whoever assigns the score often also determines, in doing so, who becomes responsible for maintaining that relationship. That ownership is rarely discussed explicitly; it follows implicitly from who filled in the box or who argued most loudly in the meeting that a party was important. This leads to a familiar problem: relationships with high influence end up with whoever happened to be present, not with whoever is best positioned to maintain the contact. Anyone wondering how that ownership can be made explicit will find an elaboration under who becomes owner of a stakeholder relationship.
A matrix orders what an organization already suspects. It does not tell you what a stakeholder actually thinks of a decision, and it does not replace contact. The boundary is that we can expose the difference between the internal picture of influence and involvement and what is actually being said externally, but we cannot fill in what a stakeholder thinks before they say so themselves. That difference, between the internal picture and the external statement, is exactly what the Trust Baseline is built on: an internal survey alongside an external stakeholder survey, with a commitment tracker for pledges that have been made and a signal rhythm to repeatedly check whether the picture still holds. The tool is under construction; anyone who wants to work with this can join the waiting list.
Scoring influence and impact is partly pattern recognition: who has previously assessed which type of topic, which signals carry weight, how a score is tracked over time and across projects. That is work that can be broken down into repeatable steps, which makes it interesting to place alongside human judgment to see what part of it can be systematically supported. Anyone who wants to know exactly which part of that scoring work lends itself to this will find it with the work scan of FTE TO AI, which calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
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