Municipalities and provinces are not a stakeholder like a customer or investor. An alderman has a portfolio, a council that scrutinises, and a horizon that is cut short by elections. A provincial executive works with a coalition agreement that is read back word for word. Anyone who enters into a conversation with these parties without taking that into account gets responses that do not match the question asked. This is usually not unwillingness. It is a different kind of logic.
Behind the wish to "start the conversation" with a municipality or province there is often a more specific question. Does the municipality see your organisation as a partner in a task, or as a party that must deliver something the municipality is responsible for? Is there support at the civil service level, at the administrative level, or both? Is your topic on the portfolio holder's agenda, or does it still need to get there? These questions are not interchangeable. An organisation that has good standing with civil servants but is unknown at the administrative level needs a different conversation than an organisation that is known administratively but encounters resistance from civil servants.
With commercial stakeholders, a commitment is often a commitment. With municipalities and provinces, a commitment is a position in a process involving other actors: an executive board that must agree, a council that can amend, a civil service organisation that carries out what has been decided administratively and not always anything more. A civil servant who sounds well-disposed may have no administrative room to manoeuvre. An administrator who expresses an intention may not, in practice, be held to it without this being seen as politically unwise. Anyone who conducts this conversation as they would a conversation with a supplier or a financier expects a clarity that administrative practice does not always offer.
This is one of the reasons why the conversation with financiers requires a different structure than the conversation with a government body: with a financier, the assessment framework is often made explicit, whereas with a municipality it is spread across the coalition agreement, civil service advice, and the political sensitivity of the moment.
A structured conversation starts with a distinction between what you ask of a civil servant and what you ask of an administrator. From the civil service organisation you can ask about the process: which documents are in progress, which department owns the matter, what is the usual route for a topic like yours. From the administrator you ask about position: how does your topic fit into the portfolio, is there a political risk attached to support or rejection, and within what timeframe can anything be said at all.
The order of the questions is here just as important as the questions themselves. An organisation that approaches the administrative level first without having done the groundwork with civil servants risks the administrator asking for civil service advice that does not yet exist, bringing the matter to a standstill. An organisation that only ever engages at the civil service level gets precision without political weight. Both routes are needed, in an order that suits the topic.
There is a difference between a municipality that knows your organisation and a municipality that supports your organisation. Familiarity arises through repeated contact, presence at meetings, participation in processes. Support arises through an explicit judgement in which an administrator puts something at stake. Many organisations mistake the first for the second, and are surprised when a municipality that always seemed well-disposed turns out to be hesitant when a concrete decision is at hand. That is not inconsistency. It is the difference between a good relationship and a political risk that an administrator may or may not want to take.
This distinction between perception and reality is precisely what why your perception differs from that of your stakeholders is about: the internal perception of a relationship and the external reality of a position diverge more often with government bodies than with other stakeholder groups, precisely because goodwill and support are so easily mistaken for one another.
The vulnerability lies not in support failing to materialise, but in it being withdrawn. A municipality that expresses an intention in a meeting and later cannot make good on that intention because the political wind has changed damages trust more than a municipality that was reticent from the start. For organisations working with government bodies, it is therefore more useful to track small, verified commitments than to build on the atmosphere of a conversation. What an alderman says in an informal meeting is not what an executive board decides, and that in turn is not what a council ultimately adopts.
This administrative layer differs from conversations with regulators, where powers are formally fixed, and from conversations with advocacy organisations, where the constituency is usually more decisive than the political news of the day.
A structure to clearly distinguish between civil service familiarity and administrative support, and to track commitments from municipalities and provinces until they have been honoured or withdrawn, is part of what we are building. The tool is not yet available. Anyone who wants to use it as soon as it is can sign up for the waiting list.
Anyone who first wants to know how much time within their own organisation goes into this kind of administrative coordination, reporting, and follow-up will find a different instrument for that: the work scan from FTE TO AI calculates, per task, what proportion of the work can be taken over by AI, making visible how much capacity remains for the conversation itself.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.