You ask internally about the picture management has of the relationship with stakeholders. You ask externally about what those stakeholders actually think. And then the difference comes back, and it's bigger than you had estimated, or it concerns a topic you thought was under control.
The question that then arises is not methodological. It is not "is this measurement even correct". The question is what you do with a result you didn't want to see.
The first reaction to an unwelcome outcome is often doubt about the instrument. Was the sample representative, were the questions phrased neutrally, does that one stakeholder have a personal agenda. That is an understandable reaction, and sometimes justified.
But there is a difference between questioning a measurement because the method is flawed, and questioning a measurement because the outcome is uncomfortable. The first is diligence. The second is a way of avoiding the need to act. On why feeling is not measurement you can read why an internal sense of trust rarely matches what is experienced outside the organization, and why that difference cannot be resolved by listening harder to your own feeling.
A deviation between the internal picture and the external picture rarely arises from unwillingness. More often it comes from a combination of time, distance, and information that doesn't flow through. Management speaks with the stakeholders who come forward, usually those with whom the relationship is already good. Those who don't come forward remain invisible until the moment the picture surfaces through another channel.
On why your picture deviates from that of your stakeholders you will find an elaboration of the mechanisms that cause that difference, apart from the question of who is right. It is not a matter of being right. It is a matter of two pictures existing side by side, which only become visible once you place them next to each other.
Not every deviation is a blind spot. Some differences are simply a different appreciation of the same facts: management considers an investment sufficient, a stakeholder considers it insufficient, and both parties know the facts. That is not a blind spot, that is a difference of insight.
A blind spot is something else: management does not know that the stakeholder has a different appreciation, or does not know that a commitment is experienced as unfulfilled. On how do you recognize a blind spot you can read how to make that distinction, and why the next step depends on which of the two you encounter.
A pattern that often repeats: a large investment that does not go ahead is explained and accepted. A small commitment that is not fulfilled lingers. Feedback that was promised and never came. A meeting that was promised and cancelled without a new date. Things like that weigh more heavily on trust than their size would suggest, because they say something about consistency, not about budget.
That is the reason an outcome you don't like rarely calls for a grand plan. More often it calls for tracking a small number of commitments, made and fulfilled, visible to the person waiting for them. A tracker that keeps track of that does nothing more than remember what was said and whether it happened.
An outcome you don't like is a snapshot at a moment in time. It says something about how things stand now, not about how things will always be and not about who is right. What happens with it after that snapshot is where the difference arises between an organization that uses the measurement and an organization that files the measurement away in a drawer.
On what do you do with an outcome you don't like and on why feeling is not measurement, and what the difference means it is further elaborated how those two routes differ from each other, and which questions help with that without guaranteeing an outcome. Anyone who wants to understand which stakeholders weigh most heavily in such a consideration will find on what is an influence-impact matrix a way to separate influence and impact, so that a small signal from a significant party does not get lost among the rest.
The Trust Baseline, the commitment tracker and the signal rhythm are part of tooling that is currently being built. Anyone who wants to start working with this now can sign up for the waiting list; nothing is being offered that does not yet exist.
Once the difference between perception and reality has become visible, a second question often follows: does the organization have the time and the capacity to do something about it, alongside the regular work that keeps piling up. That is a different question from the one this page answers, but a related one. The [work scan by FTE TO AI](https://fte-to-ai.com) calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, making visible how much room is created to give attention to the things an employee cannot skip, such as fulfilling a commitment to a stakeholder who has been waiting for it for some time.
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.