Enjoyed the breakdown of All Stakeholder Management Advice Ever, and I think you could go further. My take is that the simplistic nature of the advice reflects a general flaw in frameworks: they promise you mechanistic control of the world, but it’s a lie.
Did you see the Wire/politics post from Hang Xu recently? It was about designers, sure, but really it’s the same thing: the job is politics! Politics is people! People are messy and complex (and don’t fit in a matrix or a framework)! People aren’t a task to check off in Jira.
Anyway, glad you’re flagging it in this post, dude. I’d say an area with some useful ideas about the people side of things is complexity science and naturalising sense-making - for example methods to stimulate informal networks. They don’t give you a way to “manage stakeholders” ... but maybe stakeholders don’t particularly want to feel managed!
Enjoyed the breakdown of All Stakeholder Management Advice Ever, and I think you could go further. My take is that the simplistic nature of the advice reflects a general flaw in frameworks: they promise you mechanistic control of the world, but it’s a lie.
Did you see the Wire/politics post from Hang Xu recently? It was about designers, sure, but really it’s the same thing: the job is politics! Politics is people! People are messy and complex (and don’t fit in a matrix or a framework)! People aren’t a task to check off in Jira.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7047208257727193088?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7047208257727193088%29
Anyway, glad you’re flagging it in this post, dude. I’d say an area with some useful ideas about the people side of things is complexity science and naturalising sense-making - for example methods to stimulate informal networks. They don’t give you a way to “manage stakeholders” ... but maybe stakeholders don’t particularly want to feel managed!
great note, Tom, that video is awesome. people hate politics and that’s likely the root cause. hmw fall in love with politics without feeling dirty