A Revised Framework for Stakeholder Management in Chaotic Times
The Washing Machine Morning
Picture this: You end your day with your clothes neatly arranged in your closet-shirts by color, pants by season, everything in its place. You wake up the next morning, open the closet, and… it’s all gone. Instead, you find your wardrobe spinning in a washing machine: socks with suits, sweaters with shorts, everything mixed up, drenched, and unrecognizable. Isn't that what stakeholder engagement feels like today?
Acknowledging the Complexity of Stakeholder Relationships
A stakeholder is any individual or collective actor—inside or outside your organization—whose interests are affected by your actions, and who can, in turn, affect your mission, ambitions or strategy. This bidirectional relationship—where stakeholders both influence and are influenced—creates a dynamic complexity that static models struggle to address.
From Order to Chaos: The New Stakeholder Reality
Not long ago, stakeholder management was straightforward. You could map out investors, employees, and regulators, and as long as you kept everyone happy, you could move forward. Today, however, the world is in constant flux. Each morning brings new crises, wars, regulations, or technological leaps—like AI or humanoid robots. Stakeholders now move on your map as if a spin cycle had started: yesterday’s ally is today’s critic, and a quiet observer can suddenly take center stage. The rules of engagement are rewritten overnight.
Questioning the Root Cause
What’s really causing this volatility in stakeholders' engagement? It’s tempting to blame external disruptions. The hypothesis emerges that overadaptation has become stronger than values. Instead of adapting only plans, tactics, or strategies, stakeholders now adapt their fundamental values such as loyalty. But why wouldn't they if leaders do it first?
Leadership Tonality: The Hidden Driver
Leaders are on stage all the time. Their facial expressions when entering the office, their greeting style with colleagues, their behaviours in meetings, the style of their e-mails, their decisions and how they make them—all this has an impact.
In Buddhist tradition, tonality (Vedana) refers to the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling tone of an experience. These sensations often influence our responses (reactivity) without us even realizing it.
The Forest Runner Effect
A simple personal example: walking in the forest, feeling balanced, I greeted a struggling runner with a joyful encouragement. His face shifted from pain to smile, instantly. This micro-interaction illustrates how one person’s emotional state can influence another’s tonality.
Organizational Example: The Ripple Effect
Consider another real-life example: a top manager who was so fearful of the CEO that he would do anything to please him—a master of “strategic panicking.” While stakeholder mapping of his department surely showed positive engagement, this alignment was fragile, as it was only based on the CEO’s protection rather than genuine trust. Stakeholders were ready to disengage at the first opportunity. The issue is, each time that top manager was acting in an hectic way to please the CEO, he was creating unpleasant tonalities around. It is likely that in turn, the managers impacted would trigger the same tonalities. In organizations, leader create cascading effects throughout stakeholder ecosystems.
The Collective Leadership Impact
At a more global scale, we see States leaders moving with the winds of fear, politicians contradicting themselves, and industry leaders abandoning countries over temporary threats. This collective leadership weakness creates a negative tonality that erodes global stability. The Key Findings of the WEF's 2024 Global Risk Report mentions "A deteriorating global outlook", with headlines such as "Environmental risks could hit the point of no return", "Simmering geopolitical tensions combined with technology will drive new security risks". It is interesting to note that all these risks are listed as if they were just "facts of life", as if misinformation was a pandemia due to bad luck. Yet all the risks mentioned, without exception, are the consequence of the actions (or non-action) of world leaders, sometimes people duly elected, and of industry leaders who are allowed to act without constraints, or with the wrong one's. In other words, risks are always stakeholder related.
Why the Old Maps don't work so well anymore
Classic models like the Power-Interest Grid or Salience Model gave us order and allowed to react. But they’re built for closets, not washing machines. They miss one critical aspect, the ability to predict moves.
The Propensity Stakeholder Management Model
Today's stakeholder management requires a new way to navigate the spin, a model that captures inclination even before discussing relative importance, engagement and cross-influences. Why is this important? Because there is no point strategizing on a stakeholder who shows engagement, if he/she dreams of one thing: moving to the hostile zone. Of course the other classic criteria of stakeholder management, such as influence, interest, power, urgency or legitimacy (depending on the model) remain valid.
The difference in the Propensity model is: inclination, tonality, is the first key of reading the map, and the other criteria follow:
- Inclination: Gauging stakeholders’ tonality, thus their tendency and likelihood to shift positions.
- Relative importance: Not all stakeholders are equal in terms of their ability to impact what we want to achieve.
- Engagement: Regardless of their tonality, we want to understand the intensity of their actual engagement. It can be favorable if stakeholders provide support or resources, hostile if they create obstacles or neutral if they voluntarily take an attentive position.
- Influence Mapping: Understanding how stakeholders affect each other.
Integration with Modern Technology: Stakeholder management is a powerful, yet sophisticated competency. Our brains struggle to grasp all aspects of it, especially when in comes to making scenarios. Dynamic visualization becomes a must-have. There are many tools allowing to draw maps and manually move elements on it, but they miss the ability to consolidate and make sense of changes. The Propensity Stakeholder Model powers the Gerositus® Stakeholders platform, incorporating the above variables. This technological integration bridges theoretical innovation with practical implementation.
Proven Applications: The model has been tested across dozens of organizations—NGOs, SMEs, and global corporations—helping them navigate restructuring, transformations, and policy crises. For example, an SME managed to obtain critical public financial support thanks to the director's focus on tonality with his most crucial stakeholders.
The Propensity Model places leadership at the center
This model breaks the easy link between external events and stakeholder engagement, placing responsibility back on leaders. A stakeholder will not move away from a leader in the midst of a crisis if that leader has cultivated a strong relationship, based on mutual trust and respect, if that leader has worked on its own grounding and inspired the stakeholder to do the same. In other words, stakeholder volatility is not just about events—it’s about how leaders respond and the emotional climate, the tonality they create. Leaders can't fake it, they can't provoke positive tonalities if they are not grounded themselves, if they are not consistent in their values. So groundedness becomes a strategic imperative.
One question often asked is whether varying cultural attitudes toward emotional expression and leadership styles impacts the model. The answer is yes and no. Consider the classic case of misinterpreting silence in Japanese business meetings—where Western leaders often feel compelled to fill quiet moments with additional talking, mistaking contemplative silence for disengagement or disagreement . A culturally aware leader learns that in Japanese business culture, silence is valued as a sign of wisdom, respect, and thoughtful consideration rather than awkwardness . This cultural sensitivity prevents unnecessary friction and demonstrates respect for local customs. However, groundedness transcends such cultural adaptations. While cultural knowledge addresses the external mechanics of appropriate behavior, a leader’s true presence emerges from their inner equilibrium—the harmony between body, mind, and spirit . A grounded leader naturally emanates authenticity and calm confidence that resonates across cultural boundaries, creating positive tonalities regardless of whether they perfectly navigate every cultural nuance. Their inner balance allows them to remain centered during cross-cultural misunderstandings, respond with genuine curiosity rather than defensiveness, and maintain their core values while adapting their approach . This authentic presence often speaks louder than perfect cultural protocol, as stakeholders from any culture can sense and respond to a leader’s genuine state of being.
Conclusion: Navigating the New Reality
If your mornings feel like opening the closet and finding a washing machine, it’s probably time for a paradigm shift. The Propensity Stakeholder Management Model, grounded in leadership tonality awareness, offers a new, predictive rather than reactive, approach to stakeholder engagement. By recognizing that stakeholder volatility often sources from leadership emotional states rather than external disruptions alone, organizations can address root causes, not just symptoms.
Propensity transforms chaotic stakeholder relationships into manageable—if not predictable—strategic partnerships. In our interconnected world, mastering the art of reading the spin becomes the ultimate competitive advantage.
Curious? You can look into the Gerositus® Stakeholders platform, it is free to try for 3-days. Or feel free to reach out and discuss how the model can be tailored to your story.