Article 21

A Voice of Society Engine Part 1: Listening Posts

2-3 minute read

CAPSULE SUMMARY – Capturing societal feedback and input requires you to modify or spawn up 4th Stakeholder listening posts across your organization.

21.1 Collecting Voice of Society input and feeding it into your Impact x Responsibility matrix requires making changes to how your company operates. The first step: you need to have societal ‘listening posts’ in place to ensure you’re casting a wide ‘listening net’ to track all of the potential first- and second-order impacts your business might be creating.


21.2 Societal listening posts can take many forms and often will be one-and-the-same with existing Voice of Shareholder, Customer, and Employee channels. It shouldn’t surprise you that the communication channels for the other stakeholders often carry a strong societal signal—because shareholders, customers, and employees are all also citizens in the society and those citizens will use the most readily available channel to convey their concerns or thoughts. The challenge for the company will be to ensure that societal feedback gets teased out and further refined and analyzed vs. simply ignored—which happens in the majority of listening posts today.

 

21.3 I’ll give you just a small sampling of the major societal listening posts that might already be in place in your company where 4th stakeholder feedback intertwines with that of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Stakeholders:

  • Your customer support organization

  • Interviews and feedback conducted by your product organization

  • Research and surveys conducted by your research department

  • Employee surveys

  • Press coverage about your business

  • Social media conversation and buzz around your brand

  • Net Promoter surveys

  • Online discussion boards and forums

  • Shareholder meetings

  • Direct feedback from activist shareholders

  • Inquiries from government regulatory bodies

  • Etc.

21.4 You should consider all of these channels to be viable forms of Voice of Society capture. Any major impact from your business operations or its broader ecosystem ripples will show up as a signal, potentially faint to start, within some of these channels. Your specific action here comes down to defining a continual process, unique to each listening post, that funnels the 4th stakeholder signals showing up in these channels to a dedicated group that can analyze and synthesize them.

You need to tune all of your listening posts to be able to tease out the 4th Stakeholder signal.


21.5 This stream of input will, by definition, come in a hazy cloud and buzz of angry, sometimes contradictory feedback and emotion. How do you action something like that? What do you do actually do with the noise? It’s critical that you generally do not attempt to solve these problems at the listening post level. Although your teams might want to jump into solution mode, until you get a top-down, holistic picture of your overall impact footprint, you won’t be able to prioritize effectively.

 

21.6 Instead of prematurely jumping into action, for each listening post, simply identify the subset of issues showing up in that channel that relate more broadly to societal impact, collect it, quantify it, and pass it on in its true, raw form. So for example: “10 customers contacted our support team last week angry about X, here is their raw verbatim feedback”, or “25% of the population of the city in which we operate have a concern about our pollution footprint, and here are their verbatim concerns”).

 

21.7 And to whom are you passing this information? This messy stream of voices needs to funnel into a 4th Stakeholder Prioritization Group, which will synthesize it, simplify it, and convert it into discrete action (we’ll cover how to form that group in the next article).

 

21.8 I would be amazed if your organization doesn’t already have many of the above listening posts in place. If you don’t, I would highly recommend that you put many of them into place for the general health of your business.

 

21.9 Finally, it’s possible that for some reason none of these channels provide you with insight into your overall societal impact and footprint (e.g. you don’t get any signal read from any listening post). In those rare cases, you can always conduct your own, separate primary research to attempt to proactively tease out a view from your key societal constituents. Or, you may simply be in the ideal position where you are not creating any major, unwanted ripples in society.