The 4th Stakeholder Framework

Article 22

A Voice of Society Engine Part 2: A 4th Stakeholder Prioritization Group

3-4 minute read

CAPSULE SUMMARY – You need to anoint a dedicated, objective group to synthesize your societal input and identify potential priorities.

22.1 4th Stakeholder feedback, similar to raw customer and employee feedback, will not be cleanly packaged and digestible right out the gate. It will assault you in a chaotic flow of overlapping information streams and long-tail issues and grievances. Someone needs to take all these disparate threads, determine what should be ignored as noise vs. what should be further explored, and elevate the issues that have enough signal to be added to the priorities of the business as a whole.

22.2 If your Impact x Responsibility Matrix (Article 16) is the roadmap for 4th Stakeholder Prioritization (which it is by my definition), then you can view this part of the process as simply determining the specific priority pins that get put onto that matrix.

22.3 So who drives and owns this process? I contend that this responsibility cannot be given to a single individual. The best path, given that 4th Stakeholder issues blanket across multiple societal groups, is to anoint a dedicated and balanced collective of individuals that can, as a whole, objectively interpret and represent the societal interests. I will refer to this working group as your company’s 4th Stakeholder Prioritization Group.

22.4 I’ll describe the specific workings of this new working group by answering some basic questions:

22.5 Who do you put into the working group?  
This working collective needs to have enough business context and acumen to interpret very messy data, synthesize it down to root-cause issues, and objectively define Impact and Responsibility ratings for those issues. Instead of defining specific individuals that might join a group, I will instead describe the five key skills/knowledge areas you need to have represented within this group:

• Deep data analytics and research skills

• Deep knowledge of your product / customer experience

• Deep knowledge of the company’s end-to-end operations (including suppliers, partners, etc.)

• Deep knowledge of the company’s customers and customer segments

• Deep knowledge of the legal and regulatory environment within which you operate

22.6 Are these employees or outsiders?  
Although most companies will look to staff these groups with employees, I highly recommend you also consider tapping objective, outside resources and advisors as well to bring true objectivity to the process. An ideal working group contains a mix of both. 

22.7 How big is the group?
Working groups of this nature start to bog down if they grow too large. I’d recommend somewhere between 5 to 7 individuals for most companies, or maybe 9 to 11 maximum if you are dealing with a large number of thorny, complex, competing issues.

22.8 What does the group actually do?
At the highest level, you can think of this group as owning the Impact x Responsibility matrix and ensuring that it reflects all the latest insight and feedback both from the business and the myriad Voice of Society listening posts. This group analyzes the raw input, conducts any needed follow-up analysis to estimate actual Impact and Responsibility, and also partners with the rest of the business to incorporate other elements that might not come from the listening posts (for example, product and strategy ideas for creating positive Impact rarely come through Listening Posts channels, but they will come from employees within the organization).

22.9 How often do they meet?  
This will depend on the business but I’d recommend a minimum standing quarterly cadence with ad-hoc real-time meetings if and when one-off unexpected society-impacting issues arise. You’ll find in practice that your Impact x Responsiblity matrix, once defined, doesn’t actually change that quickly.

22.10 Can this working group be the executive team?
This can work as long as the members commit to approaching this task with a true ‘society-first’ mindset. Remember, the output of this exercise is the roadmap for potential action—those priorities still need to be balanced against the broader priorities of the other three stakeholders (and that will require the input of the executive team at the highest levels).

22.11 This last sentence bears repeating: this working group does not take control over the capital spending reins of the business. The 4th Stakeholder Prioritization Group isn’t making final resourcing decisions—that ultimately comes from the executive team / board of the company in a way that balances across all stakeholders. The Prioritization Group simply ensures that society has a voice and a vote in the process and that the largest, highest impact societal swings (either benefit creating or harm reducing) get codified and elevated for consideration.

22.12 Once you have your Impact x Responsibility Matrix defined, you can move to the third leg of the Voice of Society engine: committing to specific actions and communicating that back to society in a transparent way (the topic of the next article).