Dynamical Stakeholders Mapping
– The New Core of Decision-Making

The management team may feel confident about the future in some area of shared endeavour, but I would like to gently point out that there is inevitably a need for greater realism about what we believe we can achieve.  There are a lot of difficult trends out there, which represent themselves to us as coming delays and broken promises.  Our strategic formula can potentially succeed to some degree, but only if we learn to make more realistic observations of the trends at work in our customers or clients, as well as our suppliers and other stakeholders.  This is a very big question we have to answer.  Do we have periodic meetings for stakeholders mapping and modelling for team understanding of the overall system dynamical causal feedback loops of decision pressure and power both within and around our organization?  Are we prepared to simulate some alternative scenarios of what will happen if we do or fail to do certain things? 

If our decision-making team is working with a valid stakeholders model, it does not mean that our present strategic plan can be made to succeed by this means.  No matter how apparently desirable our present strategic choices may be, the right simulations of dynamical scenarios will show us how to develop the right fall-back plan if things do not go as we had originally hoped and overly anticipated.  This does not mean that we are predicting delays and disasters, but rather that we will not allow ourselves to be unprepared for difficult challenges, setbacks, obstacles or crisis situations.  If it turns out that we cannot thrive, we will then at least know how to survive.  This means that we see the dangers of a one-track mentality; we see the need to learn to be more flexible and versatile in our plans and actions.

Stakeholders mapping, system dynamics and scenario planning are not three stand-alone methods of visual group facilitation.  They are three indispensable dimensions of the same strategic problem.  There is nothing more illogical for any group of decision-makers than for them to believe they can change their results without comprehensive group planning or crucial coordination of effort along the right lines of overall system intervention.  We need to make it our first priority to understand the actual cranking of the great machine in which we have to operate.  There are too many causal feedback loops going on without our knowledge.  Our ignorance of how things really work will not protect us from the disappointing results that continue to emerge and plague us.

Our challenge is to achieve effective team learning in confrontation with hidden facets of our strategic situation.  There are causal texture and causal dynamics all throughout the structural features of our internal and external situation.  Our interpretation of causality at present is too primitive, too locked into habitual assumptions that keep us circulating in chronic problems with all the stress and strain and sense of futility they entail.  The spirit of enterprise has become like a mirror covered with the rust of old ways of thinking and doing things in the organization.  We must learn together how to take a leap into new thinking and new strategic direction, which implies learning to do things we have never done before.

The truth is that any group of decision-makers will learn more with just an hour or two with a real facilitator (no matter what the content of the strategic or organizational framework they are starting with) than they will learn with reading management books or attending courses and seminars of the usual management gurus.  Only genuine visual facilitators who understand the group application of comprehensive planning can really help.

We must learn to connect with genuine comprehensive facilitation.  We must stop imagining that the usual kinds of meetings (with or without the usual kinds of consultants) will progress our situation.  Whatever arrangements are made with the usual kinds of leaders, mentors and internal or external consultants cannot produce anything but the usual pretentious nonsense.  There are all sorts of ridiculous expertize and "professional judgement" of left-brained idiots and ruthless budget-cutters that have never helped organization performance, well-being or strategic success.  If we keep the faith with the usual advisors, we will never acquire the requisite cognitive skills needed to navigate emergent complex difficulties and challenges of the increasingly ruthless economic environment.  We must encourage obsolete human resources to drop away so that full-blown facilitated learning processes can take root in our organization.  We must weed-out the left-brainers, the blockers, and cultivate the right-brainers, the releasers.

Causal texture is there.  It is always there, even if we do not yet know how to look at it.  Causal circular feedback loops are dynamically functioning there, even if we do not yet know how to simulate them or anticipate real causal results.  All sorts of stakeholder forces are pushing and pulling in and around the organization, even if we have not yet learned to map them out and comprehend their real intentions and efforts.  So this is all about our critical thresholds of necessary intelligence and awareness.  Decision-makers attacking strategic and organizational problems with their usual kinds of meetings and thinking without comprehensive visual facilitation are like old fashioned lumberjacks attacking a forest with axes instead of modern chainsaws.  Our own consultancy has often experienced management situations in clients where their bosses agree that we got some wonderful results with our chainsaws, but then they immediately say to the facilitated group, "Well, that was all very good boys, but don't get carried away about it.  Get back to swinging axes in the old dependable way we up here can understand."  There is virtually no limit to retrograde stupidity in senior management.  They should all take a leave of absence and learn to go on some learning journeys.  There is nothing more destructive to any organization than maintaining obsolete brains in charge of the situation.  Those who are incapable of fresh learning should learn to gracefully step aside and allow new competence into leadership.

In the light of the overwhelming majority of senior managers who do not want to face causal facts, it will not do for us to become desperate for immediate massive breakthroughs in organization cognition.  What is coming eventually in the future will require our patience in the present.  Right now we can only inspire a few individuals here and there who struggle side-by-side with large numbers of left-brained and overly busy or confused associates.  Our own numbers are increasing; our networks of cognitive excellence are getting stronger.  The future belongs to us, but all sorts of destructive and stupid things will have to exhaust themselves no matter how frustrating this may be for us.

The good news is that those of us who can understand all this can most definitely get better at it.  There are no limits to learning for those who choose learning.  By adding to our cognitive skills and increasing our patient good will, we will emerge and lead our organizations and our world into a better future.  The present patterns of lying, destruction and greedy stupidity have no future.  Strategic and organizational incompetence have no future.  The present type of senior politicians, managers and consultants have no future; they are destined to disappear and be forgotten.

         So, what's next?  We must learn to exercise new forms of visual thinking personally as well as experimental practice of visual facilitation of others.  We should even consider applying to this consultancy to learn how to become a comprehensive causal consultant and facilitator.  There are too few of us and the future need for our kinds of skills is growing.  Whatever our career plans, we will need to develop interestingly new kinds of competence for both fun and profit.