How well do you "C" your organizational #ecosystem?

How well do you know your constituents, customers, and clients? To be successful, an external-facing organization must know what its constituents need and want so that it can offer services/products and leverage resources accordingly. Yet, traditional stakeholder analysis and mapping exercises classify stakeholders statically across X- and Y-axis frameworks to indicate how interested and influential stakeholders are. We keep using the same hammer over and over again expecting to measure different results and outcomes.

Stakeholder interests, influence, behavior, opinions, wants, and needs change over time—even overnight as global public health and political conditions have recently shown. Understanding how your stakeholders change over time must become dynamic enough to show how helpful they were, are, and will or will not be along your organization’s timeline. Compliments yesterday could become Yelp and Glassdoor critiques tomorrow. Stakeholder-organization relationships evolve. So should stakeholder-mapping strategies and tactics.

How do you define your ecosystem and stakeholders?

An organization’s ecosystem represents its connecting and overlapping community networks within the broader universe of: the environment, geography, culture, history, science, medicine/health, technology, economy, politics, rule of law, and the real-time conditions of its stakeholders. The more that the ecosystem can be explored and defined, the better the organization can optimize its opportunities while mitigating challenges, risks, and threats involving its objectives, services, and products.

Within an organization’s ecosystem, stakeholders are any individuals, groups, or organizations with an interest in the organization’s objectives, products, and services. Any person or group merely interested in and around the organization’s activities could be considered stakeholders. The key is to intentionally track the trajectory of their interests over time.

“Know who you are, what your brand stands for and who your customer is—now more than ever. Identity, courage and persistence are crucial.” ~ Claudia Li, fashion designer

How do you define your constituents?

Constituents in an organization’s ecosystem are defined more narrowly: those who have a vested interest in the organization or are directly indicated or representative of the organization’s objectives and ultimate vision. To identify your core constituency, ask the question, “Who do we ultimately serve?” Then, keep repeating that question like peeling an organizational onion until satisfied with the answer.

Who do we ultimately serve?

All constituents are stakeholders but not all stakeholders are constituents. For example, ultimate constituents would include a political candidate’s stakeholders registered within his/her electoral district. People outside an electoral district would be stakeholders impacting the district. If they do not live, work, play, purchase, and/or produce in the district, they are merely stakeholders with borderline interests. Therefore, the better you can identify ultimate constituents, the better you can define the rest of an organizational ecosystem.

How do you identify and research your constituents?

Desktop research could efficiently define constituents, such as digging into the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), https://www.bls.gov/. With resources and capacity to do so, then primary market research would be useful, which gathers information about constituents’ needs, preferences, opinions, and other feedback about their interest in your organization, products, and/or services. The research goal is to establish a baseline of the organization’s core constituency and track those stakeholders over time, as shown in Table 1 below. Knowing your base constituency and how it evolves will provide the data necessary to develop organizational strategies and outreach plans to reach and leverage your constituents.

What are your ecosystem’s extents?

The organization’s ecosystem extents (size, scope, space, area, volume) represent exponential potential for constituents and stakeholders, which could include numerous people across many organizations and groups as shown in Table 1. The more these can be tracked year to year (even quarterly, monthly, and weekly depending on the speed and tempo of an organization’s activities), the better comparison of progress and growth toward an organization’s objectives.

Table 1. Organizational Ecosystem: Potential Constituents & Stakeholders Year-Year

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” ~ Peter Drucker

How do you map an ecosystem?

Ecosystem mapping involves identifying and classifying who stakeholders are and how they influence the organization and its objectives over time, which assumes a dynamic approach that stakeholders will evolve as their respective ecosystems influence them. This emergent classification perspective focuses on allowing stakeholders to self-identify as their behavior becomes evident over time because stakeholders will emerge and move from one classification to another or share multiple classifications simultaneously.

Ecosystem Mapping Framework

With an emergent mapping perspective, stakeholders can be classified into three general areas: Helpful, Neutral, and Harmful. For example, helpful constituents who advocate for and financially support your organization’s objectives, products, and services would be considered champions. And constituents not satisfied with your organization or its products/services could be critics and challengers. They could also be critical champions, i.e. you are the only organization offering the service they need, or other organizations offer similar products that are inferior to what they prefer.

The classification of stakeholders listed below is ranked from most helpful through neutral to potentially harmful. How the organization relates to these stakeholder classifications depends how it uses stakeholder engagement strategies and tactics to achieve the organization’s short-term and long-term objectives.

Helpful Stakeholders: The strategic intent would be to engage helpful stakeholders as much as possible so that they all evolve into champions for your organization. Types of helpful stakeholders include:

 1) Creators: Founders and co-creators of the organization, services, and products who communicate, share, and guide the organization and its productivity toward its ultimate vision.

"People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe." ~ Simon Sinek

2) Champions: Any person, in/tangible resource, and/or event that advances progress toward the organization’s objectives and/or produces cash/capital to support organizational productivity and success. Financial support and capital investment is “cha-king,” i.e. customers and clients.

3) Catalysts: “Let’s do this now!” Also includes change agents: “We get this and have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to help you be effective and functional!” They get time is of the essence, and they know how to be efficient as force multipliers toward organizational progress.

4) Conveners: “We get this immediately, and will leverage our networks too.” They can make key introductions that open doors for more opportunities.

5) Co-conspirators: “We will strategize and plan with you to make this happen however possible.” They can help improve your organization and strategies with support to overcome challenges and reduce risks, e.g. legal counsel, CPAs, but you will need to ensure their work is integrated accordingly.

6) Connectors: “This is amazing! How can we help?” These are effective networkers for organizations but they need guidance on how, where, and when to be used most effectively.

7) Collaborators: “We align with your objectives too. What can we do?” These stakeholders are interested but need a plan because you are not their top priority. In the non-profit sector, these types of collaborators may need funding support, i.e. grants, cooperative agreements, fiscal sponsorships, etc.

Neutral Stakeholders: The strategic intent with these stakeholders is to maintain neutral equilibrium. In other words, “no harm, no foul.” The approach is to not inadvertently encourage them to evolve to be harmful. Types of neutral stakeholders include:

 8) Concerned: “If you need me, I’ll help but need a personal and/or professional reason/connection to the organization to engage my network.” These stakeholders need leadership but will become inert without motivation and incentives.

9) Complementors: “We have similar objectives and activities. We can help one another when possible.” These would be other organizations that do not directly compete with the organization for resources. HBR's article "In the Ecosystem Economy, What’s Your Strategy?" prudently outlines a complementor’s role in strategic ecosystem management.

10) Controllers: “You can not do this without me!” e.g., any entity that has regulatory authority and responsibility within an organization’s ecosystem, i.e. local business permits, taxation, safety and health, etc. Within a fair and equitable ecosystem, the ultimate aim is to keep regulatory agencies neutral and not adversarial.

11) Commentators, a/k/a armchair quarterbacks and talking heads: “See, I told you so!” Like all feedback, use what is helpful and discard the rest. Engage them proactively because they could be useful.

12) Critics: “Do you even know what you’re doing?” Critiques will be inevitable. How the organization officially and even casually responds to critics should be strategically considered through a communications and media strategy with specific action steps based on the organization’s values.

Harmful Stakeholders: The strategic intent would be to manage potentially harmful stakeholders accordingly based on focused and proactive messaging pursuant to the organization’s values and objectives. Types of potentially harmful stakeholders affecting an organization include:

 13) Challengers: “You can’t do it that way,” and “You’re doing it wrong, and you are wrong.” These will include any opponents who believe the organization and objectives is a waste of time, irrelevant, or should not exist at all. These types of stakeholders may intentionally organize and coalesce, e.g. boycotts, to ensure the organization’s objectives are not achieved.

14) Competitors: Any competition that distracts progress toward the organization’s objectives, products, services, e.g. other organization’s with similar objectives competing for same constituency and ecosystem resources.

15) Cloaked and Clandestine: They haven not been seen or heard yet and could self identify at anytime. Also stakeholders who work quietly to undermine the organization and its objectives.

The better an organization can “C” its ecosystem, identify its constituents, and track its stakeholders over time, the more strategically informed and successful it will be to achieve its objectives.

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