Please don't make this stakeholder mistake

Have you ever built a spaghetti bridge?

I thought it was just a high school thing, but it turns out they even have world championships in it.

It makes for great YouTube videos. Students watch in agony as their teacher loads up a bucket with sand. Every kilo is worth points, and they go until failure.

10 kilos... 15 kilos… 16… Boom!

The whole thing collapses in a flash, and a valuable engineering lesson is learned.

Instead of building one out of spaghetti, I built them virtually in high school in a game called Bridge Builder.

The main differences with spaghetti bridges?

Less messy and easier to repeat. But there’s more. Instead of loading a bridge statically, the game runs a train across your bridge and shows you the stress on the structure.

And then… you run the train again. You see, the main problem is not a one-and-done collapse of epic proportions.

It’s the cracks that appear on a first pass. The damage gets bigger on the next few runs. You see the bridge get weaker, and you know two more passes are coming for you to complete the level.

And then, the inevitable.

If you run a train across a damaged bridge, it collapses.

Game over.

And that, pushing a train across a broken bridge and hoping it makes it, is what stakeholder management often looks like.

Hear me out…

If you’re trying to explain something to a stakeholder you’re getting a message across. A new bit of information, a new part of the change story.

That information has to go from you to them. It’s like a train that has to cross the bridge.

And the support columns of the bridge?

• Trust

• Relation

• Conversation

See where I’m going?

If there are cracks in those, the bridge will come crashing down when you drive a new train across it.

But that’s exactly what most of us do. If the message is not heard, we repeat it.

Instead of doing that, you should check if the bridge is intact first. Are the relationship and the medium strong enough to carry the message?

A recent example in a client project demonstrates this perfectly.

The sponsor feels like he’s not been informed enough. So the project manager goes over and repeats what’s in his report.

The result? More frustration instead of more buy-in, because the project manager tried to drive a train across a broken bridge.

Instead, he should address why the sponsor doesn’t feel informed first. In this case, the PM was convinced he had shared enough.

But saying it is not what counts. It’s about what’s being heard.

So before communicating more information, fix the relationship first. Find out why your communication efforts so far have not worked.

Odds are there are different expectations, or a message was received in a different way than you meant it.

That happens, and it’s ok.

But by noticing that and fixing it, you create the opportunity to communicate more.

To drive more trains across the bridge without it crashing down.

So next time you’re stuck in a tricky stakeholder conversation, pause and zoom out for a second.

Ask yourself: is this bridge ready to support this message?

If not, don’t try to push it. Fix the relationship first, and then communicate more content.

Talk soon,
Jasper