MadStakeholder

The first time I encountered the Mad Stakeholder problem was in a Sea Research Institute. Our (re)working of a simulation system of the North Sea would be at intervals interrupted for running positive feedback loop simulations on, for instance, what would happen in the next 30 years if a big oil spill were to happen right now, then and there? What we wanted to be doing was backward runs, or use a negative feedback loop comparing simulated results to physical measurements at sea, to reason backward and tune and adapt the system to get better at predicting. The forward runs seemed silly yet there would be no money to do any backward runs if we didn’t do them as the project ran on government grants. I don't believe the politicians understood the lack of significance in the predictions they received.

I met the abbreviation "mad" in a context of business and architecture planning where it was used to categorize a “qualified customers” stakeholder group in relation to people having Money, Access and Desire-to-buy. Changing Desire-to-buy to Decision-making-power I got to a problem description of the mad stakeholder:

A mad stakeholder holds power, most likely in the form of some by the (sub) system required resource to fulfill it's current purpose, and same mad stakeholder has a vision of the operational processes and no real clue about what pressures the people on the operational level are experiencing.

I discovered that such situations can effectively be approached from the perspective of it being a boundary management and purpose alignment problem. The following is a possible transformation:

The mad stakeholder may want to establish priorities based on his or her vision and management style. Many change initiatives fail when the mad stakeholder has to get buy-in from below for changes initiated at the top. The problem can be solved by finding out what changes the people on the operational level already have a passion for. And instead of having to sell the envisioned state, the mad stakeholder can then build on ideas from the bottom up that are in line with his or her vision.

Boundary condition for its use is that the mad stakeholder has experienced not “getting results” while being aware of this happening. They may need to experience the effects of a HeadlessBody problem solving cycle first.

-- NynkeEtkFokma, 2002