A stakeholder is not a box in a matrix, it is someone doing their own maths
Somewhere in your project folder there is a two-by-two grid with names in it. High influence, low interest: keep satisfied. Low influence, high interest: keep informed.
Now think of the person on that grid who is quietly making your life difficult. Which box are they in, and has knowing that helped once?
The grid describes their position. It says nothing about what your project costs them, and that is the only thing they are actually working out.
Stakeholder management is the work of getting the people who can help or block an initiative to support it. The standard approach maps them by influence and interest. The useful version maps what your initiative costs each of them personally, because that is the calculation they are making. More on behavioural design for change →
What the matrix cannot tell you
An influence-interest grid is a way of allocating your attention. That is a genuine use, and it is where its usefulness stops. It tells you how often to talk to someone. It does not tell you what to say, because it contains no information about them.
Consider two people in the same box: high influence, currently unsupportive. One of them is unsupportive because your project takes two people out of his team next quarter. The other is unsupportive because she proposed something similar two years ago, it was rejected, and she has no intention of watching you succeed with it now.
Same box, opposite problems, and no shared solution. The grid put them together on the basis of the one thing that does not matter.
The grid tells you how often to talk to someone. It cannot tell you what to say.
The maths they are actually doing
Every stakeholder is running a private calculation, and it has three terms: what this costs me, what it gets me, and how sure I am of either.
The first term dominates, and it is not a character flaw. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's prospect theory established that losses loom larger than equivalent gains in how people evaluate a change.[5] Your initiative offers a stakeholder a share of an organisational gain, spread over next year. It asks them for something specific this quarter: headcount, budget, control over a decision, or the visible position of having been right.
The asymmetry is sharper still for things people already have. Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler showed in a series of experiments that people demand substantially more to give up an object than they would pay to acquire the same object.[2] Applied to a reorganisation: the two roles a manager currently owns are worth far more to him than two roles he might gain later, even if the arithmetic on paper is identical.
And then there is autonomy. Jack Brehm's theory of psychological reactance describes what happens when people perceive their freedom to choose being restricted: they push back, and the restricted option becomes more attractive precisely because it was restricted.[1] A decision announced as final produces resistance that the same decision, presented as open, would not have caused.
Why you cannot see their calculation from where you stand
There is a reason competent people keep getting this wrong, and it is worth naming.
Lee Ross and Andrew Ward described naive realism: we experience our own view of a situation as simply the objective one, and conclude that people who see it differently are uninformed, irrational or self-interested.[3] Applied to a project you believe in, this produces a specific and very common error. You explain the benefits again, more clearly, because the only explanation you can construct for their resistance is that they have not understood.
They understood. They have understood since the first meeting. What you are calling resistance is the output of a calculation you have never seen, and repeating the benefits does not change any of its terms.
This is also why "getting buy-in" so often means, in practice, a longer presentation. It is the only move available if you assume the problem is comprehension.
Map the forces, one person at a time
This is exactly what the SUE | Influence Framework is for: it sorts what someone is weighing up into pains, gains, anxieties and comforts.[6] Do it per person, not per group.
The pains are the ones your project would solve for them, and here is the uncomfortable part: often there are none. Your initiative solves a problem the organisation has, not one this person feels on a Tuesday. If you cannot name a pain of theirs, you do not have a stakeholder to convince; you have someone to compensate.
The gains have to be theirs specifically. Efficiency for the organisation is not a gain for the person whose team gets smaller. What they might actually want is visibility, a headache removed, a resource they have been asking for, or credit in a place where credit matters to them.
The anxieties are usually the real blocker and almost never stated in the meeting. What if this fails and I backed it. What does this do to my headcount, my scope, my standing with the people I depend on.
And the comforts of the current situation are underrated. They know how things work now. Their team is calibrated to it. Nobody has to explain the present.
Notice how little of that appears in a grid, and how much of it is actionable once written down.
How to run this in practice
1. Do the exercise for five people, not twenty
Pick the ones who can genuinely stop this, and write out the four forces for each. Twenty stakeholders is a filing system; five is a plan. If your list is longer than five, you have not decided who matters.
2. Ask them, before you tell them
The whole calculation is guesswork until someone confirms it. One conversation, before the proposal exists, in which you ask what would make this difficult for them. It is not consultation theatre. It is data collection, and it is also the intervention: people who were asked early behave very differently from people who were informed late.
3. Name the cost out loud
Counter-intuitive and reliable. Saying "this takes two people out of your team in Q3 and I do not have a way around that yet" does more for your credibility than any benefit slide. Unnamed costs do not disappear; they resurface later as an objection about something else, usually in front of an audience.
4. Give the decision back where you can
Reactance is triggered by a removed choice, so return one. Let them choose the timing, the pilot team, the sequence. The concession is often small and the effect is large, because what people defend is rarely the specific decision and usually the fact of being able to make it.
5. Ask for something small first
Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser showed that people who agree to a small request become considerably more likely to agree to a larger one later.[4] Ask a hesitant stakeholder to review a document, join one session, or lend one person for two weeks. A yes changes their relationship to the project in a way that no amount of persuasion does.
6. Work out who they answer to
Your stakeholder has stakeholders. What looks like obstruction is frequently someone protecting a position with a boss you never see. If you can find out what they are being measured on, you often find that your project can help with it, which converts an opponent into someone with a reason.
When someone genuinely will not move
Some calculations do not resolve. Your project really does cost them something, and no amount of design makes it not cost them something.
Say so plainly, to them and to whoever sponsors the work. A stakeholder who is being managed while everyone quietly knows the answer is no is a slow, expensive way of arriving at a decision that could have been made in week two.
Then either compensate the cost, escalate the decision, or narrow the scope so they are no longer in the path. Those are the three real options. Continuing to explain the benefits is a fourth, and it is the one most projects choose.
Frequently asked questions about stakeholder management
What is wrong with a stakeholder matrix?
Nothing, as long as you only use it for what it does. An influence-interest grid allocates your attention. It contains no information about the person, so it cannot tell you what to say. Two stakeholders in the same box can be resisting for opposite reasons that need opposite responses.
Why do stakeholders resist even when the benefits are clear?
Because clarity was never the obstacle. Prospect theory established that losses weigh more heavily than equivalent gains, and your initiative usually offers a shared future gain in exchange for a specific present cost. Repeating the benefits does not change either term of that calculation.
How do you win over a difficult stakeholder?
Find out what your project costs them, ask before you tell, and name the cost out loud rather than talking around it. Then give a decision back where you can, since psychological reactance is triggered by a removed choice, and ask for something small first, because agreeing to a small request makes a larger yes more likely.
Should you tell a stakeholder what your project will cost them?
Yes, and earlier than feels comfortable. An unnamed cost does not go away; it comes back as an objection about something else, usually with an audience present. Naming it does more for your credibility than any benefit slide, and it moves the conversation to what can be done about it.
What do you do when a stakeholder simply will not agree?
Say so out loud instead of continuing to manage them. There are three real options: compensate the cost, escalate the decision, or narrow the scope so they are no longer in the path. Explaining the benefits again is not one of them, though it is what most projects do.
Conclusion
Stakeholder management is taught as a mapping exercise and behaves like an arithmetic problem. Each person is working out what your project costs them, what it gets them, and how certain either is, and the grid on your wall contains none of those three numbers.
So put the grid away for an afternoon and write out the four forces for the five people who can actually stop this. Then go and ask them whether you got it right.
You will be wrong about at least two of them, which is the most valuable thing that will happen to the project this month.
Want to design change that holds? The online Deep Dive Leading Change and Transformation teaches you to apply behavioural science to resistance, stakeholders and follow-through.
1.5 minutes on influence
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