[MUSIC] We’re now going to go back to the foundational principle of all great communications. It all starts with the audience. However for our discussion today we’re going to replace the word audience with the descriptor stakeholder. Merriam Webster defines a stakeholder as one that has a stake in an enterprise, or one who is involved in or affected by a course of action. In every aspect in area in our lives, in every job or role we fill. The reality is we have a corresponding set of stakeholders who have an interest in or are affected by decision or course of action that we may propose. Some of those stakeholders may even have the power over those decisions. For example, in my role as a father my primary stakeholders are my three children. And trust me when I tell you they're very interested in every decision or course of action that I take especially when it comes to a family budget or vacation. And my oldest daughter even feels she has the power over those decisions. In my role as a college professor, I have a different setup of stakeholders, students or the faculty members my boss. The bottom line is that great storytelling starts with your ability to understand these different stakeholder groups and understand what's important to them. To understand how they're thinking, feeling or acting. Ultimately to put yourself in their shoes and ask, what's in it for me? This is what we call, the WIFM. And then to communicate with them in a way that is authentic and relevant. In the world of business you can generally break your audiences into nine stakeholder groups. This list is not exhaustive and some groups may not even apply to you. But this is a great start to help you get your mind around all the various stakeholders you may need to consider when developing your story. Their customers and consumers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, the communities in which we work and live, governments, non-governmental organizations, the media and of course your competition. At this point, you may feel overwhelmed that the numbering the diversity of the groups with whom you may need to communicate, so we need a way of prioritizing these groups into manageable segments. The other reality is that no person or even any company has enough resources, time, people or money to reach and persuade all of its stakeholder groups equal. So what you need is a tool or process that will empower you to focus by helping you figure out, who, where and how to allocate your resources to achieve the best outcome. Which includes your odds of success. We call this tool or process, stakeholder mapping. I"m now going to share with you a variety of stakeholder maps that are designed to help you better understand how to group, prioritize and even allocate resources against the various stakeholder groups you will need to consider as you develop your story. The process is simple pick the stakeholder maps that best suits your particular needs and populate it, or map it with the key stakeholder groups that are most relevant to you. These maps then can provide you with critical insights to help you move forward in the storytelling process. First is the basic stakeholder map. With you or your company or organization in the center, this map simply identifies the relevant stakeholders without any attempt to determine their level of importance or priority. This map is always a great first step. Second, is a stakeholder which tries to assign relative levels of importance through the use of radiating concentric circles. The stakeholder groups closest to you in the center are deemed more important than those in the outer rings. Again, if you need to prioritize you start with those that are most important. Next is a two by two grid that considers two primary variables. How interested are various stakeholders in what you're doing or communicating and the other axis is how much power influence do they have in determining whether you're successful in your endeavor. This map tends to be particularly helpful when you're leading a project or need to drive alignment within an organization. Here's an example of how it might work. Let's say you're in the restaurant business and you want to open a new location downtown. You know that you're going to communicate with many stakeholder groups about this and you're excited to begin telling your story, but who should you focus on? What groups are truly the most important? Here's an example of how I might populate the stakeholder map. Now because you don't have the resources to treat each of these groups equally. You may decide from this map that those stakeholders in the upper right hand quadrant. Those with high interest and high level of power influence are the ones that you're going to focus on you may also decide that all those that are in the lower left hand quadrant that have low interest and low power, well they're not going to get very much if any of your resources place against them. But just to reinforce the point, identifying your primary stakeholders doesn't mean you forget the rest. But at least you have a way of making a differential investment in those that matter most. This map is also very valuable because everyone may not agree with you on how you've mapped out your stakeholders. So this can be used as a foundation of a great discussion that can get everyone aligned on the priorities and how to proceed I'm sure you can also see that depending on what the project issue or action is the resulting map may look completely different. For example, what if you were trying to develop a story of how you were going to close one of the stores with the knowledge that employees were going to lose their jobs. How might that affect the man? You can see from this example the stakeholders may shift. Look at what's happened to the media. They've moved to a more prominent position because the story is now more news worthy. Lastly, we have a stakeholders issues matrix that helps determine across many issues which stakeholder groups are most important? With each of these maps, you have the ability to define the parameter axis. Maybe instead of looking at the level of importance, you want to consider the sensitivity to a topic or the propensity to act, the possibilities are endless. And now that we have discussed how to identify and prioritize our key stakeholders, let's move forward in the storytelling process by putting some structure around our story. In the next video, Charlie Thornton of the Sheffield Company is going to introduce you to a technique known as visual mind mapping. [MUSIC]
