ANALYSIS TOOL BOX

Stakeholder Map

Identify everyone with a stake in the question you're analyzing — decision-makers, sources, adjacent teams, and external actors — and plot their power and interest on a live Power-Interest grid. Draw relationship lines between stakeholders, keep a dated audit trail on rating changes, and flag sources to weight for bias later in an ACH matrix. Not a Heuer/Pherson SAT technique — a design-thinking / business-strategy bridge tool for scoping an analysis, not for weighing evidence.

How this technique works
0 stakeholders0 Manage Closely0 Keep Satisfied0 Keep Informed0 Monitor

Power-Interest Grid

Rate a stakeholder’s power and interest below to see them plotted here.

Click a node to jump to its row · rate power and interest below to place it on the grid

No stakeholders yet — add one to get started.

About this technique

What is a stakeholder map?

A stakeholder map identifies and prioritizes the people, groups and organizations with a stake in a project or decision. Unlike a contact list, it's relational: it records how much power each stakeholder has over the outcome, how much interest they have in it, and how they connect to each other. The power-interest grid comes from Aubrey Mendelow's 1991 work, building on R. Edward Freeman's stakeholder theory. It belongs to business strategy and design thinking, not intelligence tradecraft.

When to use it

Use a stakeholder map at the start of a project to decide whose needs to manage, whose views to collect and whose reporting to weigh carefully. In analysis work, it shows who will consume your product, who can block or shape it, and which sources have a stake in the answer. It's a scoping tool. It organizes who matters, but it doesn't test hypotheses or weigh evidence.

How to use this tool

  1. Title the map and, optionally, state the central analytic question.
  2. Add stakeholders and mark each as internal or external, with a description of their stake.
  3. Rate power and interest to place each one on the grid. The quadrants are Manage Closely, Keep Satisfied, Keep Informed and Monitor.
  4. Draw relationships between stakeholders and label them.
  5. Flag stakeholders whose information needs weighting for bias, because they have an interest in the outcome.
  6. Keep the map current. Merge or split entries as your understanding sharpens, and record dated notes when a rating changes.

Common pitfalls

  • Rating from title alone. Formal authority and real influence often differ.
  • Forgetting indirect stakeholders who matter only through a relationship with someone else.
  • Treating it as analysis. It tells you who matters, not what is true.

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