Storytelling and innovation: Stakeholder mapping
A few days ago I’ve been written down about the Steps in the psychology of storytelling in business innovation, and one of the key points was:
Touchpoints create internal and external experiences in your business. The sum of these experiences is your story.
So, if we want to tell a powerful story to the others or any specific audience, it is important to understand those to whom we tell our story, that is, our stakeholders in the company and outside of it.
Storytelling and innovation
We can have a clear idea of what we intend our story to be, but we must adapt the narrative to the intended audience. In other words, we must carefully consider our stakeholders, the contact points with which they interact and what is their experience with them over time, that is, we must do a minimum exercise of prior investigation, the moment we start a process of storytelling and innovation.
“Most people cannot hear until they are heard.”
- Unknown
On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that stakeholders are rarely static, for example, a future employee who starts a hiring process, at some point will become an employee, then over time he will be a former employee, and maybe in the future maybe I’ll be a customer.
Nor do stakeholders have to be defined in a single group, for example, an employee could also be a customer and a shareholder at the same time, and without major inconvenience. Hence the important fact that when working with storytelling and innovation, it is vital to take an initial time in order to get to know our interlocutors much better.
Definition of internal stakeholder groups
Internal stakeholders experience a large number of points of contact with the company’s processes, products, applications, services, including interactions between them, leaders, systems, internal communications, etc.
They are also the people who influence the creation and/or delivery of the external contact points of your brand and/or company, hence the fact that it is key to know them before making a contact through storytelling and innovation.
In this definition of internal stakeholders, we cannot forget the partners, agents and contractors who act on behalf of the company.
Some of the roles that we must consider for stakeholder mapping are:
- Employees
- Directors
- Operators
- Consultants
- Contractors
Definition of external stakeholder groups
External stakeholders are all groups that experience the products or services (clients or non-clients) of the company. This can be directly (e.g. a customer) or indirectly (e.g. telling a story or reading an article about a business). In this case, the group to be analyzed is broader and requires an additional effort within the storytelling and innovation process.
We recommend considering in this group:
- Customers
- No customers
- Users
- The consumers
- Buyers
- Communities
- Shareholders
- Future employees
- Former employees
- Sponsors
- Influencers
- Friends and family of all of the above
Stakeholder mapping, a final reflection
The complete mapping of the stakeholder system will likely require bringing together the senior leaders of the company to obtain perspectives from the entire company.
Now, after reflecting on what we’ve covered in this post, how would you further tailor the company’s storytelling?
