Decision Making / 1 / 1.2

1.2 STAKEHOLDER INVOLVEMENT IN RISK MANAGEMENT

Over fifty years ago, the German-born organisational change management pioneer Kurt Lewin (1946), working in the USA, was successfully employing organisational change techniques that include what we now accept as action research and participatory management. Lewin’s work and more recent research into group decision making in dynamic, systemic problem settings, such as risk management, suggest that working in groups to understand and manage problems faced can be highly productive. Risk management must be participatory management; it can neither be done alone, nor in splendid isolation.

In participatory management the aim is to get stakeholders engaged as a group, or a number of groups, focusing on the development of strategies for the management of the problems faced. A fundamental goal here is to engage as many of the main stakeholders as is practical in thinking about the problems and developing statements about the problem and a series of models of the problem(s) from each of their particular perspectives. Discussion, dialogue, reasoned argument, and negotiations are then used to validate the conceptual models and establish them as faithful representations of the problem perceived by the various stakeholders. The processes stakeholders must go through to formulate and validate the model, or set of models, are much more important than the model(s) themselves. Understanding of the problem is thereby increased and stakeholders often grow significantly in their commitment to courses of action they, themselves, have devised.

Participatory management is not easy and is not to be entered into naively. One reason is that not all those affected by a problem situation will be willing participants. Unwilling or obstructionist stakeholders exist. Following Kurt Lewin’s terminology, in this book, they are referred to as gatekeepers (Weisbord, 1987: 89-91). Gatekeepers are effectively able to stop people and ideas passing through. Gatekeepers have potentially debilitating impact on how stakeholders might contribute, or the extent to which how they might become involved, if at all. As a general principle, the gatekeepers must be identified early and involved from the earliest time and to the fullest extent:

‘One striking effect of Lewin’s gatekeeper theory… [now more than fifty years] later is that he always had the emphasis right in deciding who to include—those who directly controlled the situation… If you want any change to succeed [and risk management and project management are change management activities], get the gatekeepers in on it early. The field is strewn with skeletons of… change programs that used all the right… techniques but had the politics of involvement wrong. It is a mistake to charge ahead with a project just because some manager blesses it from Mount Olympus. Gatekeepers are found in all functions and at all levels. Getting them on board is a principle, not a technique (Weisbord, 1987: 88-91).’

To have key stakeholders as fully involved as their busy schedules permit is necessary but not sufficient; we need to understand them and how they think.