Stakeholders Union

Throughout my childhood I dreamed of being a stakeholder. Both my parents were stakeholders and so many of the people I admired when I was young were stakeholders. 

But the path hasn't always been easy. 

Many people professionally tend to focus on those professions that actually do something, "farmers", "doctors", "jugglers", "assasins"....and those professions are fine, absolutely nothing wrong with them. But when people in charge of designing big new programs need to validate their well thought out and expressed ideas, who else can they reach out to? 

And keep in mind that these visionary program designers don't work in a vacuum. Ideally they'd be able to just design their programs on their own, make a PowerPoint and PDF with an executive summary and be done with it. But they have managers, colleagues, relevant academics and research, and those aspiring to give input from all directions. Some of these program designers have the luxury of being able to design their programs on their own, but many others have to balance endless interference from all sides. The programs that emerge from this can often become incredibly complex to envision and express, with all the various opinions from within their organizations.

That's where we come in. Real stakeholders will be able to enthusiastically nod in ascent to anything, no matter how overdetermined in its labyrinthine manifestation.

And yet academic programs for stakeholding are very few. There are some online classes, but few undergraduate majors, leave alone graduate programs. So many meetings in hotel conference rooms, so many thirty page strategy documents, so many PowerPoints! We are left to manage all this with so little formal structure as professionals. 

I have connected with so many from our ranks, in cafes, at conferences, in waiting rooms. When I strike up a conversation and tell people I am a stakeholder, so often others will say, "me too!" and we discuss what we are stakeholders in. We always laugh and bond, so so many things we can barely remember! Some of us have developed a particular....I don't want to say "expertise" that's too much....but let's just say we are known and often invited to project launches as stakeholders in similar realms of human endeavor and geography. We feel we belong to, and in fact are in, communities of stakeholders. 

Well friends, it's time for a stakeholders union. 

Why, you ask? So many reasons. 

There have been times in the past, I don't want to name names, but there have been times when we were mentioned in project launches and then haven't been consulted again after that. 

There have been times when we were mentioned in project launches but our names were not credited publically and there wasn't an opportunity for us to give our own opinions on how incredible and amazing the project was that was designed for us. 

Also, it's past time for a regulatory regime. Legislators hear constantly from the so-called "policy people" often referencing us directly, but do we have a direct line? Never that I've come across. Time for stakeholders to demand that we are fairly and equally compensated for saying that a particular program is really important and exactly what we had wanted all along and that in general is a very big deal to us as stakeholders.

I don't want anybody to accuse us of getting too big for our britches! We know we play a support role. We know that rarely can we speak from behind the pie charts. We are not asking to be in charge. We just think that it's about time that society starts thinking more seriously about us stakeholders, who we are, and what we deserve related to all these projects and programs.

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