By Jon Ward, Director, Beneficial Consulting | Course Director, Strategic Stakeholder Engagement for Organisational Transformation, Informa Connect Academy
Most stakeholder toolkits assume something: get the influence diagram right, get the channel plan agreed, and good working relationships will follow. I don’t believe that. Collaboration is not a personality trait. Some stakeholders are not naturally better at it than others — it is a discipline, with its own research base, failure modes, and design principles. That discipline is what my stakeholder engagement toolkit is actually built on, underneath the canvases participants fill in.
In this new whitepaper, I set out the thinking behind the toolkit:
- Why Hansen’s research on disciplined collaboration shows organisations that master it outperform rivals operating in silos — and why not-invented-here syndrome and hoarding are usually undiagnosed causes of stalled transformations.
- Why trust is an engineering problem, not a mood: how Lencioni’s pyramid of team dysfunction and Edmondson’s psychological safety research point to designing conditions for trust rather than hoping for it.
- The Five C’s — Commitment, Collegiality, Communication, Consensus, Continuity — as a practical lens for building and auditing collaborative capability.
- Why the right contributor is T-shaped, not I-shaped, and what that means for strategy managers, transformation directors, PMO leaders, and functional heads.
- How this thinking is built into the seven canvases of the companion toolkit, completed progressively across four days.
Download the full whitepaper:
Collaboration Isn’t a Personality Trait — download the PDF
If you’re wrestling with how to make collaborative capability repeatable inside your own organisation, rather than dependent on a handful of naturally collegial people, I’d welcome the conversation. This is the thinking behind Strategic Stakeholder Engagement for Organisational Transformation, the course I direct with Informa Connect Academy, and its companion toolkit. Get in touch.