The patients wanted the product, and the hospital administration was on board. So, the team launched with confidence.
Within weeks, it was dead in the water.
Nobody had thought to bring the GPs and consultants into the conversation. They had no interest in the new product and they had all the power, resulting in losing a whole year’s effort simply because the wrong people had been left out of the room.
Eliza Turnbull was part of that team at Bupa in London. It was, she says, her first real lesson in stakeholder mapping and engagement – learned before she had any language or framework to describe what had gone wrong.
Does this sound familiar?
About this week’s contributor
Eliza Turnbull is a strategy, sustainability and culture specialist, founder of Kindred Collective and co-founder of sustainability strategy firm Rewa Solutions . With a background spanning marketing, philosophy, and an MBA focused on sustainability, Eliza works with organisations to surface what’s really going on, through deep stakeholder engagement, culture design, and human-centred strategy. Her work is featured as a case study in Innovation in Action, where her stakeholder-mapping approach illustrates how good ideas gain traction – or don’t.
Influence isn’t only found in high-power roles
We’ve learned to think about power in terms of titles and reporting lines. The CEO has power. The board has power. The project sponsor has power.
But influence doesn’t live on an org chart. It lives in the system.
Consider the parking attendant at an event – no title, no budget, no team. Nobody thought to brief them on which vehicles needed priority access. For over half an hour, they held up the entire show.
As Eliza puts it: “Can they influence the outcomes for better or worse? If they can do that quite easily, that’s a high power position.”
Her approach is to gather as many people as possible and whiteboard every individual, group, or organisation that could influence – or be influenced by your project. Not just the obvious ones. Everyone.
From there, you rank them by using a power/interest two-by-two matrix that plots stakeholders by their ability to influence outcomes and how much they care.
When power and interest are high, manage closely by engaging regularly, involve them in key decisions, and maintain strong relationships.
If power is high and interest is low, keep satisfied by ensuring their needs are met and they don’t become dissatisfied, but don’t overwhelm them with unnecessary detail.
And, if power is low and interest is high, keep informed by providing updates, listening to feedback, and maintaining engagement.
Lastly, low power and low interest, monitor by keeping an eye on them with minimal effort and occasional communication.
Eliza points out that it needs to happen far earlier, often during the discovering phase of a project is where you start identifying the stakeholders, before you’ve committed to a direction.
The people most likely to derail your initiative are the ones you haven’t yet thought to include.
Consulting isn’t the same as engaging
There’s a failure mode that even experienced practitioners can fall into. You speak to people. You gather the data. You synthesise the insights. You present the strategy.
And it lands completely flat.
This happened to Eliza early in her career, working with a professional services firm in Christchurch. She did the interviews, pulled the information together, wrote a culture strategy, and presented it to the directors. “I don’t quite know what I was thinking, to be honest,” she says.
The directors felt misunderstood. They didn’t trust the output. They were right not to, because while Eliza had gathered feedback, she hadn’t genuinely engaged them. There is a meaningful difference between the two.
Consulting asks people what they think. Engaging brings them into the process of figuring out what to do about it.
Eliza re-started the project again. This time with one-on-one meetings with key leaders and workshops. The group co-created the values and statements themselves. What we scoped as a six-month project took nearly two years. “And that’s probably about right,” she says.
“When you’re dealing with culture change, you can’t rush it.”
The instinct to accelerate and to gather enough information and then deliver the answer, is one of the most common ways innovation gets blocked.
If this is the thinking you want more of…
Christian and I wrote Innovation in Action for exactly this situation: the gap between having a good idea and actually getting it to land.
Everyone who orders before launch gets access to additional resources to make change stick.
Order here.
Culture is the conduit to innovation
Even with the right stakeholder map and genuine engagement, there’s a deeper truth beneath the surface.
If the culture in your organisation doesn’t make it safe for people to speak honestly, none of the tools will work.
Eliza’s definition of culture cuts straight to it:
“It’s the social order of your business, it shapes the attitudes and behaviours of your team.”
Not the values on the wall. The way people actually behave. And culture, she says, will trump whatever else is going on.
You can state that collaboration is a value while your team works in silos. Failure is welcomed while quietly penalising the people who try and miss. The gap between stated culture and lived culture is where innovation goes to die.
The organisations Eliza has seen build genuine innovation capability are those that create repeated, consistent rituals over 12 to 18 months of daily work, such as:
- a standing agenda item celebrating what teams are learning
- a monthly ideas session where no idea is too bad
- or a deliberate norm that reframes failure as a learning experience rather than a liability.
“It’s about creating repeated and consistent ways of reinforcing the culture and embedding that into the processes of the business,”
“Culture is the conduit,” Eliza says. Without it, power stays invisible. An invisible power will block good ideas every time.
Practitioner Insights
Three things worth taking into your next project:
Map before you plan. Run the stakeholder mapping exercise before you’ve committed to a direction, not after. Gather a wide group, list every possible stakeholder, however small, let people sit with the list, then rank by power and interest. The people most likely to stop your initiative are the ones nobody thought to name in the first meeting.
Slow down to engage. The pressure to move fast will always push you toward consulting rather than genuine engagement. Resist it. Time spent in co-creation is not time lost – it’s time banked against a far more expensive failure later. If the people who need to carry the idea didn’t help shape it, expect resistance.
Build the environment, not just the initiative. Stakeholder mapping workshops are tactics. Culture is the conduit they run on. If people don’t feel safe to surface honest concerns or challenge the status quo, your process tools won’t save you. Build the rituals. Reinforce the behaviours. Make it consistent.
Want to go deeper?
Watch the full conversation with Eliza on YouTube – where we get into the Bupa story, the power/interest matrix in practice, how she approaches culture change from the inside, and what she’s learned about creating space for honest thinking.
Immense thanks to Eliza for her honesty and insights in this conversation. Sharing the moments where things went wrong takes courage and generosity. That’s exactly the kind of mindset innovation cultures are built on.
Here’s a question to sit with: Who in your current initiative has high power that your org chart doesn’t show, and have you had a real conversation with them yet?