iF Quarterly

The Hunt for the How

Announcing Stakeholder-Centered Strategy

More than one year after the coronavirus hit U.S. soil, there has been a slow and cautious attempt to “return to normal.” Normalcy aside, many business leaders have realized that life after COVID will never go back to the way things were. From hybrid work to new health and safety regulations to energized initiatives around DEI and social justice, companies are being asked to step forward and radically rethink their purpose, and what it means to be a successful business.

Recognizing this emergent need to reevaluate and reinvent business strategy, we created an internal team to conduct in-depth research to uncover best practices and use cases for organizations who are coming up with innovative ways to create value for all of their stakeholders, not just their shareholders. From this research, we realized we had a unique service we wanted to bring to our clients and partners, and so we’re very excited to announce our newest endeavor: Stakeholder-Centered Strategy.

What is stakeholder-centered strategy?
Stakeholder-centered strategy is iF’s new methodology for helping leaders and businesses across sectors achieve long-term success by creating value across their stakeholder ecosystem. We use some of our best tools and practices from human-centered strategy to combine in-depth research, competitive analysis, and stakeholder interviews, and intensive workshops to provide your leadership team with a strategic roadmap that accounts for all the stakeholders you serve. And, to leverage that knowledge to drive collaborative innovation as well as operationalize the organization’s purpose across all stakeholders.

We emphasize value creation because SCS is all about shared abundance: it’s not about taking from any one group of stakeholders and re-distributing to another. That’s scarcity thinking. We believe if companies focus from the outset at how to create mutual benefit and value across their stakeholder ecosystem, everyone will benefit, including shareholders. Part of this is because SCS is deliberate and active, not reactive: instead of waiting for a crisis or disruption to your stakeholder relationships, we want to equip companies with a strategy of continued, active listening and relationship building. You’re never caught off guard, and ready to anticipate new stakeholder needs as they emerge. And that drives sustainable competitive advantage.

How does it work?
At its heart, our SCS practice is about aligning purpose, performance and profit across an organization. We work with clients in a six-pronged approach to thoroughly assess their stakeholder ecosystem, identify opportunities, and make their purpose operational and actionable:

• Intentional Learning: Dive deep into the intricacies of your market, your customers, and your competitors to understand where there’s opportunity to provide new value to stakeholders.
• Benchmarking and goal setting: A broader commitment to “do better” isn’t very actionable. We work with companies on identifying the milestones and specific goals that motivates your team and clarifies your path forward.
• Stakeholder needs & influence mapping: Drawing on our experiences with human-centered strategy and design, we conduct in-depth research and interviews across your stakeholder ecosystem, and map them so your team understands exactly what kind of value will mean the most to them.
• Value exchange modeling: We believe every stakeholder relationship is fueled by a mutually rewarding value exchange, one in which you and your stakeholders each provide unique value for each other. Based on stakeholder mapping, we can model these exchanges for you so you can see where you’re performing well and where you can grow your stakeholder focus.
• Purpose activation: To really align purpose with profit, you sometimes need a thorough inventory and revision to your governance and processes. We get into the weeds with your teams to make sure they understand how to operationalize and align with the purpose of the organization.
• Measurement systems: So many transformative visions fail to see the light of day because they aren’t connected to OKRs. We work closely with your team to develop the right measurements and targets that will meaningfully hold your people accountable to your purpose and provide meaningful indicators of success.

Some partners may be seeking very targeted support in only one of these areas, while others may be looking for a complete strategic deep dive and overhaul. Wherever you are in your stakeholder journey, we have the tools and processes to set you on a path for strong stakeholder relationships, brand equity, and a sustainable approach to building and evolving your stakeholder strategy over time.

What’s next?
We’re excited about the untapped potential for companies to generate more positive social impact through these approaches, but that’s a natural outcome from a more fundamental shift we’re advocating for. At its core, SCS is founded on a mindset shift from zero sum to abundance, from accepting hard trade-offs to creatively solving for harder, more inspiring problems; from fixating solely on profits and share price to coupling that with a broader set of success conditions.

This essential shift in how we think and define business success gives us business practices that are more in touch with the needs, desires and interconnectedness of all of an organization’s constituents; that elevate the time-horizon beyond short-term thinking; that demonstrate higher levels of clarity and commitment to why your business exists in the first place; and that creates more value than ever before for the people and communities businesses are a part of.

It’s because of this mindset shift that we think of SCS as so much more than a business offering. For us, SCS is a journey we’re embarking on, one that we want to invite everyone in our community to join. In five to ten years, we believe having a stakeholder-centered strategy will be considered a business imperative, and stakeholder-related KPIs a core part of evaluating business success right along with their market share, profit margin, and IPO. Our greatest marker of success will be if we have a healthy community of like-minded competitors and partners who are all pushing business in the right direction together. We hope you’ll join us on this journey towards building a better future for businesses and for people.

Continuing the conversation
As part of our journey into stakeholder-centered strategy, we created The Hunt for the How, a podcast to take you along with us as we explore the different ways stakeholder accountability can transform business and society. Every two weeks, we’ll release a ~40 minute interview with a leading executive, leader, economist, or thinker on their work and perspective. Our inaugural guest is Jon Iwata, Executive Fellow at the Yale School of Management and former Chief Brand Officer at IBM. Next up we have episodes with: Robert Bernard, former Chief Sustainability Officer at Microsoft and current Managing Director at Commonwealth Equity; Shalinee Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO of Zearn Math; and Fran Dunaway, CEO & Co-Founder, TomboyX. You can read more about how the idea for the podcast was born here, and listen today on Spotify, iTunes, (and soon Google Podcasts)!

Every quarter, Intentional Futures puts out a long-form piece on what we’ve been up to, and what we’re thinking about.

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To learn more about Stakeholder-Centered Strategy, visit our website or email us at info@intentionalfutures.com.