Design Thinking Roles - Stakeholder Engagement Leader

Jul 30

**Steven Forth** is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

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Roles are central to Ibbaka’s Open Competency Models. We see jobs as being bundles of roles. One can also play a role on a team and then there are all those ad-hoc roles that we play (‘I am doing this off the side of my desk’).

There are currently six roles in the Design Thinking competency model (an additional role for diversity and inclusion is being developed).

You can access the Design Thinking Competency Model here.

The six current roles are as follows:

Stakeholder Engagement as a Role

Many design thinking projects do not include stakeholder engagement as a specific role. We are recommending this change. Stakeholder engagement is critical at three times …

Empathy - understanding the wide group of stakeholders, who they are, how they influence each other, is critical to developing real empathy
Testing - the response of all stakeholders to the proposed solution, even those one or two steps removed, should be considered
Over time - even a simple solution has implications that are not obvious at first and that unfold over time, stakeholder engagement is critical to understanding the long term impacts or our solutions

One of the key skills for stakeholder engagement leaders is stakeholder mapping.

This is a multistep process and there are many ways to visualize the map. In some cases the map simply places each stakeholder on a two dimensional grid. This is not enough. It is also important to map the relationships between stakeholders. Below is a simple example from the excellent guide by Henrico Dolfing: A Step by Step Stakeholder Mapping Guide.