Org, people & execution
Stakeholder Mapping (Power-Interest Grid)
A two-by-two grid that positions each stakeholder by their power over your work and their interest in it, then sets an engagement strategy per quadrant: manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed, or simply monitor.
Also known as Mendelow's matrix, Power-interest matrix, Stakeholder analysis grid. First set out by Aubrey L. Mendelow (grid); R. Edward Freeman (stakeholder theory) in 1981.
Where this is contested
The grid is conventionally credited to Mendelow's paper at the Second International Conference on Information Systems, cited variously as 1981 and 1991; the proceedings are hard to obtain, and the familiar quadrant labels owe as much to Johnson and Scholes's textbook popularisation as to Mendelow himself.
- Format
- 2×2 matrix
- Level
- Corporate · Business unit · Team
- Best for
- Prioritise · Plan execution · Assess risk
- Decision stage
- Diagnose · Plan · Execute
- Difficulty
- Introductory
- Time to apply
- A 90-minute workshop for a first map; refresh at each project phase.
Plate · The model
The components
Keep satisfied
High power, low interest. These stakeholders can stop the work but are not currently paying attention. The task is to meet their requirements efficiently and avoid the surprise that converts latent power into active opposition. Over-engaging them is its own risk: unnecessary detail invites unnecessary intervention.
Signals of strength
Holds budget, consent or veto authority over the work · Engages only at gateways or when something goes wrong · Would escalate quickly if surprised or embarrassed
Manage closely
High power, high interest. The key players. They shape whether the work survives contact with reality, so they need genuine two-way engagement: early involvement in decisions, direct access, and no surprises. This quadrant is where most of your engagement budget belongs.
Signals of strength
Can materially accelerate or kill the work · Actively following progress and asking questions · Expects to be consulted before decisions, not informed after
Monitor
Low power, low interest. Watch with minimal effort: general communications and a periodic check that nothing has changed. The discipline this quadrant demands is restraint, because effort spent here is taken from quadrants that decide the outcome. The check matters because membership is not permanent.
Signals of strength
No direct authority and no organised voice · Rarely engages with communications about the work · Could migrate quadrants if the scope or impact changes
Keep informed
Low power, high interest. Individually weak but attentive, and often the source of goodwill, local knowledge and early warning. Keep them genuinely informed and give them channels to be heard. Neglected, they organise, recruit powerful sympathisers and arrive in the top-right quadrant as opponents.
Signals of strength
Strongly affected by outcomes but lacking formal authority · High engagement with consultations and communications · Capable of forming alliances or attracting media attention
When it earns its keep
- You are starting a project or change whose success depends on people you do not control, and you need to decide deliberately where scarce engagement effort goes.
- A programme is stalling and you suspect an unmapped stakeholder, someone with quiet power and no formal role, is blocking it.
- Interests are plainly in conflict, for example residents, funders and regulators around one development, and you need a shared picture before positions harden.
- You are planning communications and want the cadence and depth of contact matched to each audience's actual power and interest rather than to habit.
And when it doesn't
- As a one-off exercise filed after kick-off. Power and interest shift as a project progresses, and a stale map is worse than none because it feels like due diligence.
- When the real question is who does what on the delivery team. That is an accountability problem; use RACI, not a stakeholder grid.
- Where the placement itself would be explosive if leaked. A document that labels a named community group 'monitor: minimal effort' can do more political damage than the mapping prevents; handle the artefact with care or keep it coarse.
- When you lack any real knowledge of the stakeholders. A grid filled in from assumption launders guesswork into strategy; do the conversations first.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- A candidate list of stakeholders, drawn wide: anyone who can affect the work or is affected by it, named as people or specific bodies rather than categories.
- Evidence of each stakeholder's power: formal authority, funding control, veto rights, influence over opinion, or capacity to delay.
- Evidence of each stakeholder's interest: what they stand to gain or lose, and how actively they are attending to the work now.
- An honest view of each stakeholder's current stance, supportive, neutral or opposed, since the grid says how much to engage but not what you will find when you do.
- 1
List the stakeholders
Brainstorm wide, then sharpen. 'The council' is not a stakeholder; the planning committee, the highways department and the ward councillors are, and they will sit in different quadrants. Most mapping failures are really listing failures.
- 2
Assess power
For each stakeholder, judge their capacity to help or stop the work: budget authority, statutory consent, control of access, or informal influence over those who have any of these. Rate high or low, and record the evidence rather than the impression.
- 3
Assess interest
Judge how much each stakeholder cares and how actively they are watching. Distinguish stake from attention: a group can be deeply affected yet dormant, and part of the value of the exercise is spotting who could become interested overnight.
- 4
Place them on the grid
Plot every stakeholder in one of the four quadrants. Do it with colleagues who know the players; the argument about where someone sits is usually the most informative part of the session.
- 5
Set the engagement strategy per quadrant
Manage closely those with high power and high interest; keep the high-power, low-interest satisfied without provoking them into opposition; keep the low-power, high-interest informed and use them as allies and early warning; monitor the rest without spending real effort.
- 6
Revisit as the work moves
Re-map at each phase gate or when the environment shifts. Stakeholders migrate: a dormant funder wakes up, a supportive councillor loses a seat. The strategy should follow the movement, and the map's history tells you which way things are trending.
Reading the result
A populated grid placing every named stakeholder in one of four quadrants, an engagement strategy and owner for each, and a record of the reasoning, revisited on a set cadence as power and interest shift.
- Read the top row first. Everyone with high power needs a deliberate strategy, and the difference between the two top quadrants is depth of engagement, not importance.
- Look at the borders. Stakeholders sitting near a quadrant boundary are the ones most likely to migrate, and migration towards the top right, powerful and newly interested, is the movement that changes your plan.
- Treat sparse top-right quadrants with suspicion. A significant project with only one or two key players usually means power has been under-assessed somewhere.
A worked example
A harbour-front regeneration project maps its stakeholders before planning submission
A development partnership is regenerating a disused harbour front in a south-coast town: 340 homes, workspace, a refurbished fish quay and a public boardwalk. Before submitting the planning application, the programme director runs a power-interest mapping session with the delivery team, because an earlier scheme on the same site collapsed after organised local opposition that nobody had seen coming.
- Keep satisfied
- The Marine Management Organisation and the Environment Agency hold consent powers over the quay works but show little day-to-day interest, as does the combined authority co-funding the boardwalk. Strategy: meet every statutory requirement early and cleanly, brief them at gateways only, and never let a compliance surprise reach them through the press.
- Manage closely
- The council's planning committee, the harbour commissioners who own the water frontage, and the anchor commercial tenant funding the workspace. All three can stop the scheme and all are watching it. Strategy: monthly face-to-face sessions, early sight of the design changes, and a named senior owner for each relationship. The previous scheme's team had treated the harbour commissioners as a formality.
- Monitor
- Trade suppliers, a regional property journal, and residents of the estates inland with no sightline to the harbour. Strategy: general newsletter and a quarterly scan. The team resists the urge to consult everyone equally, which last time diluted engagement effort to the point where nobody got enough of it.
- Keep informed
- The fishing cooperative that works off the quay, harbour-front residents, and a heritage society devoted to the fish market building. Individually low power, but this is exactly the coalition that sank the previous scheme once it recruited two ward councillors. Strategy: a standing liaison forum, honest updates including bad news, and design workshops on the quay and market frontage where their knowledge is genuinely useful.
The read. The map's main verdict is that the project's biggest risk lives in the bottom-right, not the top row. The fishing cooperative and heritage society have high interest, real grievances and a proven route to acquiring power through the ward councillors, who sit on the planning committee. The engagement plan therefore commits its largest single effort to the liaison forum, and the team sets a review trigger: if either group's tone shifts or a councillor starts attending their meetings, they are re-mapped as key players immediately. The grid did not make the politics easy, but it made them visible before the application went in rather than after.
Pitfalls
- Mapping categories instead of actors. 'Local residents' spans supporters, opponents and the indifferent; the grid only works when entries are specific enough to have a knowable power and interest.
- Confusing interest with support. A stakeholder can be intensely interested and wholly opposed; the grid positions effort, and a separate read of stance is needed to shape the message.
- Treating the map as static. The most consequential stakeholders are often the ones who move, and a map that is never revisited will be most wrong exactly when it matters.
- Letting the artefact leak carelessly. Named individuals filed under 'monitor: minimal effort' reads as contempt; keep the working version candid and the shared version diplomatic.
- Under-scoring informal power. Committees and budget-holders are easy to rate; the retired harbour master everyone still listens to is not on any org chart.
- Using the grid as the whole engagement plan. It allocates attention; it says nothing about what to say, who should say it, or what each stakeholder actually needs to hear.
What the critics say
Two dimensions are too crude for real stakeholder dynamics. Mitchell, Agle and Wood argue that salience depends on power, legitimacy and urgency in combination, and that these attributes are variable and socially constructed, so a static power-interest reading misclassifies exactly the stakeholders whose claims are urgent or legitimate but not yet powerful.
Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R. and Wood, D. J. (1997) 'Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts', Academy of Management Review, 22(4), pp. 853-886.
The grid frames stakeholders as objects to be managed from the firm's viewpoint, but stakeholders are actors with strategies of their own. Frooman shows that stakeholders choose influence pathways, direct or indirect, withholding or usage, depending on resource dependence, so the interesting question is not where they sit on a grid but what they can do to you and through whom.
Frooman, J. (1999) 'Stakeholder Influence Strategies', Academy of Management Review, 24(2), pp. 191-205.
The instrumental register of quadrant strategies sits awkwardly with the normative core of stakeholder theory. Freeman's argument was that stakeholders merit attention because they have legitimate stakes, and an ethic reduced to 'keep the powerless merely informed' inverts that; critics note the grid can operationalise precisely the shareholder-centred instrumentalism the theory set out to displace.
Work it through
Place each named stakeholder in the quadrant their power and interest warrant, note the engagement strategy beside them, and argue about the borderline cases. Your entries persist for this browser session and can be copied out as Markdown or printed.
0 of 4 blocks filled
Run it as a workshop
Draw the power-interest grid large on a wall before the room opens. Ask attendees to name actual people or named roles, never categories: 'the finance director', not 'finance', 'the residents' association chair', not 'local residents'.
Running order
| Brainstorm every stakeholder, named specifically | 20 min |
| Place each on the grid by power and interest | 30 min |
| Separately, note stance: for, against, or genuinely undecided | 15 min |
| Agree an engagement approach per quadrant | 20 min |
| Total | 85 min |
You will need
- A large power-interest grid on a wall
- Sticky notes, one stakeholder per note
- A second marker colour or symbol system to record stance separately from position
- A follow-up owner list for the highest-power, highest-interest names
Traps to avoid
- Mapping categories instead of named actors. 'Local residents' spans supporters, opponents and the indifferent; the grid only earns its keep when entries are specific enough to have a knowable power and interest.
- Confusing interest with support. A stakeholder can be intensely interested and completely opposed; capture stance as a separate read, never folded into position on the grid.
- Treating the finished map as permanent. The most consequential stakeholders are usually the ones who move; put a date in the diary to redo this at the next project phase.
- Letting the exercise stop at the map. Each quadrant needs an actual engagement action attached before the room closes, not just a label.
Sources and further reading
- Mendelow, A. L. (1981) 'Environmental Scanning: The Impact of the Stakeholder Concept', Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Information Systems, Cambridge, MA, pp. 407-418.
- Freeman, R. E. (1984) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Boston: Pitman.
- Johnson, G., Scholes, K. and Whittington, R. (2008) Exploring Corporate Strategy, 8th edn. Harlow: FT Prentice Hall.
- Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R. and Wood, D. J. (1997) 'Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience', Academy of Management Review, 22(4), pp. 853-886.