What Organisations Miss When They Say “We’ve Identified Our Stakeholders”

When organisations say “we’ve identified our stakeholders”, what they often mean is that they’ve produced a list. Employees. Regulators. Customers. Suppliers. Communities. Partners. The box is ticked. The exercise is complete.

Except it isn’t.

Because stakeholder identification is not the same as stakeholder understanding and confusing the two is where some organisations can quietly undermine their own strategy and engagement.

A List Is Static. Stakeholders Are Not.

Most stakeholder lists are snapshots in time. They reflect organisational structure, contractual relationships, or governance requirements at the moment the list was created. But stakeholders are not static entities.

Their priorities shift. Their influence fluctuates. Their trust rises and falls based on decisions, communication, and lived experience. A stakeholder who was neutral six months ago could well be frustrated, disengaged, or actively resistant and no spreadsheet will tell you that. When organisations rely solely on lists, they miss the movement underneath.

Formal Roles Hide Informal Power

Another common blind spot is an over-reliance on formal titles and reporting lines.

Organisations tend to focus on:

• Who should be influential

• Who ought to be consulted

• Who appears on the org chart

What they often miss are the informal influencers:

• The long-serving technician everyone trusts

• The administrator who knows how things actually get done

• The supervisor who absorbs frustration from their team but never escalates it

These individuals may not appear on any stakeholder register, yet they shape morale, behaviour, and acceptance of change far more than senior briefings or formal consultations ever will. Ignoring informal power structures doesn’t make them disappear, it simply makes them harder to manage.

Stakeholders Are Grouped, Then Flattened

Another issue that I've seen arise once stakeholders are identified is that they are grouped into categories and treated as homogenous. “Employees” become one stakeholder. “Community” becomes another. “Regulators” become a single voice.

In reality, each of these groups contains competing perspectives, conflicting incentives, and very different levels of trust in the organisation. Some may also overlap. A frontline worker’s concerns are rarely aligned with senior management’s assumptions. A local community is never one voice. When organisations flatten stakeholder groups, they end up responding to an average view that doesn’t actually exist.

Identification Without Engagement Creates False Confidence

There's a particular kind of confidence that comes from believing stakeholders have been “covered”. Consultations were held. Surveys were issued. Communications were sent. Tick. Tick. Tick. Why is it then, that stakeholders say they feel unheard? Why do decisions feel pre-determined? And why is feedback disappearing into the void? Then, over time, participation drops and the organisation wonders why. It's not because stakeholders don’t care, but because they’ve learned they makes no difference.

Stakeholder Insight Is Ongoing Work, Not a Phase

The core issue is this: stakeholder identification is often treated as a phase rather than a practice. It’s something done at the start of a project or to satisfy governance requirements. Once completed, the attention moves on. But understanding stakeholders requires continuous listening, interpretation, and adjustment. It means paying attention to what people aren’t saying as much as what they are. It means noticing patterns across teams, sites, and conversations and being willing to hear uncomfortable truths.

This kind of ongoing awareness isn’t just an organisational issue; it plays out all the time in the public and political sphere too. Media and public narratives move fast, and so do stakeholder perceptions. News of the tragic fatal shooting of Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026 by U.S. federal immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis spread around the world within minutes, it didn’t just reach political critics- it reached supporters too. Verified footage of the encounter and the subsequent worldwide reporting prompted intense scrutiny, protests, and political commentary across the spectrum. For some stakeholder groups, particularly within Trump’s support base, Second Amendment rights are deeply held values and perceived contradictions can trigger alienation. In this case, the perception that a legally armed civilian had been killed by authorities created a narrative tension that risked alienating segments of that base, not because stakeholders suddenly changed their values, but because the emerging story appeared to conflict with them. The official statement alone wasn't enough, but how the event intersected with existing beliefs and expectations as the media narrative evolved.

Stakeholder insight doesn’t end once a position has been stated or a communication issued. It requires watching how narratives shift, how different groups react as new information emerges, and where silence, discomfort, or disengagement starts to appear.

The Real Question Organisations Should Ask

Instead of asking: “Have we identified our stakeholders?” A more useful question is: “How well do we understand how our stakeholders actually experience this organisation right now?” Because lists don’t reveal frustration. Matrices don’t capture trust. And engagement plans don’t guarantee understanding. Organisations that get this right move beyond identification toward insight and that’s where better decisions, stronger relationships, and more resilient change begins.

TL;DR

Listing stakeholders isn’t the same as understanding them. Stakeholders change over time, hold informal power, and don’t think or react as neat groups. When organisations treat stakeholder identification as a one-off task, they create false confidence and miss shifts in trust, sentiment and influence. Real stakeholder insight requires ongoing listening and attention to how people experience decisions in real time, especially as narratives evolve publicly. The better question isn’t “Have we identified our stakeholders?” but “Do we understand how they experience us right now?”