Eight questions that measure how complicated the human terrain around a decision really is, from veto holders to incentive conflicts, before the plan assumes a smooth path.
Score the decision as it must actually travel: through the approvers, functions and external parties who can shape or stall it. Fixed questions, fixed points, nothing stored.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Put the stakeholder landscape to selected senior operators from the Global Board and receive a confidential report on where it will resist, before the timeline is public.
Get independent perspectivesAnswer for the specific decision, counting the stakeholders it actually has rather than the ones on the governance chart.
The human terrain around this decision is navigable: few approvers, no hidden vetoes, and interests that broadly point the same way. Complexity this low is worth confirming rather than celebrating, because the most common scoring error is counting only the stakeholders you already know about.
This decision has enough moving human parts to fail on coordination alone, even if the underlying choice is right. In this band the danger is uneven attention: the loudest stakeholders get managed while the decisive ones, often the quiet veto holders, get a briefing pack and an assumption.
The stakeholder landscape is itself the main risk to this decision: multiple vetoes, conflicting incentives, history between the parties, and a timeline lashed to other people's decisions. Plans of this shape rarely fail in one dramatic meeting. They dissolve across many small delays that each look reasonable.
The same organisation can pass one decision in a week and trap another for a year, because complexity lives in the specific combination of who must approve, who can block and whose incentives collide. Treating stakeholder management as a standard workstream misses this. A decision with three aligned approvers and a decision with three competing ones need entirely different plans, whatever the organisation chart says.
Underestimating complexity has a familiar bill: launch dates set before the approval sequence was understood, sponsors spending credibility on rework, and compromises added late that trade away the value the decision was meant to create. Scoring the terrain before committing to dates is the cheap version of learning it afterwards.
Eight answers at 0, 5 or 10 points, normalised to 100, where higher means more human complexity between the decision and its outcome. A high score is not an argument against the decision. It is an argument against the current plan's assumptions about how easily it will pass.
Rarely. It is a reason to re-plan it: sequence the approvals deliberately, resolve the decisive conflicts early and stop promising dates that assume none of this exists. Some of the most valuable decisions are the high-complexity ones nobody else has managed to land.
A map records who the stakeholders are. This score measures what their combination does to the decision: vetoes multiply with incentive conflicts and old history in ways a list does not show. Use the map as the input and the score as the health check.
Score it anyway. One difficult stakeholder is usually manageable; the score reveals whether the difficulty really is one person or a structure of conflicting incentives that person happens to voice. The remedies for those two situations are entirely different.