Stakeholder Ecosystem Map
Coaching only sticks if the ecosystem around it holds. Map four roles — sponsors who protect time and budget, coaches slightly ahead per team, learners and what they are coached toward, and the support roles (IT, legal, data) who unblock. Then find the missing role that will quietly stall adoption.
Use before standing up a coaching layer, to surface the dependency that will stall it past the first quarter.
Solves: Capability programmes stall not on skill but on an unnamed missing role — usually the one who unblocks data access.
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Step 1: Draw four zones: Sponsors, Coaches, Learners, Support roles (5 min).
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Step 2: Populate each with real names, not job titles. A zone with no names is a gap (15 min).
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Step 3: Draw the dependencies between zones. Which arrow does not currently exist? (10 min)
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Step 4: Name the one missing role that will quietly stall adoption past the first quarter. Assign someone to go find them (10 min).
- Insist on names. 'The IT department' is not a stakeholder; a person in it is.
- The critical gap is usually a support role, not a sponsor. Sponsors are visible; unblockers are not.
- If nobody in the room can name the sponsor, that is the finding.