Reducing Delivery Risk Through Stakeholder Mapping: The Mendelow Matrix
Executive Summary
Modern leadership is rarely linear. Senior executives operate within a web of expectations shaped by customers, regulators, partners, employees, and investors. The resulting stakeholder load is a predictable driver of delayed decisions, misallocated effort, and avoidable reputational risk. The practical challenge is engagement and prioritisation.
This is where the Mendelow Matrix earns its place in the executive toolkit: as a structured filter for allocating attention and defining proportionate engagement. Used well, it converts complexity into clarity, sharpens decision-making, and protects executive bandwidth for what is most material to strategy delivery.
Many leaders recognise the Mendelow Matrix as a simple 2x2 from business school. Its enduring value, however, lies in its purpose: to support environmental scanning—the disciplined process of filtering vast signals and demands to identify what genuinely requires managerial attention. Popularised through its inclusion in mainstream strategy texts (notably Johnson & Scholes), the matrix provides a practical decision aid for executives: it helps distinguish material stakeholders from background noise and creates a visual map for engagement choices.
In short, it is a fast, shared way to prioritise attention and allocate scarce time.
Defining “Power” Beyond Formal Authority
A recurring executive error is to equate “power” with job titles. Formal authority matters, but it is not the only form of influence that shapes outcomes. If you want to reduce execution risk, you must define power with greater precision.
A useful approach is to adopt a simple 1–5 scoring system for both Power and Interest, anchored in evidence rather than intuition. Establish criteria such as:
Decision rights: Who can ultimately approve, block, or materially reshape the initiative?
Control of resources: Who controls funding, capacity, access, or critical dependencies?
Proximity to impact: Who is closest to execution success or failure?
Network influence: Who shapes opinions and decisions through trusted relationships, despite limited formal authority?
To make the mapping more predictive, capture two additional dimensions:
Stance: Are they supportive, neutral, or opposed—and what observable behaviour supports that assessment?
Salience: How urgent is their claim, and how quickly could it become a constraint or risk?
A practical rule: if you cannot point to observed behaviour, decisions, patterns, or data to justify a score, your map is assumption-heavy and therefore unreliable.
A shared Language for the Executive Team
Stakeholder prioritisation often fails not because leaders do not care, but because leadership teams hold different, untested assumptions. One executive may overstate a stakeholder’s influence due to personal history; another may underweight a stakeholder they rarely engage with. Misalignment here creates predictable downstream issues: mixed messages, unmanaged expectations, and preventable escalation.
Use the matrix as a calibration mechanism. Map stakeholders together, score collectively, and record the rationale for placements. The discussion is not a “nice to have”; it is where risks surface.
A useful diagnostic is disagreement. If three senior leaders place the same stakeholder in different quadrants, you have identified a hidden coordination risk in your engagement strategy. Resolve it early, while you still have room to shape expectations.
Engagement Cadence is Resource Allocation
Engagement is not a communications exercise; it is a governance choice. Executive attention is finite, and stakeholder engagement should be proportionate to risk and value.
The Mendelow Matrix gives you four distinct engagement cadences:
Manage closely (High Power / High Interest): This is the zone of co-creation. Involve these stakeholders early, establish two-way dialogue, and negotiate trade-offs transparently.
Keep satisfied (High Power / Low Interest): Protect their time and prevent surprises. Provide crisp executive updates, clarity on risks, and invite deep dives by exception rather than by default.
Keep informed (Low Power / High Interest): Use targeted briefings, FAQs, pilots, and feedback loops. This group can provide operational intelligence and become advocates if treated with respect.
Monitor (Low Power / Low Interest): Track efficiently through light-touch updates and watch for shifts in influence or interest.
For every high-power stakeholder, define the value exchange: what they need from you, and what you need from them. Then make it operational:
Assign an Owner (named accountable lead)
Specify the Next Two Actions (near-term commitments, not vague intentions)
Define a contact rhythm (monthly, fortnightly, by phase gate, by exception)
This is how engagement moves from good intent to execution control.
Avoid the Trap of the Static Map
A stakeholder map that is months old is not simply out-of-date—it can be actively misleading. In volatile environments, power and interest shift quickly. A supportive stakeholder can become a constraint after a leadership change, a regulatory signal, a commercial setback, or a public incident.
Treat the matrix as a living map with an explicit review cadence aligned to:
Phase gates: when the initiative moves from planning to mobilisation to execution
Leadership moves: internal changes or transitions within stakeholder organisations
Material milestones or incidents: events that alter urgency, scrutiny, or reputational exposure
A practical discipline is to run a short “delta review” at each phase gate: update only what has changed, document why, and revise engagement actions accordingly.
Bottom Line: From Complexity to Clarity
The Mendelow Matrix endures because it is decisively practical. It forces a shift from reactive stakeholder management to intentional prioritisation. By converting a web of expectations into calculated engagement choices, you improve decision velocity, reduce delivery risk, and protect executive capacity for what most advances the strategy.
As you look at your current priorities, ask yourself: Which stakeholder relationship represents the greatest execution risk because it is being managed on intuition rather than evidence?