Category: Stakeholder Belief Audit

  • Plan for Stakeholders, Not Scenarios

    Plan for Stakeholders, Not Scenarios

    You don’t build credibility in the moment. You risk it.

    In biopharma, few things are more fraught than the Phase 3 readout. Every stakeholder is watching. Investors modeling. Clinicians forming opinions. Patient advocacy organizations and families hoping for new options. The company’s own teams, from investor relations to medical affairs to marketing to market access to government affairs, are running their own parallel preparations, often without a shared view of what others are doing or what others know.

    The conventional response to that situation is scenario planning. Map the possible outcomes. Prepare statements for each. Establish a clearance process. Wait for the data.

    We took a different approach.

    Working with a global biopharma company ahead of a pivotal readout, we built an integrated stakeholder engagement plan. Not a crisis communications plan. Not a scenario-planning exercise. An engagement plan: a research-anchored assessment of eight stakeholder groups essential to the company’s long-term success, each mapped from where they stood at the start to where they needed to be by the time results were in hand, so that any outcome could be received in context rather than as a surprise.

    The plan mapped across the whole clinical development program. It included proactive engagement at every key landmark, the company’s and their stakeholders. Not announcements. Conversations and actions. Not managed messages. Shared progress.

    When the results came in and the trial outcome was negative, a coordinated plan was already in place across all eight. Not a siloed set of individual preparations. A single, integrated response built from a common foundation of stakeholder understanding.

    Even those most desperate for good news understood the outcome and held the company in high regard for bringing them along on the journey.

    That is not a communications outcome. It is a trust outcome. And it was built before the data existed.

    What Scenario Planning Gets Right, and What It Misses

    Scenario planning is a reasonable tool for managing what you say and anticipating operational choices. Readying for the unexpected, though sometimes predicted. It is not a plan for managing what your stakeholders experience.

    The distinction matters because stakeholders are not waiting for your announcement. They are forming opinions, gathering intelligence, comparing notes with each other, and building their own understanding of you and your situation based on everything they see, hear, do not hear from you and experience with you. By the time any landmark arrives, the context in which it lands has already been shaped.

    Scenario planning prepares the message and the corporate response. It does not build the relationship in which the message will be received.

    Every stakeholder audience arrives at the moment carrying assumptions, concerns, and relationship histories that no announcement can quickly undo.

    The integrated approach begins earlier. It begins with a question most organizations do not ask systematically: where does each critical stakeholder stand today, and what needs to be true about our relationship with them before the results arrive?

    What an Integrated Stakeholder Engagement Plan Actually Looks Like

    The work starts with a rigorous assessment of each stakeholder group: where are they now, in terms of understanding, confidence, and relationship with the company? What are their priorities and concerns? Who and what shapes their thinking? What are the key milestones on their own calendar that determine when they are most receptive and when they are most concerned? From that baseline, the plan maps each group forward to where they need to be, not in terms of what they believe about a specific outcome, but in terms of their relationship with the company’s science, their confidence in leadership’s judgment, and their understanding of what the program is designed to accomplish and why?

    The engagement points that connect those two positions are planned conversations, calibrated over time, that build the relationship the company will need. Every interaction is designed to move a stakeholder along a specific arc, from their current position to the one that serves both parties when the stakes are highest.

    This is not a messaging exercise. It is architecture. (Readers of Episode 2 will recognize the principle.)

    The Internal Alignment Problem Nobody Addresses Directly

    There is a second priority to this work that is rarely discussed with the directness it deserves: building organizational coordination and cross-functional capacity.

    In many organizations approaching a major milestone, investor relations, medical affairs, marketing, corporate affairs, and other functions are each running their own preparation. Each function has its own stakeholders, its own clearance requirements, its own institutional knowledge and engagement tradition. Each team is competent. Most are not coordinating.

    The result is a set of parallel preparations that converge at the same moment, the trial results and public disclosure, with different assumptions about the message, different levels of familiarity with the external stakeholder landscape, and different thresholds for what a successful response looks like. The tension in the planning war rooms is palpable because the interplay of stakeholder groups is rarely anticipated from the outset.

    Engagement by Design treats the alignment of internal functions as part of the stakeholder engagement strategy, not as a separate organizational problem to be solved later. The plan that guides communication must also be the plan that aligns internal teams and optimizes key actions. Not because internal alignment is a management virtue (though it is), but because stakeholders detect its absence. Investors talk to investigators. Patient advocates compare notes across the globe. Physicians build their expectations of a company’s current portfolio and what’s promising in the pipeline. A company that is not coordinated internally will eventually demonstrate that externally.

    Trust as a Measurable Corporate Asset

    The measure of an integrated stakeholder engagement plan is not how smoothly an announcement goes. It is the state of the relationship after an announcement, including when the news is not what anyone had hoped for.

    In the example here, stakeholders who had every reason to be disappointed by a negative trial outcome held the company in high regard. That is a specific, observable, consequential result. It reflects decisions made and actions taken months and years before the data existed. It is also the definition of what transparency looks like as a sustained corporate practice, not as a one-time gesture or a crisis communications posture.

    That reputation is not a byproduct of good work. It is the result of planned, proactive engagement, designed in advance, executed with discipline, and measured in the quality of the relationships it produces.

    The Question to Ask Before the Next Milestone

    The Impact Imperative returns to the same standard across every episode: does your engagement strategy produce evidence of impact, or only evidence of effort?

    For integrated stakeholder engagement, the questions are pointed. Do you know where each critical audience stands today, before the news arrives? Are your internal teams working from a shared understanding, or running parallel preparations that will converge at the last possible moment? When the outcome comes, whatever it is, will your stakeholders have the context to receive it, because you built that context with them over time?

    If the honest answer to any of those questions is uncertain, the architecture for sustained stakeholder engagement is worth examining before it is needed.

    That is where our work together begins.

  • Discipline 1: Understand Your Audience is Key to Effective Engagement

    Discipline 1: Understand Your Audience is Key to Effective Engagement

    The engagement that never moves anyone doesn’t count.

    In a room of health policy advocates, someone posed a difficult scenario: how would you respond if a critical category of funding were eliminated by an ill-conceived policy proposal? One leader’s response was immediate. I would tell them: Where else are we going to get the resources from? You certainly are not in a position to support us if the proposal becomes law.

    The organizations most committed to their mission are often the ones most certain their stakeholders understand it too. That certainty is not a strength. It is a blind spot, one that tends to surface at the worst possible moment.

    The leader’s perspective was clear: the proposal maker surely understood this organization’s mission, its operations, and the community that depended on it or they would never have put that proposal on the table. Therefore, the policymaker must understand and had simply decided not to care. Another option: the proposal originated from someone who was completely unaware of the importance of the organization’s mission, constituents and funding reality and the harmful impact of their suggestion.

    In either case, the response inverts the problem. If the proposal was informed by what was at stake and who would pay the price, it would never have existed. The issue was not indifference. It was a gap in awareness that no one had thought to close. And a mission-driven organization, so immersed in the urgency of its own work, didn’t start the process by asking whether the people involved had the full picture.

    This is where stakeholder engagement often fails. In the assumption that the knowledge foundation is already there.

    The first discipline of Engagement by Design asks a question most organizations find uncomfortable: not “What do we need to say?,” but “What does our audience actually know, believe, and need before we say anything at all?” The answer is almost always more complicated than expected. Closing that gap systematically is where impact begins.

    The Cost of the Assumption

    Mission-driven organizations are particularly vulnerable to this gap. The very clarity of purpose is often their passion. When you know why your work matters, it is difficult to imagine that someone else does not.

    Economists Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber named this the “curse of knowledge” in a 1989 study of expert bias (Journal of Political Economy, 97:5): once you understand something deeply, it becomes nearly impossible to reconstruct what it felt like not to know it. That curse compounds over time. The longer an organization has been doing important work, the more invisible its own assumptions can become. The risk: the greater the gap grows between how it sees itself and how it appears to the people whose decisions determine its future.

    The policy scenario reflects this precisely. The leader’s frustration was not unreasonable. But the response, framing the policymaker as indifferent rather than uninformed, points to an engagement strategy headed in the wrong direction rather than one that informs, enlightens and compels positive change. An engagement campaign without the correct starting point and strategy is built to fail.

    Knowing your audience by the numbers is not enough.

    What Audience Calibration Actually Means

    Most organizations have demographics or profiles of their stakeholders. Fewer have mastered what actually drives engagement: a clear picture of where your audience stands in their thinking today and where you need to get them.

    What does this stakeholder believe about this issue today, before you have said a word? What has shaped that belief? What would have to be true for them to act on what you are asking? Which essential inputs will move them to your position? What is their definition of success? These are not marketing questions. They are strategic ones. And they cannot be answered by looking at your mission alone.

    Getting there requires research, landscape understanding, an honest audit of what your stakeholders consider credible, and, what actions will make an impact. For Engagement by Design, this is the belief audit: a structured process that maps the gap between where your audience is and where they need to be, and builds the engagement strategy around the journey to achieving your priorities. The output is not a persona. It is a map of assumptions, resistances, and entry points: the foundation every subsequent engagement campaign depends on.

    Designed Engagement and Reactive Engagement

    In the policy scenario, a belief audit conducted around the proposal would surface its origins and drivers and the stakeholders involved in its origination and those that share your view and motivations to prevent it. It would have identified which key policymakers lacked a working understanding of the organization’s mission, community reach, and funding dependencies, and it would have generated a proactive engagement plan designed to build that understanding before a crisis made it urgent.

    This is the distinction that defines the first discipline: reactive engagement shows up after the room has already gone wrong. Designed engagement builds the foundation before the conversation begins, so that when the critical moment arrives, you are not explaining yourself to people who should already know. You are confirming what they have come to understand through sustained, purposeful engagement. Both skills are needed because unlike film, we can’t be Everything Everywhere All at Once! And whether designed or reactive, your audience strategy must be built on evidence not assumption. That distinction is measurable: in the policy decisions that go your way, in the funding that remains intact, in the relationships that hold when the pressure is highest.

    The Question to Ask Before the Next Engagement

    The question The Impact Imperative returns to every stage is the same: does your engagement strategy produce evidence of impact, or only evidence of effort? Knowing your audience is not a preparation step. It is the first measurable discipline of a strategy built to move people, and the one too often skipped.

    What does your audience actually know about you today? What do they believe? What are they afraid of? If you do not have confident, evidence-based answers to those questions, that is where the work begins and where the impact is waiting. And The Engager Company is here to help.

    Lynn Hanessian is the founder of The Engager Company. The Impact Imperative is an eight-part series on the disciplines of Engagement by Design.