Stakeholder groups vs. UN Security Council

You must be wondering how can there be any similarity between our stakeholder groups and the UN security council?

Indeed there exists a beautiful co-relation.

United Nations as a well-known organization to which most sovereign countries are

member nations. However, 5 countries (US, UK, China, Russia, and France) are permanent members of the security council and they hold a very special power. They hold the VETO power to obstruct any UN resolutions.

So even if 100 other countries want something, this elite group can strike it down with

their VETO power.

Do you see such stakeholder groups in your company?

I had a real-life experience of this situation in one of our projects.

We were very excited to be moving to UAT for one of the very prestigious projects.

We printed 40+ freshly minted reports from the to be deployed system.

We pasted all these reports in a conference room and invited stakeholders to provide

feedback on the new reports.

Business stakeholders were quite happy with what we developed.

Then one fine day, legal folks visited the demo room and made a clear demand, we need

another set of 40 reports.

We tried to persuade legal folks to accept what we developed. They said that was out of consideration as legal requirements are non-negotiable.

Finally, we had to develop 40+ new reports.

So in most organizations, the legal function maybe a tiny function, but it has the VETO

power. One can negotiate with other stakeholders but can’t negotiate with legal function.

I hope you now recognize the similarities between the stakeholder groups and UN

security council.