Reflection on Stakeholder Management, Bert Hellinger, and the Embassy of the Earth

Last weekend I was invited to join the Embassy of the Earth, an initiative for and by the younger generation of the Netherlands to combine a constructive dialogue on the sustainability challenge of the Netherlands with building bonds to strategically collaborate with the ambition to keep and make the Netherlands a healthy, safe, inspiring and joyful place to live in.

With a group of 40 ambitious and compassionate people we spend the weekend on a little island in Amsterdam. What struck me most was the individuality with which we came, the different roles people played, the different stakes people value and the patterns we came into because of this.

There was room for sharing our own stories, the challenges we face and what fuels our commitment to sustainability. One of the participants shared a beautiful story from the hearth with a referral to the family constellations that psychotherapist Bert Hellinger developed in order to reveal destructive patterns that many of us unconsciously take on in our families. These patterns are a barrier to living up to our fullest potential and for that reason there is tremendous value in finding a way to address them.

These patterns do not only exist within families, they also exist when different groups of people representing different stakeholders come together to achieve a shared goal. Our conscious and unconscious attitudes toward representatives of other stakeholders in the process and our ability to relate to their perceptions determine to a large extend the effectiveness of our collaboration and the amount of energy we have to invest in the relationship.

With the organization that I work for we developed a stakeholder game that was inspired by Bert Hellinger’s family constellations where we train teams in being effective change agents and invite them to position the different stakeholders in relation to one another, sharing the insights that come from that and preparing themselves to perceive the playing field in a more constructive way.

The group I was with this weekend was such a group, dedicated to a shared vision of success, representing a wide array of interests, was slowed down by its current inability to optimally tap into the levels of commitment people were ready to make, the networks people represent, and the drivers people have.

The positive note on this is that this group consists of people with highly developed leadership skills, openness, and a tremendous drive to be successful. And taking into account that this was only the first gathering we collectively had I think we made tremendous steps in the right direction. I’m very eager to see what initiatives will arise from this and looking forward to our next gathering when Autumn sets in.