Five Questions Worth Asking Stakeholders Before Refreshing Your Strategy

Glastonbury Abbey Tree

When an organisation begins refreshing its strategy, it often starts with a familiar set of steps: reviewing performance, examining financial forecasts, considering risks, and assessing progress against existing objectives.

All of these are important. But they largely tell us how an organisation is performing against what it has already decided matters.

What they may not reveal is what has changed beyond the organisation, what stakeholders are experiencing differently, or which assumptions about the future are no longer holding true.

This is where thoughtful stakeholder conversations can add real value.

Not simply by asking people whether they are satisfied, or what they think of the current strategy, but by exploring what they know, experience and notice from their different positions in relation to the organisation.

Here are five questions I find particularly useful when thinking about stakeholder research ahead of a strategy refresh.

1. What has changed in your world that you think we may not have recognised?

This is a different starting point from asking stakeholders how well an organisation is performing. It invites people to speak about their own circumstances, rather than respond to the organisation's priorities.

A community partner might describe changing local needs or a funder might be noticing a shift in the wider funding environment. A supplier might be experiencing pressures that have yet to appear in the organisation's risk register.

Individually, these observations may seem relatively small. Taken together, they can reveal changes in the environment in which an organisation operates.

What this can reveal: Emerging risks, changing expectations, unmet needs and opportunities that may not yet be visible through internal reporting.

2. Where do you see us creating the most value, and where might we be falling short?

Organisations tend to measure value by what they have committed to deliver. Stakeholders may experience that value quite differently.

An organisation might consider a programme successful because it met its targets, while participants place greater value on relationships, confidence, or opportunities that developed along the way.

Equally, an activity that appears successful internally may create unintended burdens elsewhere.

The question becomes particularly interesting when we consider who benefits from an organisation's work, who contributes to it, and who might experience its costs.

What this can reveal: Differences between intended and experienced outcomes, overlooked contributions, unintended consequences and opportunities to create greater value.

3. What makes it easy or difficult to work with us?

This can be one of the most revealing questions in a stakeholder interview.

Organisations develop processes, policies and ways of working for good reasons. Over time, however, those arrangements can become so familiar internally that their effects on others are difficult to see.

A partner might value an organisation's expertise but struggle with its decision-making processes. A community group might appreciate the support offered but find the reporting requirements disproportionate. Staff may recognise barriers to collaboration that senior leaders rarely encounter.

These experiences are not simply operational matters. They can reveal whether the organisation's operating model supports or obstructs its strategic ambitions.

What this can reveal: barriers to collaboration, power imbalances, unnecessary complexity, and areas where organisational structures may need to change alongside strategy.

4. Where do you see tensions or disagreements that we should understand better?

There is a temptation in consultation to look for common themes and areas of agreement.

But disagreement can be just as valuable.

Different stakeholders may have competing priorities, different understandings of success or fundamentally different experiences of the same organisation.

These differences are not necessarily problems to be resolved. Sometimes they reveal genuine choices that a board needs to make.

For example, an organisation seeking to grow its reach may encounter concerns about losing the depth of its existing relationships. A commitment to greater efficiency may sit uneasily alongside ambitions for more meaningful participation.

Rather than smoothing over these tensions, good research makes them visible.

What this can reveal: Strategic trade-offs, competing expectations, questions of fairness and assumptions that deserve closer examination.

5. What do you think could become possible if we worked differently?

I particularly like ending conversations with a question that opens up possibility.

Much stakeholder consultation asks people to respond to what already exists: current services, established priorities or proposed changes.

But stakeholders may see opportunities that fall outside the organisation's existing understanding of its role.

They may recognise partnerships that haven't been explored, resources that could be shared, or different ways of approaching a persistent challenge.

Sometimes the most valuable finding from stakeholder research is not an answer to a question the organisation was already asking. It is discovering a better question.

What this can reveal: New possibilities, potential collaborations, alternative approaches and ideas that might fundamentally change how the organisation understands its future.

The questions are only the beginning

Of course, the quality of stakeholder research depends on more than having a good set of questions.

Who is invited into the conversation matters enormously. Including those who may not have traditionally had a seat at the table.

So does the ability to listen without immediately defending existing decisions, to explore unexpected responses and to recognise that different experiences may all be valid even when they appear contradictory.

There is also a difference between collecting stakeholder views and developing strategic insight.

An interview is not a vote. Nor is stakeholder research an exercise in assembling a list of requests for the board to satisfy.

Its value lies in understanding the patterns, relationships, tensions and possibilities that emerge across conversations, and considering what those findings mean for the organisation's choices.

Sometimes that requires independent research, particularly where existing relationships, power dynamics or organisational assumptions may influence what people feel able to say.

It can also require boards to sit with findings that challenge their preferred direction.

From listening to strategic decisions

The final step is perhaps the most important.

What will the organisation do differently because of what it has learned?

Stakeholder evidence might lead a board to reconsider its priorities, change how it allocates resources, strengthen partnerships, or redesign elements of its operating model.

It might also reinforce an existing direction, but with a better understanding of the conditions needed for success.

Not every stakeholder recommendation can or should be adopted. Boards retain responsibility for making decisions and navigating competing interests.

But there is a meaningful difference between choosing not to act on a perspective that has been carefully considered and making a decision without ever having heard it.

A strategy refresh offers an opportunity to do more than update an organisational plan. It can deepen an organisation's understanding of the relationships that make its work possible.

So perhaps the most useful question for a board preparing to refresh its strategy is this: whose perspective is currently missing from the conversations shaping our future?

She Changes undertakes independent stakeholder research and strategic advisory work, helping organisations understand the relationships, experiences and changing conditions that shape their decisions.

Find out more