There is a particular moment in organisational life when stakeholder research becomes especially valuable, and a heads-up: it is not when the new strategy has been written and someone decides it would be wise to “consult stakeholders”. No, it needs to come much earlier. Before the problem is fully defined and before the preferred solution has hardened. We need to listen before restructuring, service redesign, or a strategic shift becomes sufficiently developed...

There are times when an organisation knows it needs to understand something, but reaches too quickly for a survey. Surveys are useful. They can tell us how many people think something, how frequently something occurs, whether one group responds differently from another, or how attitudes change over time. But sometimes the most important question is not how many? It is why?

This week I bought a new journal covered in illustrations of mushrooms. Some of them, I suspect, are magical in the sense that they may never have existed anywhere other than inside the imagination of the artist, rather than because they are hallucinogenic. Either way, the cover captured me. Fungi often do. There is something extraordinary about this kingdom of life that spends so much of its existence beyond our ordinary field of vision. We notice the mushroom because it appears above ground