Buy-in.

A List Apart offers up an article on Educating Stakeholders about how important it is to communicate context to the decision makers in a project.

Ideally, you should arrange for [a] workshop to occur at the very beginning of an engagement, before any real plans have been made. By doing so, you can ensure that subsequent discussions remain informed, focused, and—most importantly—realistic.

Spot on and a good start, but I think that it stops a little too short. Educating stakeholders so they can properly weigh decisions is important. However, involving stakeholders further can create a sense of buy-in to the concepts underpinning the project. What happens after the decisions have been made is the
difference between success and failure in a project - do the people doing the work believe in the work they are doing?

Mapping Dialogue is a Pioneers of Change report on different methods for bringing stakeholders together and getting them communicating effectively. Pulling methods from the Israeli and Palestinian peace process, the technology industry and community groups, it profiles in detail 10 methods, each with different goals, strengths and weaknesses.

Human beings have a living, deep impetus for freedom and self-determination, and given appropriate circumstances, people are usually more resourceful than expected in terms of finding their own answers. They buy in to, and own, solutions they have been a part of creating. The success of implementing interventions on social issues often depends more on ownership and motivation of those involved than on the cleverness of the idea.

I’d argue that this sense of ownership in projects is the single most important factor for success in a project. While Mapping Dialogue talks largely about stakeholders as those effected by a given project, buy-in has equal weight for those creating within the project. If people don’t believe in what they are working on, that comes through loud and clear. The report makes the value of bringing external stakeholders into the project in an active fashion very lucid.

One thing that came up repeatedly throughout the report was the notion of compromise to achieve buy-in. For designers, compromise is often quite hard - it means watering down our precious ideas. However, understanding the importance of buy-in from key stakeholders can really help to illuminate the value of strategic compromise. We are talking about compromise not in the context of a simple dilution of the soul in a project, but an active search for synergy in two seemingly opposing viewpoints.

What really interests me about this topic is what happens when the real value creators of a company are external stakeholders as with any online community based site. The value of methods like these to dialogue with the community at the core of your business is invaluable. It’s almost mind-boggling that we don’t see companies taking advantage of more tangible communication to protect their most valuable resource.