Every project is an opportunity to drive meaningful change, but its success hinges on more than just financial or commercial outcomes. This page equips you with essential insights to navigate the complexities of stakeholder dynamics, ensuring your project resonates with the people it impacts. By understanding how stakeholders interpret and respond to change through their unique perspectives and values, you can foster alignment, build trust, and drive sustainable outcomes.

Drawing on the expertise of Ian MacDonald, Catherine Burke, and Karl Steward in Systems Leadership, we explore six key principles of behavior in complex systems to help you lead change effectively and ensure your projects create lasting impact.

1. People need to be able to predict their environments. People need to clearly understand how your project will affect their lives, ideally for the better.
2. People are not machines. Beware of language that focuses solely on efficiency improvements, performance enhancements, or productivity gains when framing the rationale for business transformation.
3. People’s behavior is based on six universal values. These values include honesty, trustworthiness, courage, respect for human dignity, fairness, and love.
4. People base some aspects of their culture on mythologies. Not everyone will make sense of your project in a purely logical way; many interpretations will be intangible and symbolic.
5. Change is a result of dissonance. For behavior to shift, there must be significant and sustained tension between people’s current views and the emerging reality.
6. It is better to build relationships on the basis of authority rather than power. Just because you can make a project happen doesn’t mean you should, especially without stakeholder buy-in.