Module 7: Multi-Stakeholder Altitude Mapping

Everything so far has been written as if “the client” is a single voice. In practice, discovery almost always involves multiple stakeholders — different departments, different levels of seniority, different (and sometimes contradictory) positions on the same question. This module addresses what changes when that’s true.

The Core Complication

Two stakeholders can each make a perfectly valid L2 statement, at the same altitude, about the same topic — and directly contradict each other. This isn’t a tagging failure. Both statements are correctly leveled. The problem is one level up: nobody has yet established whose requirement governs, or whether the conflict itself needs to be escalated rather than resolved in the room.

Three Things to Track Per Statement

In multi-stakeholder discovery, every tagged statement needs three attributes: altitude (L0–L3), source (who said it, what role), and standing (does this stakeholder’s role give them authority over this particular topic, or are they describing something outside their own domain?). Standing matters because an L2 statement from someone without standing on that topic isn’t wrong, exactly — it’s provisional, and should be flagged as needing confirmation from whoever actually owns that process.

Detecting Conflict vs. Detecting Gaps

Two different situations get confused constantly:

• Genuine conflict: two stakeholders with real standing on the same topic want different things. This needs a decision, not a synthesis — don’t average two contradictory L2 statements into a vague compromise that satisfies neither.
• Apparent conflict that’s actually a scope gap: two stakeholders are describing different parts of the same process, and it only sounds like conflict because neither has the full picture. This resolves by mapping both statements into a single L1 process description that shows where each one’s piece fits. An apparent conflict at L2 often dissolves once you step back up to L1 and diagram the whole process — a strong signal the “conflict” was actually a coverage gap, not a disagreement.

Escalation

When a genuine conflict surfaces, it isn’t the practitioner’s job to resolve it by picking a side. The correct move is to name the conflict explicitly, to both stakeholders, and identify who has the authority to decide — sometimes someone not currently in the room. Log it as an open decision, not a diplomatically vague L2 statement that lets everyone leave believing agreement was reached when it wasn’t.

Building a Stakeholder Map

For any engagement with more than one stakeholder, maintain a simple running map: who’s involved, what topics they have standing on, and where their L0/L1 material has (or hasn’t yet) been reconciled with other stakeholders’. A table is usually enough — but its absence is exactly what allows contradictory L2 statements to survive undetected until delivery.

Worked Example (Composite)

Genuine conflict: Marcus — “Reps need same-day flexibility to apply a one-off discount at close, or we lose deals to faster-moving competitors.” Sarah — “No overrides outside the approval matrix — that’s exactly what’s been bleeding our margin.” Both have real standing (Marcus on sales process, Sarah on billing/margin policy), and they want different things. This gets logged as an open decision for escalation to whoever owns pricing policy — not smoothed into a vague “discounts will be reviewed appropriately” compromise. Apparent conflict, actually a gap: Priya asks whether Salesforce is always the source of truth; Sarah says Finance sometimes edits billing directly for true-ups. This isn’t Priya and Sarah disagreeing — it’s two people describing different parts of the same process that nobody had mapped together yet. Stepping up to L1 (a full close-to-cash process map) resolves it without escalation. Stakeholder map: