When Two Critical Stakeholders Want Different Things#
Before I could even get onto solid ground about who everyone was in The Iliad, Achilles and Agamemnon were already deep into what I think we can safely describe as a fairly significant stakeholder disagreement.
Which is fine, I suppose.
We are still on a beach.
Agamemnon is forced to give up Chryseis after Apollo sends a plague through the Greek camp. He agrees to return her, but he isn’t prepared to be the only leader left without a prize.
So he takes Briseis from Achilles.
Achilles is furious.
And he doesn’t just get angry with Agamemnon.
He withdraws from the fighting.
Suddenly, a disagreement between two people has consequences for an entire army.
That got my attention.
And my first reaction was basically:
Yeah. I can see why.
But I couldn’t quite get all the way onto Team Achilles.
Because while I could understand why he was angry, there was another thought sitting in the back of my project-manager brain:
There are a lot of people depending on you.
It wasn’t really about one woman#
One of the things I have always struggled to understand about the Trojan War is the idea of going to war over one person.
Helen.
Then I started The Iliad and almost immediately found myself in another enormous argument involving Chryseis and Briseis.
I had questions.
But the more I started understanding the world these people were operating in, the more I realised I was looking at the argument too literally.
This isn’t simply an argument about who gets Briseis.
Honour and status matter enormously in the world of The Iliad.
The prizes awarded to warriors aren’t just possessions. They are public recognition of honour and standing.
So when Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, Achilles doesn’t experience it simply as losing something he wants.
He experiences it as an attack on his honour.
And Agamemnon’s position in the dispute is bound up with status and authority too.
He is the leader of the Greek expedition, and he isn’t prepared to be the only leader left without a prize.
Suddenly, the argument looked very different to me.
These aren’t just two powerful men wanting different things.
They both care deeply about how they are recognised and treated.
They have different perspectives on what their positions mean, what they are entitled to, and what respect looks like.
And now we have a stakeholder problem.
Projects are manifestations of things people care about#
Nobody allocates money, labour, time, expertise, attention, and reputation to an outcome that absolutely nobody values.
Projects are manifestations of things people care about.
And that means projects are emotional before the first spreadsheet ever gets created.
We make them look rational because that’s useful.
We give them objectives, schedules, budgets, resources, milestones, risks, dependencies, and governance structures.
Sometimes the spreadsheet leads us to forget that.
Underneath all projects are people.
And those people care about things.
They care about the outcome.
But they also care about their expertise being respected. Their contribution being recognised. Their authority. Their autonomy. Their reputation. Their relationships.
They care about whether they’ve been consulted.
Whether somebody kept their word.
Whether they’ve been treated fairly.
Different people will care about different combinations of those things.
And that’s why stakeholder disagreements can derail even the best-intended projects.
Not necessarily because someone is irrational.
Not necessarily because somebody is the “difficult stakeholder.”
Not necessarily because one of them is wrong.
Sometimes two people can both be behaving in ways that make complete sense from where they’re standing, and the wider system still has to absorb the consequences.
Understanding someone isn’t the same as agreeing with them#
I think that’s why I couldn’t completely agree with Achilles.
I could understand him.
From where he was standing, something deeply important had happened.
His honour had been publicly challenged by someone he was already in conflict with.
His anger made much more sense once I understood that.
But understanding someone’s position doesn’t make the consequences of their response disappear.
Achilles withdraws.
The disagreement might be between Achilles and Agamemnon, but the consequences aren’t contained to Achilles and Agamemnon.
There are a lot of other people on that beach.
That’s a very familiar project problem.
A disagreement between two people can look interpersonal right up until you discover that the rest of the project depends on those two people continuing to work together.
Then their relationship becomes part of the project environment.
And you don’t necessarily get the luxury of deciding who is right before you have to deal with what happens next.
The spreadsheet isn’t the project#
I like project-management frameworks.
I like systems.
They help us take complicated things and make them visible.
But there’s a danger in making a project look so orderly on paper that we forget what we’re actually trying to organise.
People.
People who care about things.
People with history.
People with expertise.
People with competing priorities.
People who want to be respected.
People who occasionally become furious with each other.
The plan might say that one workstream depends on another.
The org chart might tell you who has authority.
The stakeholder register might tell you who needs to be consulted.
None of those things can completely capture what happens when two critical people look at the same situation and experience it very differently.
I’m still not sure whose side I’m on in the Achilles–Agamemnon argument.
I’m not sure I need to be on a side.
What interests me more is that I can understand why both of them believe something important is at stake.
And once two critical stakeholders believe that, their disagreement doesn’t stay between them.
The wider system has to absorb the consequences.
We put projects into spreadsheets because we need somewhere to keep the plan.
But the project still happens between people.
Originally published on LinkedIn.