Randal Evans | randalevans.com/writing
In my early years working independently, after leaving a large international law firm, I started to notice one particular word showing up everywhere. It surfaced in corporate filings, board presentations, fundraising campaigns, and funding requirements; always a kind of catch-all shorthand that seemed to signal seriousness and inclusion without ever quite saying who anyone was.
Then a colleague I deeply respected, someone whose work was grounded in dialogue and emergent practices, announced a rebrand of her firm around “stakeholder engagement.” I remember reading the email and feeling an unexpected jolt of confusion and disappointment. Not in her, but in the word itself. Why did a term that sounded so reasonable feel so out of step with the kind of work she was actually doing?
Since then, stakeholder has quietly joined a small list of managerial terms I try not to use. When clients or partners reach for it, I rarely push back directly. Instead, I ask a simple question: When you say stakeholders, who do you actually have in mind?
The answers are almost always more interesting—and more honest—than the label: a specific neighborhood, a staff team that feels sidelined, donors anxious about change, a community that has never been invited into the room. The word collapses all of those into a single, neutral category. The conversation that follows begins to pull them back apart.
In other cases, this simple question (who, exactly, do you have in mind) surfaces something revealing: that this inclusive-sounding catch-all was obscuring a lack of clarity about purpose and direction, a way of postponing critical questions that are, in fact, essential for success.
This article is an attempt to explain why this clarity matters. Why stakeholder engagement so often produces the appearance of inclusion without the reality. And what we might do instead.
How a Technical Term Became Institutional Furniture
Understanding where the word came from helps explain why it now lets us feel more accountable than we actually are.
The modern business sense of stakeholder is more recent than people might realize. It dates to a 1963 Stanford Research Institute memo that introduced the term to describe groups without whose support an organization would cease to exist. The framing was strategic and practical: knowing who had a stake in your organization was a planning tool, not a values statement.
The term remained largely inside management theory until R. Edward Freeman’s 1984 book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach systematized it into a full ethical and strategic framework, defining stakeholders as any group or individual who can affect or is affected by an organization’s objectives.
Freeman’s intent was genuinely expansive. He questioned the shareholder‑only story of corporate purpose, which was often treated as something of a legal doctrine, even where the law itself was more permissive. And his stakeholder language helped surface obligations that many boards were already free to consider.
What happened next followed a familiar institutional pattern. The term migrated from management theory into sustainability practice, corporate governance, and eventually into the common vocabulary of nonprofits, foundations, government agencies, and civic initiatives.
The 2019 Business Roundtable statement, signed by nearly two hundred major U.S. CEOs and framed as a commitment to serve all stakeholders rather than shareholders alone, marked the peak of the term’s institutional prestige. By then it had traveled so far from its origins that it could be invoked simultaneously by Fortune 500 executives, community organizers, federal program officers, and ESG analysts, each using it to mean something somewhat different. In some rooms that vagueness was simply unexamined; in others it was quietly useful, a way to sound more accountable without having to be more specific.
When a frame becomes a story
This is worth understanding, not to dismiss what the term was trying to do, but to see clearly how a tool designed to expand accountability can, through the alchemy of institutional adoption, become a way of appearing accountable without doing the harder work the word was meant to require.
In this light, it is not surprising that “shareholder versus stakeholder” has often functioned less as a clear legal or ethical boundary and more as a flexible story, one that can justify almost any distribution of attention so long as the right words appear in the charter or the slide deck.
Something similar is now happening around ESG: for many organizations it has become a spacious container, large enough to hold sincere commitments and careful obfuscation at the same time, which makes it harder to tell what, if anything, has actually changed.
What the Word Hides
The most pointed critique of stakeholder is not that it’s wrong. It’s that it has become what plain-language advocates call a non-word: a term so broadly applied that it no longer tells you anything specific.
In the same way that ‘shareholder versus stakeholder’ or ‘ESG’ can function as roomy stories that seem to settle debates without resolving the underlying questions, stakeholder has become a label that smooths over the very distinctions a serious process most needs to see.
The UK Local Government Association, in its plain English guidance for public bodies, lists stakeholder among the jargon terms it discourages, advising organizations to name specific groups instead. Contemporary researchers have gone further, noting that the term is now routinely applied to cover audiences, communities, citizens, employees, policymakers, funders, research participants, and more, sometimes in the same sentence.
That breadth is the problem. Behind every ‘stakeholder’ are specific people. Before I use the word, I now try to ask—Who, specifically, am I talking about? In what capacity are they here? What is their history with the others in the room? What kind of voice do they actually have: advisory, consultative, co-governing? At what stage are we inviting them in? The label makes those choices invisible by flattening everyone into a single, neutral category.
The neutrality is itself a form of distortion. A federal agency, a community foundation, a neighborhood association with a contested history with one of the project partners, and families who will be directly affected by what gets built are not equivalent parties, and treating them as entries on a common map obscures the differences in their power, their exposure to risk, and their legitimate claim on the process.
The etymological root of the word (a stake, something wagered, something at risk) points toward this, though it rarely surfaces in contemporary use. The people who carry the most genuine stake in a decision are frequently not the ones whose vocabulary shapes the process.
There is also a subtler dynamic worth naming. Institutional language doesn’t just describe reality. It shapes what we look for and what we fail to see. When “stakeholder engagement” becomes the phrase for what an organization does with the people outside its walls, it tends to import a set of process assumptions along with it: categories get defined internally, plans get shaped by the people already in the room, and the engagement that follows is more often consultation than genuine co-creation. The word sounds inclusive. The process it describes frequently is not.
When the Word Stopped Working
I saw this collision most clearly in a regional planning process a few years ago.
(The following description, in actuality, draws from several related projects. The composite is not a single initiative, but the dynamics it describes are real, and so is the collision at its center.)
The original idea for this project, a regional technology training center, grew organically from within the community. It began taking shape during a facilitated strategy session with a key subcommittee of the community council. The idea was to address the community’s persistently high unemployment, connect residents to jobs in the surrounding technology corridors, address the need for workforce pipelines in the region, and eventually serve as a national model for similar efforts in other rural and tribal communities.
This multifaceted vision attracted genuine interest from nearly every sector at once. Federal economic development agencies. State workforce programs. Several private foundations with regional focus. Employers from the surrounding tech industry who were struggling to find qualified workers and willing to say so publicly. A consortium of universities, community colleges, and vo‑tech programs. And at the center of it, the Tribe on whose land the facility would be built, a community that had been navigating relationships with all of these entities, in various forms, for generations.
The community secured seed grants from two federal agencies, supplemented with the Tribe’s own funds, for the formal planning process. The lead federal agency convened the first formal planning meeting about eight months in, once the initial feasibility work was done and the funding picture had become clearer. The room held perhaps twenty people. The agenda was structured and professional. The agency’s program officer, experienced, well‑prepared, clearly committed to the project’s success, opened by saying that the first order of business was to establish a shared stakeholder map.
It was a familiar way to begin. Everyone in the room understood the word. The whiteboards filled quickly: the Tribe and its leadership. Surrounding municipalities. Employers. Educational institutions. State agencies. Community members. Future trainees. Regional workforce boards. Other tribes in the region and nationally.
Midway through the exercise, one of the Tribal council representatives set down his marker.
He didn’t object to the list. What he said, measured and precise, was something closer to this: that the community he represented did not think of itself as one entry among many on a map of interested parties. That the relationships being mapped out in this exercise—between the Tribe and the federal government, between the Tribe and the surrounding municipalities, between the Tribe and the employers who had been recruiting from their community for years, between the Tribe and the educational institutions whose programs had not historically served their members well—were not equivalent relationships, and the word being used was making them all appear equivalent.
And then he continued, going a bit deeper.
The community, he explained, had its own word for the kind of conversation this project actually required. A very specific (and special) term describing a process of talking things out. Not a meeting, not a negotiation, not really even a decision‑making process. Rather, it described something that was simultaneously more focused and more open, a structured way of ensuring that every voice in the circle was genuinely heard, that no single perspective, including the most powerful one in the room, could dominate the outcome, and that what emerged was real consensus rather than the managed appearance of it. These processes did not begin with a map of categories. They began with relationships, with history, with an honest accounting of what each party needed and what each could genuinely offer. They took longer. They were also less likely to produce a plan that fell apart eighteen months into implementation because the people it most affected had never been genuinely inside it.
That framework, he said, existed. It was available. It was, in fact, what this project needed.
The program officer listened carefully. She acknowledged the point. Then she did what her role almost required her to do: she brought the conversation back inside the frame she had been given.
She explained, with the practiced patience of someone who had repeated this many times, that the framework they were working within—the federal program guidelines that structured the grant and the process requirements attached to it—used this language throughout. The funding, she noted, came embedded in a programmatic design developed for very different contexts, with its own definitions, measurement requirements, and process assumptions, administered by a national organization that applied them uniformly across grantees. She pointed out that every community she worked with had “its own way” of talking things out, and that the stakeholder-mapping process the group was now doing was, in effect, a way of honoring these traditions in a form that would satisfy the reporting and compliance requirements.
The word stakeholder was one thread in that larger fabric, and in that moment it functioned as a kind of trump card: the way to acknowledge the Tribe’s own process while gently setting it aside.
She was not wrong about any of this, in the narrow sense. She was working with the vocabulary her institution had given her, inside a framework designed elsewhere for a different context. That is almost always how it goes.
What happened next was not a breakdown. The meeting continued. Notes were taken. Action items were assigned. The planning process moved forward in the way such processes usually do.
But something had been named that didn’t un‑name itself. The relationships that actually needed to be identified and discussed—who had authority over what decisions, whose planning traditions would govern the process design, what it meant for the surrounding municipalities to participate in a project sited on sovereign land, how the federal accountability framework would interact with the Tribe’s own governance structures—these were relationships the stakeholder map was trying to arrange into tidy parallel rows that didn’t really fit this particular context.
The word stakeholder, and the process it represented, made the room feel organized. It had also made certain questions harder to ask. And, in the months that followed, this made it easier for the project to drift back toward the safer, more familiar patterns that had already failed this community many times before.
How Humans Actually Build Things Together
The Tribal council representative was pointing toward something that research in cognitive development and organizational behavior has been documenting for decades, even if it rarely surfaces in planning meetings.
Michael Tomasello, whose work on human cognitive development spans thirty years, argues that what distinguishes human collaboration from every other form of animal cooperation is our capacity for shared intentionality: the ability to form genuine “we-intentions,” to coordinate perspectives, and to build meaning together rather than simply alongside one another. We don’t just pursue parallel goals in proximity. At our best, we create a shared understanding of what we are doing, and why, that none of us holds alone.
This capacity is not activated by categories. It is activated by specific relationships and genuine dialogue. The question is not whether we have a stakeholder map; it is whether the people who most carry the consequences of a decision have been inside the conversations that shaped it.
Organizational researchers in the field of dialogic practice describe the alternative as generative process—not engagement after questions have been shaped, but meaning-making in which the questions themselves emerge from genuine conversation among the people for whom the work really matters. It is less tidy. It requires more discernment about who needs to be in which conversations, at what stage, and under what conditions for genuine openness to be possible. And it produces something that a well-managed stakeholder process rarely does: shared commitment that holds when things get difficult.
What to Say Instead
In practice, I’ve found that replacing the word is less important than replacing the habit behind it. None of this requires banning a word. It requires developing the habit of asking what the word is covering.
When stakeholder appears in a planning document or a meeting agenda, the most useful response is usually a set of questions rather than substitution. Who, specifically, are we talking about? How do they describe themselves and their relationship to this work? What is their actual history with the other parties in the room? What kind of voice are we genuinely offering them—advisory, consultative, co-governing—and does that match what we have told them? Are we designing a process to gather their input, or one to build shared meaning? And perhaps most importantly: who needs to be in conversation before this conversation, to make this one genuine, and genuinely helpful?
The substitutions that follow from those questions tend to be more specific and more honest. Not “community stakeholders” but the families in this neighborhood, the staff members who have been raising this concern for two years, the partner organizations who will implement what we design. Not “stakeholder engagement” but the series of conversations that actually need to happen, named in sequence, with the right people in each room.
This is not a call for a new vocabulary. It is a call for the discipline of asking what we mean before we reach for the word that lets us avoid the question.
Living with Imperfect Words
Stakeholder will remain in circulation. In some technical and legal contexts it still serves a legitimate shorthand function. And Freeman’s original framework did at least succeed in making visible a wider set of relationships than the most reductive versions of shareholder primacy allowed, even if the theory has since been used to carry many different (and sometimes conflicting) projects. The word now carries that history, along with several decades of institutional use, and abandoning it entirely is neither possible nor especially important.
What is possible is developing enough awareness of what the word does—and what it prevents—to use it more carefully, and to notice when it is doing work that more specific language should be doing instead. To ask, when someone says stakeholders, who they actually mean. To resist the gravitational pull toward the whiteboard exercise when what the room actually needs is a different kind of conversation entirely.
Over twenty-five years as a professional advisor working across philanthropy, family enterprises, and nonprofit development, what I’ve observed is that the most consequential planning failures I’ve encountered were rarely failures of technical competence. They were failures of precision—about who was actually in the room, what kind of voice they actually had, and whether the shared commitment that seemed to exist at the end of the planning process was genuine or merely well-managed. The vocabulary available to the people in those rooms made certain questions easier to skip.
The Tribal council representative in that meeting offered a word that represented the process their community had long used. It wasn’t stakeholder engagement. And it wasn’t a harder process. It was, in some fundamental ways, a more honest one.
That distinction—between the appearance of inclusion and the conditions for genuine shared meaning—is worth the discomfort of asking better questions. It is also, I suspect, what most of us were actually seeking when we reached for the word.
Randal Evans, JD, CAP® is a philanthropic and legal counselor, strategic advisor, and Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy® based in Scottsdale, Arizona. He works with families, foundations, and mission-driven organizations on charitable planning, governance, and leadership.
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