A problem can look simple because the first telling includes only the speaker and one visible obstacle. In practice, different people may experience the difficulty, shape it, make decisions about it, or bear the cost of a proposed change. Map Stakeholders asks whose perspective is already inside the frame and whose is missing. It is a lightweight map, not an organizational chart.
Start with roles rather than blame. Who encounters the problem? Who decides? Who controls a resource or rule? Who is affected even though they are absent from the conversation? A person can hold several roles, and an important group may have no formal authority. The map is provisional: “possibly affected” is safer than inventing someone’s motives. It can also reveal that the person presented as the cause has little power over the process.
Consider “The developers are delaying our release.” A map might include developers implementing changes, a product owner changing requirements, reviewers who approve releases, support staff who handle defects, and customers waiting for a feature. The next question may not be “How do we make developers work faster?” but “Where does work wait, and who can change that handoff?” The map has widened the frame without deciding who is at fault.
In a family, “Dad refuses help with appointments” might involve Dad, relatives offering help, a clinic with limited booking times, and whoever handles transport. A useful reframe could ask whether the offered kind of help matches what Dad wants or whether scheduling itself is the obstacle. This does not deny his agency; it avoids reducing a multi-person situation to stubbornness.
For a product, “Users ignore the accessibility settings” may omit people who need those settings, the team choosing defaults, the staff writing help content, and the device platform that exposes controls. Mapping those roles could shift attention from “users fail to find the feature” to “the default experience may need to work before anyone searches for a setting.”
Signals and limits
Reach for this pattern when a sentence repeatedly says “they,” when decisions happen elsewhere, or when a proposed fix would change life for people who have not been consulted. It is particularly useful before interpreting an interpersonal conflict or a cross-team process. The common mistake is to turn the map into an accusation list or to treat a hypothesized absent perspective as known. Ask affected people where possible.
Locate the Problem examines where agency and causation sit in the wording; this pattern first makes the cast visible. Find Hidden Influences looks beyond the cast for incentives or conditions. A stakeholder map can help both, but it is not itself a causal explanation.
Related patterns
Locate the Problem · Find Hidden Influences
Source
Inspired by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg's What's Your Problem? This is an original Patternverse procedure, not reproduced book text or an official implementation.