What it shows
A power-interest grid places stakeholders by their power (influence) over a piece of work and their interest in it. The four quadrants are manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed and monitor, with names and meanings that follow Imperial College London (2017).
The worked example is the cold brew concentrate launch at Northfield Coffee Roasters, a fictional specialty roaster, with eight stakeholder groups placed by their power and interest.
How to read it
Manage closely, top right: the owners and the head roaster, who can stop the launch and care how it goes.
Keep satisfied, top left: the company’s bank and the courier firm, powerful but not closely interested.
Keep informed, bottom right: packing staff and online customers, who care a lot but have little say.
Monitor, bottom left: the local coffee press and the packaging supplier.
The four quadrants
- Manage closely: high power, high interest. Engage them fully; this is where most of the effort goes.
- Keep satisfied: high power, low interest. Give them enough information to stay up to date.
- Keep informed: low power, high interest. Keep them informed so that no major issues arise.
- Monitor: low power, low interest. Minimal communication.
Ways to use it in teaching
Give students a case and ask them to place its stakeholders, then defend the placements that sit near a split.
Discuss how a stakeholder can move between quadrants as a project runs: online customers, say, moving toward manage closely if the launch changes their subscription.
The grid is often called Mendelow’s matrix, and many reference lists cite “Mendelow (1991)” with the Second International Conference on Information Systems as its source. That conference met in 1981, and the Mendelow (1981) paper in its proceedings sets stakeholder power against the dynamism of the environment, not interest; later authors credit the power-interest form to him (Botten 2006, as cited in “Stakeholder analysis”, n.d.). Have students trace the citation and discuss how a model changes as textbooks retell it.
Put the grid beside Tuckman’s stages, which follows the project team running the same launch. The owners and the head roaster sit in manage closely here. How would the team’s storming over a 6-week or a 12-week schedule look to them, and what should the team’s lead tell them?
Sources
- Imperial College London. (2017, June 21). Stakeholder management [Staff development guide]. https://web.archive.org/web/20220818112239/https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/staff-development/public/impex/Stakeholder-management-21jun17.pdf
- Mendelow, A. L. (1981). Environmental scanning: The impact of the stakeholder concept. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Information Systems (Paper 20). Association for Information Systems. https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis1981/20
- Stakeholder analysis. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved October 19, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis
