NR-708 Week 6 Power Mapping and Feasibility: How to Write It

What NR-708 Week 6 asks for

Who is actually in the room when a community health decision gets made? A coalition trying to bring a mobile dental unit into three rural school districts spent nine months in church basements with a table full of the obviously interested: two health center directors, a county health officer, a parent group, a dental hygienist who had driven the idea from the start. The proposal died at a school board meeting nobody from the coalition attended, over an objection nobody had anticipated, raised by a facilities director worried about who would be liable for a vehicle parked on district property overnight. The coalition had mapped everyone who cared about children's teeth. It had not mapped anyone who could say no for reasons unrelated to teeth.

That is the analytic gap this stage closes. Stakeholder analysis done badly is a list of everyone affected, which is comforting and useless. Done properly it is a claim about power: who holds a formal veto, who holds an informal one, whose support is necessary versus merely helpful, and who is currently indifferent but could be activated by either side. The distinction between a stakeholder's stated position and their underlying interest does most of the work, because positions are what people announce and interests are what they will actually trade on. A department that opposes a change because of workload will often support the same change with a staffing adjustment attached, and the paper that finds that is the paper that changes something.

Expect the deliverable to be an analysis of the actors around your issue, sometimes with a required matrix or map, often paired with a feasibility judgment. Where a visual is permitted, use it, but the analysis must live in the prose. A matrix with names in quadrants and no interpretation is a graphic organizer, and rubrics reward the sentences that say what the pattern means and what follows from it.

Two disciplines protect the writing here. First, characterize organizations by their institutional interests rather than by the character of the individuals inside them; a payer resisting a coverage expansion has an interest, not a moral failing, and papers written the other way lose credibility with exactly the readers who matter. Second, keep individuals unnamed. Describe a role, a body and a documented position rather than a person, and where you rely on something a colleague said, treat it as background you cannot cite rather than as evidence.

The NR-708 Week 6 method, step by step

Seven moves for turning a stakeholder list into a feasibility argument.

1. Write the decision before you write the actors

   Name the specific decision that has to be made, by whom, and by when. Stakeholder maps drift because the question is vague; a map built around a named decision sorts itself quickly.

2. List everyone who can stop it, not everyone who cares

   Formal authority, budget control, facility control, contract signature, union agreement, accreditation exposure and regulatory sign-off all confer stopping power. Start there, then add the people affected, and keep the two lists visibly distinct.

3. Score interest and influence separately

   High influence and low interest is the group that decides your outcome by whether they wake up. High interest and low influence is where the moral case usually lives and where organizing matters. Say which quadrant each actor occupies and why.

4. Separate stated position from underlying interest for each actor

   Write two columns in your notes. What have they said publicly, and what do they need to protect. The gap between the two is where a workable proposal is usually found.

5. Name the losers explicitly

   Somebody loses budget, workload, autonomy, revenue or standing if your proposal succeeds. A feasibility analysis that cannot identify the loser has not located the opposition and will be surprised by it later.

6. Include the community as an actor with standing, not as a beneficiary

   Residents, patients and community organizations are parties with interests and often with real influence through elected bodies and public comment. Writing them only as the population to be helped is both an analytic error and an ethical one.

7. End with a feasibility judgment that carries a condition

   Not feasible or not feasible. Instead: feasible within this cycle if the facilities objection is resolved in advance and one of the two payers signals support, and not feasible otherwise. Conditional judgments are checkable, and checkable is what earns the analysis row.

A layout and word budget for a stakeholder and feasibility analysis

Our frame for a political feasibility paper, sized for roughly 1,200 to 1,500 words plus any permitted matrix. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree.

Evidence craft for political analysis

Positions belong in the record, not in your recollection. Testimony, published statements, comment letters, board minutes and association policy documents are all citable, and building your account of who supports what from those sources makes the analysis verifiable. Where an actor has taken no public position, say so rather than inferring one.

Name organizations, not people. Analyze a state hospital association, a facilities department, a payer's coverage committee. Naming individuals in a course paper adds risk and no analytic value, and role-level description travels better because roles persist while people rotate.

Read interests structurally. Ask what each actor is accountable for, what they are measured on, and what their budget cycle looks like. A department that will absorb a new task without a matching resource has a predictable interest regardless of anyone's goodwill, and stating it that way is analysis rather than accusation.

Cite the coalition literature rather than improvising the method. Stakeholder analysis, power mapping and advocacy coalition frameworks are published methods with authors. Naming the one you used and applying its categories consistently earns the theoretical row and stops the section from reading as intuition.

Distinguish what you know from what you suspect. Political analysis attracts speculation. Mark inference as inference, keep it proportionate, and where a conclusion depends on an unverified assumption about an actor's motive, say which assumption it depends on so a reader can weigh the whole argument accordingly.

Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory

• A list where an analysis was asked for. Twelve stakeholders named with a sentence each and no pattern identified is inventory, not evaluation.
• Every actor described as supportive. Maps with no opposition on them signal that the analysis stopped at the people who already agree.
• Moral characterization of institutions. Describing an organization as uncaring replaces the interest analysis that would have made the paper useful.
• The matrix carrying the argument. A four-quadrant graphic with no interpretive prose leaves the analysis rows unearned.
• Unconditional feasibility claims. This is feasible, stated flatly, cannot be checked and cannot be acted on. Conditions make it both.

Before you submit

• A specific decision, body and timetable appear in the first paragraph
• Actors who can block are distinguished from actors who are merely affected
• Interest and influence are assessed separately with reasons given
• At least one stated position is separated from the interest beneath it
• The party that loses if you succeed is named and what they lose is specified
• Community members appear as actors with a channel, not only as beneficiaries
• Public records support the positions you attribute to organizations
• The feasibility judgment carries explicit conditions

Questions students ask about this stage

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