The Groups That Aren’t Groups
This is a deep-dive article in a series on structured decision making, where I work through a real, publicly discussed case — Mallorca’s tourism debate — using my Strategic Clarity framework: Frame, Map, Imagine, Design, Decide, Commit. It sits between Articles 4 and 5 and looks at a word every team uses in decision making in organizations: stakeholders. Teams often say it without first agreeing who exactly is meant, and which interests, concerns and needs of each group matter for the project. Everyone then carries a slightly different mental model of the same word, and the team can talk past each other while believing it agrees. Using Mallorca’s tourism debate, I look at what changes when “the residents” or “the rental operators” turn out not to be one group. Methodology notes and context at the end.
In Article 4, the third variant of one dimension added a binding hearing and co-decision step, and two of the three strategy families contain it. That step presupposes that someone has said who “the people affected” are. Article 2 promised the diversity inside its groups as “its own later article”. This is that article, and it starts with the word itself.
In decision making in organizations, “stakeholders” is one of the most used and least defined words. A team agrees to “involve the stakeholders”, and the agreement feels complete. Later, when options are assessed for how well they fit the groups involved and whether they still hold if those groups’ positions shift, the numbers rest on whatever each person had in mind.
The word, as a morphological box
Each row below is a label I used in this series. Each column is a reading that a reasonable person could mean by it. The box is an example to make a point, not a complete list of the readings a label can have.
| The label | Reading 1 | Reading 2 | Reading 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| “The residents” | Everyone with a registered address on the island | Households with little contact to tourism | Households squeezed by rent and housing costs |
| “The rental operators” | Booking platforms | Professional operators and agencies | Private owners renting out a home |
| “The administration” | The Balearic government | The island council | The city council of Palma |
| “The citizen groups” | The large protest platform of nearly 100 organizations | Neighborhood and single-issue groups | Individual citizens, organized or not |
| “The environment” | Water and aquifers | Coast and seagrass meadows | Soil and land |
The readings differ in kind from row to row: by group, by unit, by level, by resource. What they share is that each is a legitimate answer to “who exactly?”, and the label alone does not say which one is meant. The number of possible versions of this list is the number of readings raised to the power of the number of rows: with three readings and five rows, 3⁵ = 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 243. Every additional label triples it. Nobody holds that many in mind, so each person silently picks one. Two people on a team can both say “the stakeholders” and mean different lists. Other labels and other readings are possible; the box shows the mechanism, not the full list.
One vehicle, several readings
A parked motorhome in Palma shows what that looks like. In February 2023, Mallorca Magazin described people living in motorhomes because they could no longer afford rent. The same vehicle type is also a holiday product: the magazine reported in April 2023 that motorhomes were being offered as holiday accommodation on rental portals. According to the Majorca Daily Bulletin, Mallorca had had no campsite worth the name for about 25 years (January 2025), so holidaymakers traveling in a motorhome have had few places where they may stay overnight; a small, regulated motorhome area with 21 pitches opened in Son Serra de Marina at the end of July 2025. Neighbors, in turn, worried about the spread of such vehicles in their district (Mallorca Magazin, January 2025). On 3 August 2026, Inselradio reported that the city wants to dissolve the motorhome settlement at the Son Hugo pool. Two days later, Mallorca Magazin reported that the city does not plan an eviction for now, but will fence the lot, close it at night and later admit only users of the sports facility. The same report describes about 200 people living there permanently in 105 vehicles.
I make no judgment on the city’s plan; I have not studied it. The point is narrower. A rule about “motorhomes” addresses an object, while the people behind it are a resident priced out of housing, a holidaymaker without a legal pitch and a neighbor. “The residents” alone already covers two of them, “the visitors” the third.
What goes wrong later
A map can live with this. An assessment cannot. When options are assessed for how well they fit the groups and whether they hold if the groups’ positions shift, each entry becomes a number, and three things happen that the numbers do not show.
- Averaging. A middle score for “the residents” can mean “moderately good for everyone” or “very good for half of them and very bad for the other half”. The number is the same, the situation is the opposite.
- Different readers. Two assessors with different cells in mind score the same option differently, and the difference is blamed on the option.
- Shifting positions. Whether an option holds depends on which part of a group moves. If “the rental operators” is one entry, a shift in one part either looks like the whole group moving or does not show at all.
These are risks that follow from how such assessments are built. They are not findings from this case, because no option has been assessed yet.
Three agreements before mapping
- Name the unit: organizations, roles, individuals or interests. In my own map, one row reads “holiday landlords and platform economy”. It covers an international booking platform and an islander who rents out a second flat.
- Name the property: affected, able to decide, or able to speak. The environment is the clearest case: affected, unable to speak for itself, and named on the map as unrepresented, which makes it a known gap, not a blind spot.
- Split a group only if its parts would rate at least one option differently. A group that passes no such test stays one entry. The simplification was right for drawing the map, and its cost appears only when the entry is used to seat people or to score options.
The result belongs in the entry itself, so that the next reader does not have to guess. The same applies to decision making in organizations of any kind: “the customers”, “the regional offices”, “IT”. My Mallorca examples come from press reports, not from conversations with the people concerned. Whether a split matters for a given option can only be established with them.
What this hands on
Article 5 holds the three families against the goals and scenarios. This article changes nothing in the causal mapping and evaluates no option. It adds one precondition: before the effect of an option on “the residents” or “the rental operators” is weighed, it needs to be clear which residents, which operators,
and in which role.
Sources: Mallorca Magazin, 1 February 2023, 28 April 2023, 17 January 2025, 26 July 2026 and 5 August 2026; Majorca Daily Bulletin, 21 January 2025 (updated 1 August 2025) and 1 August 2025; Inselradio, 25 January 2026 and 3 August 2026; Tourinews, 12 February 2026.
A note on this series: This article is a methodological illustration of my Strategic Clarity framework using Mallorca as a case study — not an evaluation of specific political decisions or actors. This case is offered as a discussion prompt and a working example, not as a complete or authoritative account — Mallorca’s tourism system has more dimensions, affected groups, and open questions than any single analysis, however careful, can fully capture. The groups and their interests come from an internal test run of my own Strategic Clarity software, applied to Mallorca’s tourism debate as a demonstration case; the map’s interest profiles were plausibility assessments, not surveys. The readings in the box are illustrations of how a label can be understood, not a complete or ranked list, and they make no claim about how the groups are actually composed. Some come from my own map (for example, households with little contact to tourism, and platforms and landlords sharing one row), some from press reports (for example, the protest platform of nearly 100 organizations, Mallorca Magazin, 26 July 2026), and the rest are my own constructions. The examples are my own reading of press reports published between February 2023 and August 2026, quoted as of the dates given. I did not speak with anyone mentioned, and quotes originally in Spanish or German are my translations. There is no real client behind this analysis, and the “consortium” referenced in this analysis is an assumed, illustrative construct built for testing purposes, not a documented position of any real institution. Parts of the analysis are produced with the support of AI agents and reviewed editorially before publication. My focus remains the wellbeing of the island and all who inhabit it — human and ecological alike — not party politics.
