Tales of Risk: 10 – Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty: The peril of excluding key stakeholders in planning

The tales we cherish often hold a mirror to our greatest organisational flaws. The classic story of Sleeping Beauty often focuses on the curse and the prince, but its true root cause lies in a significant governance oversight: the deliberate exclusion of a crucial individual – the uninvited fairy, Maleficent – from the christening celebration. This single act of exclusion, a failure in stakeholder mapping and engagement, leads directly to a devastating, unforeseen consequence that impacts the entire kingdom for a century.

At Imergo, we champion the power of storytelling to embed essential risk literacy and foster organisational cultures that are not only efficient and high-performing but also profoundly inclusive. Let’s explore a classic fairy tale that provides a stark warning about the long-term, systemic dangers of ignoring an essential voice.

The myth of Sleeping Beauty: The Uninvited Stakeholder

The King and Queen, in their joy over the birth of Princess Aurora, hosted a grand christening. They invited every good fairy in the kingdom to bless the child, ensuring the Princess had every possible advantage. However, due to a combination of negligence and perhaps an outdated contact list, the most powerful and, crucially, the most easily offended fairy, Maleficent, was left off the guest list. When she arrived uninvited, her fury over the slight was immediate and absolute. Her curse—that the princess would prick her finger and fall into a death-like sleep—was not just an act of pure malice; it was the direct, disproportionate consequence of being deliberately excluded and disrespected. The kingdom paid the price for this singular planning failure.

The Risk Lesson: The critical cost of exclusion

This compelling fable powerfully underscores the critical risk associated with excluding pertinent individuals or stakeholders from the planning, decision-making and risk assessment processes. When key voices are omitted, an organisation creates unnecessary vulnerabilities and risks:

• Blind spots in risk assessment: The King’s planning team focused only on the benefits bestowed by the invited fairies, creating a fatal governance blind spot by failing to acknowledge a key entity whose potential negative impact (the curse) was greater than the collective positive impact of the others. In business, this manifests when projects are planned without engaging key departments (missing operational risks), or by management alone (missing ground-level compliance challenges). Excluding diverse perspectives, specialised knowledge, or critical functional leaders means you are missing crucial insights that only those stakeholders possess, leading to risks that remain invisible until it’s too late.

• Resistance and sabotage (The Maleficent effect): Those who feel deliberately overlooked or excluded from decisions that affect them rarely remain passive. Maleficent’s curse was a vengeful, active form of stakeholder resistance. In the corporate world, this can range from passive non-cooperation and foot-dragging on implementation to active sabotage or the leaking of damaging information. If a key department, customer segment, or regulatory body is excluded from the initial design phase, they may feel disenfranchised and actively undermine the initiative, transforming a solvable problem into a systemic failure.

• Unforeseen, systemic consequences: The consequence of the King’s oversight was not minor; it was a century-long, kingdom-wide systemic failure. Decisions made in a vacuum, lacking a full understanding of the stakeholder landscape, are prone to having devastating, unforeseen consequences. An organisation that launches a new IT system without engaging the end-users risks a complete lack of adoption, a failure that isn’t technical but governance-based. Ignoring the “fairies” in your planning process can lead to a long, costly “sleep” for your organisation through project failure, operational halt, or reputational damage.

• Erosion of trust and talent: The act of exclusion, whether intentional or accidental, signals a lack of respect and value. This erodes internal and external trust, leading to resentment, reduced morale, and hindering future collaboration. Talented individuals who feel their input is consistently ignored will eventually disengage or leave. Similarly, external stakeholders who are overlooked become sceptical, making future negotiations, compliance, or crisis management significantly more difficult.

Beyond the Spindle: Cultivating inclusive governance

The tale of Sleeping Beauty is a potent reminder that an organisation’s most catastrophic vulnerabilities often originate not from external threats, but from internal failures of inclusion and engagement. To prevent the Maleficent Effect and build a truly resilient organisation, leaders must:

• Implement formal stakeholder mapping: Actively identify all individuals and groups (internal and external) who have an interest in or can influence a project’s success or failure. Critically assess the power, interest, and potential impact of even the most peripheral or dissenting voices.
• Establish a culture of proactive engagement: Don’t wait for the “fairies” to show up uninvited. Create formal and informal channels to solicit input from all key stakeholders early and often in the decision-making cycle, ensuring their contributions are demonstrably valued.
• Champion dissenting voices: Recognise that the most valuable voice is often the one that provides the most uncomfortable truth. Actively seek out and protect those who offer dissenting opinions, as these individuals often possess the critical knowledge needed to identify major risk blind spots.
• Conduct “What-If-We-Failed-To-Ask” reviews: Before launching a major initiative, conduct a formal risk review focused specifically on exclusion: “Who did we not invite to the christening, and what is their worst-case potential reaction?”

By internalising the lessons from Sleeping Beauty, organisations can ensure that their decisions are built on a foundation of inclusive insight, preventing a momentary oversight from resulting in a long-term strategic paralysis.