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Players-vs-Pawns

4 min readStatus:Seedling

Players vs. Pawns

Lopp’s Players vs. Pawns framework is a classification lens for reading the human landscape in any meeting or project. Every room contains two kinds of people:

  • Players — actively engaged, with a personal stake in the outcome. They have an agenda (declared or hidden), they are tracking the discussion against their interests, and they are actively trying to shape what gets decided.
  • Pawns — passively present. They fill seats, execute instructions, and have no strategic stake in the outcome. Their presence may be obligatory, habitual, or incidental.

Both types exist in every meeting. Neither is inherently good or bad — pawns are often reliable executors, and not every meeting requires everyone to be a player. The managerial skill is in correctly identifying which is which.

Why It Matters

A skilled manager walks into a room and immediately begins reading it: who has skin in the game, who is just there, and what each player actually wants. This agenda detection is essential for:

  • Alignment meetings: Knowing who the real decision-influencers are — the players — allows the manager to address their concerns directly, rather than wasting time on those who have no stake.
  • Conflict anticipation: Players signal disagreement through behaviour (body language, silence, early exits) before they voice it. Pawns don’t signal anything meaningful.
  • Outcome prediction: If the players in a room aren’t bought in, the decision won’t hold — regardless of what was agreed. Pawn consent is cheap; player consent is what enables execution.

The Misclassification Risk

The most dangerous error is misclassifying a player as a pawn. A senior engineer who stays silent in a meeting may appear to be a pawn. If they are actually a player — with deep technical authority and a contrary view — their silence will be interpreted as assent, but their behaviour outside the meeting will undermine the decision. Lopp frames this as a common failure mode: managers read passive compliance as alignment.

Connection to Stakeholder Theory

The Players vs. Pawns distinction maps onto the academic Power-Interest Matrix (Mendelow, 1991; Eden & Ackermann, 1998): players occupy high-power or high-interest quadrants and require active management, while pawns occupy the low-power, low-interest quadrant and need only monitoring. Research by Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (1997) on stakeholder salience formalises this: stakeholders with power, legitimacy, and urgency demand attention; those lacking all three do not.

López-Fresno and Cascón-Pereira (2022) found empirically that the stated purpose of a meeting often diverges from its actual purpose — the gap is bridged only by reading who the players are and what they are actually optimising for.

Future Connections

  • DNA-Meeting — a meeting whose outcome is already decided; the Players vs. Pawns lens reveals who made the decision before the room assembled

Sources

  • Lopp, Michael (2019). Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, 3rd ed. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-484-23712-4.

    • Chapters 2 and 9: Players, Pawns, and agenda detection in meetings

  • Mitchell, Ronald K., Agle, Bradley R., and Wood, Donna J. (1997). “Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts.” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 853–886.

    • Salience model classifying stakeholders by power, legitimacy, and urgency — formal academic grounding for the Players vs. Pawns intuition

  • Eden, Colin and Ackermann, Fran (1998). Making Strategy: The Journey of Strategic Management. Sage Publications. ISBN: 978-0-761-95525-4.

    • Chapter on stakeholder mapping; origin of the Power-Interest matrix used in project and organisational analysis

  • López-Fresno, Palmira and Cascón-Pereira, Rosalía (2022). “What is the Purpose of this Meeting? The hidden meanings of the meeting announcement.” Group & Organization Management, Vol. 47, No. 6, pp. 1151–1183. DOI: 10.1177/01708406211040216.

    • Empirical study (1,946 respondents, 490 meetings) showing divergence between stated and perceived meeting purposes — directly supports the need for agenda detection

  • Hochwarter, Wayne A., Rosen, Christopher C., Jordan, Samantha L., Ferris, Gerald R., Ejaz, Aqsa, and Maher, Liam P. (2020). “Perceptions of Organizational Politics Research: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal of Management, Vol. 46, No. 6, pp. 879–907. DOI: 10.1177/0149206319898506.

    • Review of 30+ years of organizational politics research; contextualises why recognising political actors (players) in meetings is a core managerial competence

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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