Core insight: decisions fail less because of bad analysis than because the wrong people weren’t turned into allies before the call. The Stakeholder Heatmap is a one‑page ritual you can run in 10–20 minutes that turns fuzzy politics into actionable patterns. This episode gives a compact method: (1) Map: pick the decision, list 6–12 stakeholders, and locate them on an Influence×Interest grid with one‑line motivations; (2) Score: add two quick lenses—failure vector (what they break) and swap cost (how costly they are to replace)—so you prioritize interventions; (3) Act: three concise scripts (Align, Neutralize, Escalate) plus exact AI prompts to draft tailored outreach and a 48‑hour pilot to test one relationship. Finish with one action: build a Heatmap for an imminent decision and run the Align script on the top two people this week. CTA: subscribe. Stay agentic.