Organizations increasingly invite stakeholder input, yet engagement alone does not explain whether external voice becomes strategically consequential. This article develops an original non-empirical capability model that conceptualizes stakeholder engagement as potential sensing infrastructure rather than as sensing itself. Integrating scholarship on stakeholder engagement and dialogue, organizational attention, sensemaking, learning, adaptation, and managerial microfoundations, the analysis separates four transformations: external voice must become organizationally noticeable, noticed information must be interpreted and integrated, stakeholder knowledge must become response-relevant, and response must be mobilized under organizational and contextual constraints. The proposed stakeholder-sensing capability therefore resides not in the volume of engagement but in the organization’s capacity to preserve, prioritize, interpret, connect, and revisit heterogeneous stakeholder signals without treating them as automatically accurate, representative, or actionable. The model further makes filtering endogenous: stakeholder status, attention structures, executive cognition, internal conduits, and interpretive frames can amplify some signals while attenuating or distorting others. Adaptive response is consequently treated as a conditional endpoint rather than an inevitable or inherently successful outcome. The article contributes by linking stakeholder theory to attention-based and organizational-learning perspectives while preserving level-of-analysis, temporal, power, and measurement boundaries. It also identifies temporal recursion and cross-level enactment as central research challenges. The integrated architecture remains proposed rather than empirically validated, universally applicable, ethically sufficient, or performance enhancing.
