Bob Cialdini is a social psychologist at University of Arizona who has studied influence and persuasion since the 1970s (maybe earlier?). His landmark book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion distilled 20 years of academic research into six principles of influence.  I’ve taken those and put them into an influence honeycomb diagram.   Reciprocity If you [...]

Influence doesn’t happen overnight, especially the ability to affect big decisions. Instead, influence is iterative—each successful influence opportunity builds on the last. We want to make that cycle an upward spiral that lets us make bigger and better impacts on the decisions made in the organizations we work with. I’m playing around with what that [...]

So, for what I’m working on right now, influence is the ability to affect others’ beliefs and behavior without authority. Day to day, that boils down to decisions – how can we affect other people’s choices? That’s where influence is measured most – if people make the decisions we want them to make. That might [...]

I’ve been thinking about influence as the key skill for designers, user experience pros, and innovators for a few years now. Came up today with the above visual to look at what we need to consider about someone we want to influence. We can observe external inputs and outputs of action, conversations, and connections to [...]