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 others. From that, we have to infer the interests, motivations, attitudes, and priorities that emerge from the person’s core beliefs. Knowing that “I” map, we are able to better understand how to approach the person to influence a decision.

UPDATE:

Niti Bhan points out the role of values along with beliefs in shaping someone’s internal map (thanks Niti!).  Jerome Rykborst asks why we don’t just ask, and so points out that I didn’t talk about *who* we are influencing here. This isn’t a model for influencing users, it’s a model for influencing business decision makers. We have a lot of great tools for working with users, and we can adapt many of them to working with business people (who are just another set of users, if you squint a little). When I say that influence is the key skill for people creating new products and services, I mean influencing clients, stakeholders, and decision makers. Great design lives or dies inside the organization long before it reaches the market, and influence is key to whether design makes a difference or if it gets sidelined. And to answer Jerome’s question, sometimes directly asking a stubborn VP of Marketing why he hates your project will not help your cause ;-)

Finally, Austin Govella likes the simplicity of the diagram, but asks how we infer internal states. That’s the $64 question, and the answer is that we can infer internal states from external, observable things like Actions, Conversations, & Connections (with other people). I could add to that list things like Environment (what someone surrounds themselves with) and Culture…but there’s getting to be too much going on already :)

Thanks to all for reading and your thoughtful comments.

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