Gene Smith, my partner at nForm, has put together a fantastic program for our upcoming Web Strategy Summit. With a focus on driving business value, the Web Strategy Summit offers the kind of ideas, stories, and tools to make the most of your web investment. We’ve got amazing folks like Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), Christina Wodtke [...]

So, like I wrote about yesterday, decisions are fractal – big decisions are often composed of a lot of smaller decisions. But there’s another kind of big decision that we need to think about: decisions are big when they have a big impact, not just when they take a lot of resources or involve a [...]

When we talk about influencing decisions, it’s important to recognize that many decisions hinge on a whole bunch of other smaller decisions. Decisions are often fractal – we see decisions within decisions within decisions. And that helps us sort out what kind of decisions we need to focus on for influencing outcomes. Matching the level [...]

The foundation of influence is your network of relationships in the organization. Effective influence  is best when your relationships are both focused and wide. Wide influence covers a larger group at a less personal level. While you have relationships and reputation in that group, you may not have a known track record or tight connections. [...]

Time Deficit Version: For influencing organizations, you can ask “Five Whos” to get to key decision makers. Many readers will be familiar with the 5 Whys approach to getting to root causes. Formalized by Toyota in the 1970s as part of the Toyota Production System and popularized by Six Sigma, 5 Whys looks for the [...]

Influence theory and models won’t help you reach your design goals if you can’t put them into practice. So I’ve boiled down the influence gameplan into a 1 page worksheet (pdf) to get a sense of how to tackle things in the real world. This sheet is about influencing outcomes inside an organization (not influencing consumers to [...]

Last year, on the last evening of the 2008 IA Summit in Miami, I invited myself onto Samantha Bailey’s 2009 committee with the stated intention of creating a Business & Strategy track for 2009. Mags Hanley popped over, nominated herself co-chair, and added management to the roster. And with that, the Business Strategy & Management [...]

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 [...]

These are my links for December 22nd from 10:50 to 10:50: 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year | FlowingData – Beautiful data visualization roundup.