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 [...]

Groups and individuals are the yin and yang of influence. To convince a group often means convincing individuals. And convincing individuals often means convincing a group. Knowing who to focus on, and in what setting is the key question we have to answer when we want to affect a decision. Getting a group to agree [...]

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 [...]