http://www.bplusd.org Business + Design Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:35:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/03/13/web-strategy-summit-may-4-5-in-calgary/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/03/06/8020-influence/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/03/05/fractal-decisions/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/02/25/t-shaped-influence/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/02/18/fivewhos/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/02/13/the-how-to-influence-worksheet-draft/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/02/04/social-influence/ 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, ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/02/03/business-strategy-management-track-at-ia-summit/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/01/29/cialdinis-six-principles-of-influence-the-honeycomb-edition/ 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 ... http://www.bplusd.org/2009/01/28/iterative-influence/