Chapter 7 – Influencing for results

Inter and Intra games – The influencer has to be clear on which phase of the GAME he/she is in and switch back and forth as the need arises. It is also necessary to be able to work in one phase with particular players and another phase with other players. Changing with in an organization – You need to consult people who you know. If people closest t you are not excited or roused by your perception it is unlikely those less known to you will rush to adopt your solution. In practice the ideas and solutions to org problems are not judged solely by their merit. Allies can provide useful feedback on your proposal. All delegated tasks should be – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound. Job

gets done when smart criteria are used. People who control access to important influential people exerts influence by their formal ranking. People on the inner circle must be covered before moving on to people on the outer circle. When trying to change minds and arguments, influencers should consider the implications of Exhibit 7.3, which represents how a group might divide for or against a proposition. The thick sloping line shows the position when about half the people affected are in favor and half are against a proposition. Distances above the neutral horizontal line indicate the strength of support or opposition. The point S above the line indicates those people who are very strongly in favor of the change and the corresponding point, R, below the line on the extreme right indicates those who are very strongly against the

change. Most people have less strong views for or against the changes and those closest to the horizontal line (N) are more or less neutral.

Winning Allies: You win allies by arguing convincingly for change and by weakening the arguments against it. Lukewarm opponents are a key target group. Influencer has to keep the momentum for change by reinforcing the arguments – otherwise doubts grow, advocates waver and allies makes excuses. Strategies for blocking change are calling for more studies, reassessments, pilot trials, surveys of practices elsewhere, consultations of all interested parties, invitations to prominent critics to ensure ”balance” etc.A “salami” strategy is a viable means of winning over cautious managers by exposing them to demonstrations a slice at a time. (I.e. trials, pilot schemes, observations of experimental projects etc).Unanswered flaws corrode influence. It is necessary to answer them and explain objections.

Influencing for results: First segment people who you know and don’t into categories. “Functionaries” are

people who make things happen according to their titles. Knowing who does what is the first step to building your influence. The second step is to identify those who you hope to act with you to complete the task that you need for your job. The last step is to identify people who are your allies for your project. They make things happen and are a strategic group of players for an influencer. Allies come form potential allies in the functionaries.

Imperatives: To achieve an objective certain imperatives must be met. An imperative can be political (adopt a policy, win election), commercials (reduce labor cost, raise prices, enlarge market share) People (recruit programs, retrain, change supervision). One useful way to create a force filed diagram is to follow the steps in 7.7. On some issues you will need to take sides and others you must not. Neutrality is not dishonorable and nor is comforting words to prominent losers. To bring people into allies you need to see their world, analyze their word and analyze how the change you are proposing is going to affect them in their terms. Do not personalize disputes – once a function clash is personalized, it spirals out of control.

The Grid – Once you leave your functional role in an organization, it is difficult to get back. Beware of people who tell you that a special project is good for your career or development. One way to keep your feet on the ground is to use the grid diagram. It enables you to keep track of where you stand in regard to each player that you identified in the key players diagram. The gird helps you think about how you act and react as the players come into your game. If your allies or resources have fears, comfort and assure them, if they have ambitions, support and encourage them. Their is no point in misleading players by telling them what they want to hear without regard to the truth. The state of your relationship depends on how recent your contact was with them. People become allies because they share experiences, social contacts with you. They want to be part of a team. Persuasion involves many skills varied as the relationships between the people. Some are easy to persuade and some are not. A rational individual goes through a rational process: awareness of a problem, search for a solution, selection of solution according to criteria. At each stage individual may abort. When approaching an individual with a proposal, the criteria by which they make their decision should be of great interest to influencer. The reason for understanding is that if your and their criteria do not match. As an influencer you task is to bring into alignment your criteria with theirs by influencing the priorities by which they use their criteria to judge your proposal. Because some important decisions criteria are not easily changed by influences some special persuasion techniques are needed such as “reframing” and “levering”. Reframing is well known in counseling. Levering is more difficult because you want to lever the criteria that you can meet into a higher priority than criteria that you can not meet. .

Content of influence messages: Content is the essential ingredient that makes influencing activities operational. Drawing a key players diagram is a first step – deciding the message is a second step. Themes – Theme plays a large role in the content of the competing influence message. A large part of influencing preparation is the creation, development, and placing of themes. These messages are planted, repeated throughout the GAME to win allies. Themes are best developed at each stage of the influencing agenda. Stances and Justifications: When themes are summarized into short statements “stances”. The idea of a stance is to trigger off consequential ideas related to the reasons for influence. Justifying means to elaborate upon your theme to make your proposal.

(Clarifications, evidence, etc.).Justifications should be summarized as bullet points on a flip chart. It is better to have 2 or 3 excellent reasons than a dozen or so weak ones. Responses and counters:

EPILOGUEInfluencing games are not for the fainthearted! They do not always – if ever – operate with ‘sweetness and light’. There are choices to be made, many of which carry risks; and the wrong choices create self-inflicted and unintentional setbacks. Dithering between choices is no option either, but effective influencers consult with friendly allies before they make irreversible choices. They make what Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls ‘sanity checks’ (The Change Masters, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983), and others call ‘reality checks’, on their proposals with confidants.As information accumulates about the people, the arguments and the situation, a Force Field tool captures the initial detail in an economical manner and allows the influencer to continue to capture detail as it changes. The Grid brings this information together and also monitors what is being done and what remains to be done.

Influence- Module 7

Influencing for Results

7.2: Inter and Intra Games

- In the game, it could be that something happens that causes the players to pause while the problem is addressed. This may mean going from Executive Influence to the Generate Objectives. Or while trying to Manage Allies, new players are identified and the influencer must return to Arrange Access before returning to Managing Allies. Indeed, it may be necessary to Manage allies at several points during a game in order to execute this or that influencing move, and such activities could require new objectives.

- The influencer has to be clear which phase of the game he or she is in and switch back and forth as the need arises. It is also necessary to be able to work in one phase with particular players and another phase with other players. That is why a common reaction when these requirements are spelled out is that it is all far too complicated! But, if influencing is complicated with GAME to guide you, think how complicated it must be without any structure at all.

7.2: Will it Pay?

- The best way to implement plan is to check if the plan is needed, is to consult with those people who share the alleged problem and who are in the best position to know whether or not there is a problem worth rectifying.

- If it is only a problem to Blake and not to others who are affected by it, then it will never play as an influencing game; the organisation is not going to change just because Blake thinks it has a problem.

- It is easy to become obsessed and to dismiss the disavowals of others as myopic. It is also easy to be discouraged by the apathy of others. Neither reaction is ideal.

- If your colleagues are slower to appreciate your insights into a problem, this at the very least dictates a cautious approach, which has the side-benefit that you get more time to collect data and to test the robustness of your solution.

- Influencers need to bring people with them. If the people closest to you cannot be roused by your perception of the problem, it is unlikely that those less disposed to you are going to rush to adopt your solution.

- Not all ideas survive or deserve to survive their first exposure to the people likely to be affected by them. In the myriad of informal discussions that take place in side meetings, over coffee, at the water-cooler, at lunch breaks and while journeying to meetings, as many flashes of insight are articulated as there are solutions to ‘problems’.

- Some of these are said in jest – those present laugh a little – some are said in anger. Most ideas perish shortly after their birth.

- Sometimes an idea once expressed is then forgotten, but for at least one person it nags away at the back of the mind, until he or she asks ‘Why not?’ The answer may be revealed the first time you mention the idea: ‘We tried that once and it failed miserably,’ they tell you. That may be enough to kill it for good. However, it may start you wondering whether the situations are strictly analogous.

- This process filters the vast informal flow of ideas and solutions (many of them plain silly or otherwise impractical), leaving the few that may be taken seriously. Ideas that survive the filtering process remain fragile.

- For a start, some people react to other people’s ideas because it was ‘not invented here’; they are against an idea because they did not think of it first. Moreover, if they are hostile to the person who did invent it, they are doubly opposed on emotional grounds.

- It makes sense, therefore, to try out your solutions to problems with trustworthy colleagues first. If they respond positively – even offer supportive suggestions – you can enroll them into your alliance to make the change. Ask them whom else should you see? They might make useful suggestions or sponsor introductions to other key players who can influence the outcome.

- Do not just harvest support and leave it there. If the change is radical, it will take detailed planning to iron out all the defects (and all plans begin with in-built defects because you cannot see or anticipate every contingency). Allies can provide useful feedback on the workability of what you propose. Tap into these sources by keeping your allies fully informed of any changes you contemplate to make the plan workable and carefully consider their comments, criticisms and suggestions. Your plan has to become their plan too if your influencing project is to make progress.

- The opening phase of an influencing game is also fraught with the risks of a ‘takeover’ by other key players who see the initiative as more beneficial to them if they, rather than you, sponsor it. This is a critical moment. Some of these attempted take-over’s are benign and necessary to implement the change; others are malign, such as when rivals are only interested in taking over the leadership of the change in order to deny you the credit.

- if the enhancement of your own position is uppermost over the organization’s problem, you are more likely to resent the intrusion of those bent on a take-over. If the organization’s problem is uppermost, you are more likely to welcome others into a leading role if it assists the push for the change.

- The test should be whether their intervention is decisive for the change to be implemented. If it is, the organisation will benefit. At least your closest allies – the people with whom you raised the problem first – will know that you initiated the change and will credit you accordingly, particularly if what you initiated is seen to be picked up and implemented by those more senior

than you, who exercise their powers to get things done. Your credibility is enhanced if powerful people respond positively to your influence.

- The alternative of monopolizing the initiative and, in a fit of pique, repelling boarders who attempt to take it over, could do significant damage to your credibility. It is better, while building your influence in the organisation, to be credited as an initiator of change than to be disparaged as an ‘awkward’ colleague who is too possessive and egotistical to be a team player. Anybody powerful enough to take over your solutions once initiated should have little difficulty squashing your attempts to hang on to them, and privately discrediting you to others.

- When rivals on the same level as yourself attempt ‘take-over’s’, the best way to handle them is to welcome their involvement and then ‘out-GOYA’ them. You become the link between the disparate allies in the organisation who support the change and you energies the process between inception and delivery. Tactically, you delegate and closely monitor the individuals who undertake to deliver.

- Set ‘SMART’ objectives as criteria when delegating. All delegated tasks should be:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic

Time-bound.

- By delegating SMART tasks in this way to people whom you suspect are trying to take over your project, the achievement of SMART standards benefits your initiative – because the job gets done when SMART criteria are used, provided the individuals meet these criteria.

- Using SMART criteria also tests the motives of those who join the game to take it over. If they shape up and deliver, this helps your game; if they fail to deliver, their bids to usurp your project are easily rebuffed.

- But beware of paranoia. Most of your early influencing games are unlikely to be about major transformations in an organisation. They are going to be relatively minor projects that opportunistic rivals are unlikely to usurp. Only when the stakes are much higher is there likely to be a serious threat to the paternity of your project and, by then, you will be a much more formidable player than a beginner. Also, by then your allies will probably have formed into a reliable coalition or network, not easily taken over by hostile rivals, because they are used to working with and not against you.

7.4: Who to Access?

(Figure 7.1: Key players: Blake’s game)

- People who control access to important and influential people exert influence belied by their formal rankings. The Chief of Staff of the US President exercises greater power than the Vice-President or Secretaries of State if he or she controls access to the President.

- Sometimes an approach through a third person is the best way to gain access and exert influence. If that third person is a highly regarded adviser to the target (i.e., highly regarded by the target and not necessarily by onlookers) it is essential that the initial approach is directed at the adviser.

- Attempts to circumvent key people are usually futile and may be misunderstood by them as an attempt to demean their role. Antagonizing such people with shabby maneuvers to circumvent them is foolhardy – they might decide to demonstrate to you their indispensability.

- The concentric circles diagram is an adaptation of the Key Players doodle (which in passing illustrates the versatility of doodles – I used a version of Tony Buzan’s ‘Mind Map’ to achieve something similar in a recent highly complex influencing game). Visually, Figure 7.1 maps the links between the influencing targets in relation to each other and is much more relevant than the official organ gram.

- It is important that influencing contacts lead to other relevant decision makers.- Figure 7.2 (below) is an extract from the force field diagram:

- When trying to change minds and arguments, influencers should consider the implications of figure 7.3 (below), which represents how a group might divide for or against a proposition.

- The thick sloping line shows the position when about half the people affected are in favor and half are against a proposition. Distances above the neutral horizontal line indicate the strength of support or opposition. The point S above the line indicates those people who are very strongly in favor of the change and the corresponding point, R, below the line on the extreme right indicates those who are very strongly against the change. Most people have less strong views for or against the changes and those closest to the horizontal line (N) are more or less neutral.

- Note that this line has most of its length above the neutral line (N has moved to N*), which suggests that the majority of people are now in favor of the change, which is good news for Blake. Only a small rump of them (close to the right-hand extreme) remain opposed – some strongly, others lukewarmly, and a few who are neutral. One thing Blake must be careful to do in this situation is not to provoke this small minority into recruiting new adherents from those who support the change at present (they are presently above the line, shown as from S* to N*). And this again underlines the need to take seriously the doubts, fears and

concerns of people who do not want the changes with the same enthusiasm as you and your allies.

7.5: Winning Allies

- You win allies by arguing convincingly for change and by weakening the arguments against it. Crucially, though, you do not have to dislodge everybody from opposition (especially those most strongly opposed) but you must do enough to marginalize intractable opponents by winning over those who are only lukewarmly opposed.

- Consensus generates its own momentum. Those who are only marginally opposed are susceptible to hearing regular expressions of support for the change and hearing doubts about the case against from those whom they respect.

- Your allies are not immune to swings away from a proposed change or occasional doubts about it when they are left without regular and enthusiastic infusions of the arguments for change from the influencer and his or her allies.

- The battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of those affected by the change and of those who make decisions to implement the change is not well served by a ‘fire and forget’ approach.

- Doubts grow, advocates waver and allies make excuses, unless the influencer keeps the momentum going by reinforcing the arguments for the change. This is why one of the most commonly used and successful blocking strategies against change is to slow down the commitment process by calling for more studies, reassessments, pilot trials, surveys of practices elsewhere, consultations of all interested parties, invitations to prominent critics to ensure ‘balance’, ‘full and proper costing of the implications’, and other plausible devices.

- Every delaying tactic can be countered by appealing to the same cautious inclinations of reasonable people. Where the radicalism of the change inhibits its adoption by the cautious, a ‘salami’ strategy is a viable means of winning over cautious managers by exposing them to demonstrations ‘a slice at a time’. Trials, pilot schemes, observations of experimental projects and such like can build the alliance necessary to gain approval for the full version of change – assuming that these salami activities prove successful.

- People who oppose something usually find fault with the details. The devil, it has been said, is in the detail, and a dismissive lament along the lines of ‘Great in theory, BUT …’ has broken the momentum of more than one proposed change. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that you respond effectively (and politely) to all objections. It is not prudent to dismiss the persons who raise detailed objections (even if you feel you have excellent grounds for exposing their foibles). It is the effect on the people who could be influenced by the objection and not your assessment of the objection’s (or the objector’s) merits that counts.

- Unanswered ‘flaws’ fester. They corrode your influence. Again, it is necessary to GOYA and to answer them. If the objections have substance, be thankful you found out before they found you out. And do not forget to ‘thank’ the people who brought the problem to your attention, because there is nothing like acknowledgement for making opponents into ‘allies’.

7.6: Influencing for Results

- One way of looking at your organisation is to segment the people in it into categories, starting with those you know and ending with those you do not. Roughly the growth in the details of this segmentation corresponds to the time when you joined the organisation to where you are now (unless this is your first day in post, in which case everybody practically is in a single category: you don’t know them).

- It is time to take stock, perhaps conduct an influencing audit of your relationships; make no mistake, the state of your influencing potential determines your work-related performance. Influence or be influenced. Use your time and energy to meet your goals, or have your time and energy, unwittingly perhaps, used to meet somebody else’s. You are a player or a pawn

and, while the latter can be quite comfortable (ignorance can be bliss), it leaves you performing well below your potential.

- ‘Functionaries’ are the people who make things happen according to their titles. The accountant accounts, sales staff sell, buyers buy, producers fabricate and so on.

- If you want something done, functionaries do it. Normally, you do not go to the secretarial service to arrange transport for your warehouse, or to the buying department to send sales staff to an exhibition. Knowing who does what – initially, who is supposed to carry out the functions you seek – is the first step in building your influence.

- The second step is to identify those whom you hope or expect to act with you in a manner that is more than that of a functionary charged to complete the tasks you need to do your job. These are people with whom you have established friendly relations, ranging from the normal ‘banter’ between the people you know, greet, gossip with and ‘kid’, to those with whom you have progressed through the varying steps in relationship building (seeModule 4). These people are your potential allies, towards whom you are broadly empathetic and they are to you.

- The last step is to identify the people who are allies for your project. When they exert influence on your behalf they make things happen. They are a strategic group of players for an influencer. For you they are a valuable and scarce resource. Figure 7.5 illustrates the people you know in your organisation, roughly in the order in which you will meet and identify them.

- In equilibrium, the relationships between these three groups is shown in Figure 7.6. The functionaries, who consist of everybody in the organisation and therefore the largest group, occupy the largest circle.

- Two smaller circles are shown, one marked potential allies and other allies. It is presumed that you will have many more potential allies than allies, if only because many people with whom you have friendly contact will be in no position to give you direct help in particular influencing games.

- The two circles that overlap in Figure 7.6 represent the situation in an influencing game in which some of your allies are drawn from people outside your pool of potential allies. The head of the mailroom could be a player in your game (an ally) and some of her staff could be among your potential allies, but they might not be players, let alone allies, in the game.

- Obviously, developing someone as an ally who is a functionary of whom you know nothing is much more difficult in the short run than bringing a potential ally into play. Hence, the broad rule that should drive your relationship-building activities is that you should keep in touch with potential allies throughout the organisation and build these relationships into allies.

- Allies come from potential allies among the functionaries. Now, all functionaries are decision makers if they hold control of a budget or other resource strings or information, etc., and they are relevant if you need such resources etc. to make your decisions.

7.7: Imperatives

- If you intend to achieve an objective, there are certain imperatives that must be met if you are to meet your objective. An imperative can be political – adopt a policy, win an election, or secure a nomination. It can be commercial – reduce labour costs, enlarge market share or raise prices. It can be related to people – recruit programmers, retrain electricians or change supervision. Imperatives must be achieved, like tactical objectives in a military campaign, if the strategic objective is to be achieved.

- Identifying, therefore, the four or five imperatives in each project that will deliver your objectives is crucial to planning.

- If you are trying to reorganize distribution and you need the co-operation in the job functions of, say, the merchandising manager and her team to provide information that only they can provide, your acquisition of that specific information within a time period is an imperative: no information, no reorganization. Once an imperative is delayed, the objective is delayed – and, conversely, if it is not delayed, it is not an imperative. If the imperative is fudged, the objective is compromised.

- Your objective may be a major or a minor change. In all but the most trivial of cases, you should prepare a Force Field diagram of the players, the arguments and the events that are relevant to each imperative and to the overall objective.

- In the players’ column, identify each one by name. Just putting in the name of a department, without inserting the names of the players, advertises the gaps in your preparation.

- Fabricated steelwork is not delivered to a site by ‘transport’; it is delivered by supervised drivers, loaders and truck maintenance and repair people, who have names and locations (yes, you will probably have to GOYA!).

- Along with the names of relevant functionaries, rank them as potential allies and allies. You could try colored highlight pens to aid rapid visualization: say, blue for potential allies; green for allies and red for the rest, including where you have functions but not names in the diagram. A sea of red suggests that you have some way to go before you are ready to exert influence.

- Some functionaries may be in the set of players with whom you have, to put it mildly, tense relationships. They stand in an antagonistic or unsympathetic posture towards you, either because of events or your carelessness in the past. They might be rivals, or people who see you as some sort of threat to them or their function. You may have aligned yourself previously to others towards whom they are antagonistic (organisations are not always paragons of ‘sweetness and light’ and some are riven with dissent).

- You ought to adopt a strategy that will bring antagonists on side, even if only temporarily, though hopefully permanently. You might also reflect on the costs of carelessly (or worse, gratuitously) antagonizing colleagues. Some antagonism towards you is inevitable. If, however, you tread so carefully that you never upset anybody, you will be too submissive to have any effect. On some issues you must take sides; on others you must not. Neutrality is not dishonorable. Nor is a comforting word to prominent losers.

- To bring people into play as allies requires your understanding of how they see their world. You should analyze their world and how they see it and assess what resources you have that can assuage their concerns about how the changes you are proposing will affect them – in their terms, not yours.

- Many of the relationship-building techniques discussed in Module 4 are relevant here, though it is to be hoped that you have had these techniques in play for some time prior to the moment when you need allies (including those with whom you have a good relationship).

- Influencers who only appear when they want something are as cynically received by allies and potential allies as politicians who only visit when there is an election coming up.

- It may be that certain individuals are as resolutely opposed to you as they can be and no amount of effort on your part alters their disposition. The best you can hope for is their neutrality; more likely you will have to go ‘head-to-head’ with them if they actively campaign against your proposals or undermine their implementation. This is unfortunate and it can be made worse if relations between yourself and those who oppose you

deteriorate to the point that they affect the effectiveness of the organisation. - The one thing you can do of a preventive nature is not to personalize a dispute. Once a

functional clash is personalized, it spirals out of control.- If tempted to personalize a dispute, or when watching one developing between others, I

recollect the ultimate personalization of a dispute, namely that between the Argentinean navy and its air force some years back.

- You need allies to get the job done. Begin, therefore, to cultivate potential allies long before you need them as allies. If they are needed for specific projects, identify who they might be, how they see their world (not yours), and what you can do yourself, and through third parties, to develop your relationships (think ‘wallowing’).

- The very qualities in players that draw you to them are usually what draw them to you. Expand your potential allies across the organisation and at all levels. Help them where you can and seek opportunities to demonstrate your benign intentions (avoid, if you can, instances where a malign interpretation of your behaviour and intentions is possible). Listen sympathetically to their accounts of their ‘adversities’ and joyously celebrate accounts of their ‘triumphs’.

- And do not put a verbal gloss on what you hear from them to third parties. Joe was not ‘moaning again’ – he was ‘disappointed’; George was not ‘smirking’ – he was ‘happy’. The language you use about others, when you think it is safe to be frank, damages you if your third party ‘confidant’ spreads it about as confirmation of his own prejudiced opinions and it gets back to your (‘ex-’) ally.

7.8: the Grid

- Identifying people to assist you in an influencing project and hoping they will contribute in the manner you require is best not left to casual interactions.

- The Key Players diagram contains the names of the people whom you need to influence to complete your project and not a list of friends of varying quality who might at a pinch substitute for people qualified to do the job. You are not forming an ad hoc team from scratch to do an unusual job, like robbing a bank or building the first atom bomb; you are mobilizing people in situ to do something that you prefer them to do and that is legitimately within their discretion, instead of doing something different for somebody else.

- You start, therefore, with the people in post. If the people in post cannot do what is required, you may be tempted to assemble a new team and circumvent the people in post, but then you have to influence the people who can authorise the formation of a new team to do what the present team cannot do. This is an altogether more difficult influencing task and one fraught with career-breaking dangers. These initiatives usually result in a resort to new teams that are often called ‘special projects’ teams.

- Many a member of a ‘special projects’ team has disappeared into organisational limbo, along with the special project and the people behind it. Once you leave your functional role in an organisation, it is difficult to get back. Your rivals know this and they will probably encourage you to sideline yourself in this manner.

- Hence, beware of people who tell you that a ‘special project’ is ‘good for your career’ or your ‘development’ or your ‘experience’. And watch out for being shuffled into a ‘working party’, especially of the interdepartmental kind, as these usually are the organisational version of the funeral procession for inconvenient ideas.

- One way to keep your feet on the ground, is to use a Grid diagram like that shown in Figure 7.8. It consists of six columns, each one headed by the tasks set out in Figure 7.7. The grid enables you to keep track of where you stand in regard to each player that you identified in your Key Players Diagram. The number of entries can be as long as the number of known key players, and as new players become known, they can be entered into new rows on the same grid, or a new grid that is drawn in moments (or you could have a standard layout

preset on your PC so as to print off copies as you need them).

- In column one you enter the names of the key players, some of whom you will know, and you mark these as one of ‘F’ for functionary, ‘PA’ for potential ally or ‘A’ for ally. If all the entries are marked ‘F’, you have a lot of work to do; if they are marked as ‘A’, your project has a good start and is probably well under way, though never take anything or anyone for granted. Allies have to be looked after, because neglect is a powerful signal to them of the shallowness of your attitudes towards your relationships.

- Most likely, there will be a combination of ‘F’, ‘PA’ and ‘A’ in the Identity column. For each player you need to analyze, as best as you can from what information you have, how they see their world. For the functionaries, of whom you know little or nothing directly, you may have to rely on information about them from allies who know them, always treating, of course, the opinions of other people – even allies – cautiously. Your own assessments have higher value, providing they are candid.

- Those you identify as potential allies will be people with whom you have had some contact. In time, functionaries should be re-designated as potential allies and some (all?) of the potential allies are likely to be re-designated as allies. Each player is moved through the same sequence on the grid.- In my experience, you find in any group of managers larger than six a wide range of views of

the world and their places in it. Some want a quiet life; others prefer to remain in the state of whatever equilibrium they are in at the moment; others want to expand their activities; some want to preserve a self-image of their own importance; still others are out to get others into trouble.

- In assessing your resources relevant to their world, it is important that you think carefully about how you can help them, or how you can persuade them to make an exception in your case if they perceive you as a threat of the kind that bothers them, given their view of the world, or how you might induce them to feel obliged to help you on the basis of the reciprocation principle.

- The Grid helps to think about how you act and react as the players come into your game. Players may have a positive view of what you are doing and how it affects their world. Their views of the world and their role in it may perceive you to be sympathetic, on their side and worthy of encouragement. Their views could be ‘golden’ because they are totally aligned with yours. Assessing your resources relative to their needs, you could find yourself with an abundance of options to bring them into your game and to keep them there to its successful conclusion.

- How are your relationships with all the key players? Frank diagnosis is called for in the Diagnose column. With functionaries, your relationships are non-existent and you ought to have plenty to think about in completing this column. Be careful, though, that you do not project backwards your hopes of being able to write good things about your relationships.

- There is no point in misleading players by telling them what they want to hear without regard to the truth. This dictum does not just apply to the truth about your intentions, which should anyway be robust in an interrogation by any of the players; it also applies to factors such as the amount of time and actual work that the project will commit players and participants to undertake should it go ahead with their support.

- Fudging the level of support is tantamount to gaining support by false pretences, and when you are found out – as you will be – your credibility will slide. As in other relationships, candor is the best policy. Minimizing the extent of opposition to your proposal is dishonest and might be self-defeating. Some people will work harder for something that is opposed than for something that appears, according to you, to be an easy ride.

- The state of your relationship with players tends to depend on how recent your last contact was with them. Life moves on, and long periods of neglect of your allies can change a strong relationship into indifference.

- People become allies because they share experiences, including social contacts, with you. They want to be involved and to feel part of the ‘team’ that helps each other, that passes on information and news about anything that affects them, and that renews the regard each has for the others through regular contact.

- The penultimate and vital step is to select the appropriate behavioral tactics that will influence each player or group of players. Individually note these against each name in this column. If you leave gaps, you leave weaknesses in your influencing plan.

- Some influencing projects have prospered by the proverbial ‘walk-in-the-woods’, where two key players have a serious ‘heart-to-heart’ discussion, alone and in private, where they seal a compact that enables a project to go through without a player’s opposition in return for some future benefits from the grateful influencer. Such events are less rare than supposed. The belief in their rarity is widespread, of course, because of their confidentiality and lack of visibility.

- Once you have decided on how you are going to bring the players into play, it remains to implement what you have decided. This will require a large amount of GOYA, and some GOTT. Near the date or time of relevant meetings you should get in touch with your allies and check to make sure they are minded to attend, and to make ad hoc arrangements to solve any logistical or other problems in their way.

- Persuasion involves many skills as varied as the relationships between the people. Some people are easily persuaded and change their minds according to who has most recently spoken to them. Others are easily persuaded by certain individuals and stubbornly resist being persuaded by anybody else. For the bulk of people, their susceptibility to persuasion depends on the circumstances. In the absence of a magic formula to ensure that persuasion is effective, some general advice is relevant here.

- Influencing attempts can involve a proposal that is judged entirely on its own or in competition with other proposals. Of course, putting forward a proposal that does not have directly competing proposals creates its own competition in the form of the case against itself: the decision makers may veto it at the instigation of its opponents, who may have no ready alternative, except ‘don’t let’s do it’.

- This is akin to the situation that a sales person is in when attempting to sell something to a potential customer. There are some well-practiced persuasion techniques commonly used in selling that have applicability in influencing.

- Persuading people to buy a product with various attributes and features that allegedly meet the needs of the customer is different in many ways from influencing people to adopt a proposal; but one thing they do have in common is that people make considered decisions in major purchases or significant policy changes according to criteria. The criteria form the basis of support or opposition to accepting the influencing attempt or making the purchase.

- A rational individual, according to rational decision theory, will go through a process that can be summarized as: awareness of a problem; search for a solution; and selection of a solution according to criteria. At each stage in the process the individual may abort continuing.

- The problem may not be as pressing as others of which the individual is also aware – realizing you have no sugar in your tea may not require continuing to search for sugar if simultaneously the house catches fire. At any one moment various problems vie for attention.

- Lastly, selecting one solution that best fits the chosen criteria may become impossible if some part of the criteria cannot be met by any available solution.

- What you regard as important and what others regard as important may be different. You may have thought through every aspect of your proposal and you may have carefully evaluated every alternative that you can think of to arrive at the particular set of solutions contained in your proposal.

- Existing criteria may be the result of long-established company policy; they may be due to technical prejudice; they may be socially or politically biased; or they may conform to an individual’s idiosyncrasies. However irrational, irrelevant or incredible their criteria, they stand

in the way of your persuasion. Why you should believe that the merest exposition of your proposal should be enough to overwhelm all their doubts, prejudices and criteria is a problem only you can resolve.

- So you not only need to know by what criteria they will be influenced for or against your proposal, but also in what order of priority they will assess it. Is it more important to some of them that disruption in services is minimized, or that costs are contained below £200 000, or that differentials are reduced, or that local environmentalists are not provoked, or whatever?

- The reason for understanding their criteria and priorities is that persuasion is more difficult when their criteria and priorities do not match yours. Wonderful if they do match, of course, but unlikely. As an influencer, your task is to bring into alignment your criteria with theirs, by influencing the priorities by which they use their criteria to judge your proposal.

- To do this, your initial approach to a player would consist of generating awareness of the problem to which your proposal, to be revealed later, is addressed. This is much like the circumstances in which you would use the technique of wallowing, except that you are not just aimlessly wallowing but are encouraging wallowing for effect.

- Your problem may be that your proposal involves one or more of the inhibitory criteria that surface. Whatever else you do, do not attack any of the criteria you hear: ‘Speed is less important than getting it right’; ‘It cannot wait, whatever the cost’; ‘Damn precedents’; and ‘Change is necessary now’. Much better – mandatory, even – that you ask questions to finesse out more details of your listener’s apparent decision criteria: ‘How would we do it quickly?’; ‘What would be an acceptable cost?’; ‘How do we avoid precedents?’; ‘What problems did the last round cause?’ Your basic thrust is to use questions to return their focus to the problem and the need for a solution rather than reinforce their focus on the problems of the solution.

- Decision criteria, necessarily prioritized, compete for prominence. Provided that you have not reinforced criteria that they have initially regarded as important by attacking them, it remains possible that their initially important criteria can be dislodged by upgrading the importance of less important criteria, to which they are not yet attached, or, by introducing other criteria that they have not thought about but for which your proposal has strengths.

- Because influencers do not easily change important decision criteria, some special persuasion techniques are needed. These are known as ‘reframing’ and ‘levering’.

- ‘Reframing’ is well known in counseling. If individuals have a fixed view of something that affects them – from trivial to profound – it is not effective to go head-to-head with them over its importance. The classic case from neurolinguistic programming was that of the tidy mother who caused herself and her family a lot of stress from her obsession with keeping rooms tidy.

- ‘Levering’ is more difficult because you want to lever the criteria that you can meet into a higher priority than the criteria you cannot meet. You are helped to some extent by not directly comparing the criteria. You lever yours without reference to theirs.

7.9: Content of the Influence Messages

- The messages will vary as widely as the influencing campaigns underway at any one moment and it would be tiresome to address every variation and circumstance you could come across. Another reason is that mixing messages with method can be confusing. By now though, you have a good grounding in method and it is time to say something about content.

- Drawing a Key Players Diagram is the first step; deciding what messages you are going to impart to the people named on it is the second. Likewise, no Force Field diagram has any operational value devoid of content: to what exactly are the People in favor of or to what are they opposed to; what are the contents of the Arguments to which they favor or oppose?; and what precisely is the nature of the Events that may help or hinder the resolution of the influence campaign? On the Player’s Grid exactly what policies are you intending to Implement from the last column?

- We influence for a purpose; there is some end in view which we wish to influence for or against.

- It is never a simple matter of stating the alternatives and asking, or leaving it to, the people in the GAME to choose. We wish to influence their choice and, frankly, simply laying out the alternatives and then stepping back and leaving them to choose is pretty useless.

- A decision-maker has conversations with many others and things said to them, perhaps tangentially associated with the decision that affects us, can influence them in ways unanticipated by ourselves.

- The bids from several (including two foreign) engine manufacturers are in, so are the engine performance reports, maintenance schedules, spares requirements, engineers’ training plans, costs and signed commercial memoranda of understanding. Every document that is required is set out on separate tables at the Defense Ministry and teams of evaluators are beginning to work their way through the details to make their recommendations to the Minister in ten month’s time.

Themes- ‘Theme’, because themes play a large role in the content of competing influencing messages. A

large part of influencing preparation is the creation, development and placing of themes. These are messages that are presented, planted and repeated throughout a GAME to win over allies, to reduce support for rivals and the stiffen support for our objectives. They form part of the content of the influencing activity.

- Every influencing activity we undertake expresses themes whether we think of them carefully or make them up as we go along. Themes are best developed at each stage in the influencing agenda (see Figure 7.7), preferably as early as possible and preferably reviewed as regularly as possible. Some themes may prove counter-productive with some or all of the people and should be dropped and replaced with other, more helpful themes. Some themes, though accurately reflecting real concerns, grow stale by constant repetition and the evidence of counter-facts.

- Themes are short stories, heavy in content, that carry compact messages to listeners or readers and which are memorable in their repetition by third parties among themselves. They require work to create, including ‘staff work’ to check the data upon which they may be based.

- Selected corporate relationship managers were tasked with creating influencing themes to persuade corporate customers of the need for ‘arrangement fees’. Data were collected (staff work) on the actual profitability of every corporate account in the Bank and analyzed. The effects of securing arrangement fees of 1, 3, or 5 per cent for the additional services were calculated.

- The themes that were developed by the corporate managers (not the consultants!) covered subjects as diverse as ‘the costs of doing business had to be recovered if the Bank was to remain in business’; ‘bankrupt Banks cannot loan money to anybody’; ‘the bigger the loan the more the reliance on analysis, the more senior the people who were involved and the more risky the consequence of the wrong decision, therefore the more it cost to give a safe ‘yes decision’; and ‘Banks that make poor credit decisions have to make large debt provisions and this increases the costs of making good loans to good customers. Stances and Justifications

- The disparate themes were summarized into short statements called ‘stances’. One such was: ‘Only profitable Banks can stay in business’. The idea of a stance statement is to trigger off consequential ideas related to the reasons for the influence policy with target audiences and to stiffen the resistance of influencers ‘wobbling’ when under pressure. And ‘wobble’ they do if pushed hard enough.

- The stance statement acts like a mantra; quiet repetition of it rekindles one’s resolve to stick with, or elaborate upon, the theme. If only profitable banks stay in business it means that unprofitable ones go out of business.

- It is a sure bet that when something is proposed that affects the listener’s interests the first question it provokes is something like:‘How do you justify what you have just proposed?’

- It is one question anybody may ask without apologizing. And you had better have a convincing answer if you wish to influence them positively in your favor. This does not mean that your answer will convince them – it takes more effort than that – but if it is unconvincing your chances of ever influencing them rapidly diminish towards zero.

- Justifying usually elaborates upon the theme you have used to make your proposal. It can encompass expansive explanations, clarifications, evidence and examples, data (those most useful of supporting evidential proofs), the histories of the decisions and the compelling case for doing it the way you propose as opposed to other ways that might be suggested by the listener. Responses and Customers

- People whom you are trying to influence are not passive participants, especially when what you are proposing affects their interests. Where the influencer has considerable experience of the exchanges between him or her and the target audience, it is possible to capture the series of usual ‘Responses’ and ‘Counters’ that pass between them.

- Most corporate bankers have heard the typical responses of customers faced with an addition to their banking costs, often many times over. Teams were tasked with collecting the typical responses and offering suggestions on the most useful counters to make. By comparing the teams’ outputs of this exercise it provided some interesting insights into just how varied the untutored responses of individual managers were at this Bank.

- Taking one exchange of responses and counters fairly typical at that time (early-1990s) it ran like this:‘You just want me to pay for the Bank’s exposure to its losses from Third World Debt.’

- It was agreed that this was indeed a most common response to anything to do with Bank charges or interest rate hikes. When asked what was their counter, a whole host of answers, varying from straight denials to assurances that Third World Debt had nothing to with domestic lending, were forthcoming.

- Opinions varied on the truth of these counters and their relative worth in such exchanges.

Table 7.1 Tools for Managing Content

Tool Role Problems

Themes(s) Short story presenting a concise statement likely to be persuasive

Themes too long, too complicate and inaccurate

Stance(s) Assertive single line statement that stiffens an influencer’s resolve in support of the Theme

Stance is used instead of the Theme and it comes across too harsh

Justification (s) Anticipates the inevitable question of “why?”

Too many weak reasons given *focus on one or two strong reasons only).

Anticipated response(s) How the receiver is likely to respond to the Theme(s)

Unanticipated responses (experience counts).

Intended counter How the influencer will try to counter the receiver’s

Influence forgets the

response counters of fluff them.

- Table 7.1 also indicates some of the common problems of using the tools. The best antidote to some of the problems in the third column is to thoroughly prepare the tools.

- Theme writing is not a quick run through some rough ideas. It is best to work in a team if possible (good task for a brainstorming session). Themes are meant to be sharp not diffuse. It is better to have several themes separated than one multi-theme story. This also works better because different stages of the influencing GAME will require different themes – especially as different themes emerge from the multiple ‘GAMES’ underway from your rivals and arguments wax and wane under the pressure of events.

- Stances act as ‘back stiffeners’ when influencers feel under pressure. At one time during the Bank’s influence campaign several branches with large numbers of (seriously unprofitable) agricultural accounts were under pressure to take on no more loans to farmers from the centre and were also under pressure to justify losing customers as a result of no loans when it threatened the viability of their Branch.

- This caused some senior managers to ‘wobble’ and question the policy. A new stance was spread round, from Economics 101: ‘The demand curve slopes downwards’, saying in effect that if the Bank raised its prices it would lose some of its customers and was best to lose the least profitable to rival banks!

- Influencers are always asked to justify their proposals or suggestions and you should anticipate your explanation. Biggest problem is having too much to say in justification, and going for the longest list of reasons you can think of even at the expense of their validity, which exposes you to a loss of credibility – and of influence.

- Another problem is that you have not anticipated a response and you get caught out in having no clear thoughts of a counter. Of course, experience helps here but you cannot easily substitute for inexperience while face-to-face.

- Probably better to focus on learning about the unanticipated response by asking the target questions and trying to assess how serious the listener is about the content of the response.

- Table 7.1 also indicates some of the common problems of using the tools. The best antidote to some of the problems in the third column is to thoroughly prepare the tools.

- Theme writing is not a quick run through some rough ideas. It is best to work in a team if possible (good task for a brainstorming session). Themes are meant to be sharp not diffuse. It is better to have several themes separated than one multi-theme story. This also works better because different stages of the influencing GAME will require different themes – especially as different themes emerge from the multiple ‘GAMES’ underway from your rivals and arguments wax and wane under the pressure of events.Stances act as ‘back stiffeners’ when influencers feel under pressure. At one time during the Bank’s influence campaign several branches with large numbers of (seriously unprofitable) agricultural accounts were under pressure to take on no more loans to farmers from the centre and were also under pressure to justify losing customers as a result of no loans when it threatened the viability of their Branch. This caused some senior managers to ‘wobble’ and question the policy. A new stance was spread round, from Economics 101: ‘The demand curve slopes downwards’, saying in effect that if the Bank raised its prices it would lose some of its customers and was best to lose the least profitable to rival banks!

- Influencers are always asked to justify their proposals or suggestions and you should anticipate your explanation. Biggest problem is having too much to say in justification, and going for the longest list of reasons you can think of even at the expense of their validity, which exposes you to a loss of credibility – and of influence.

- Another problem is that you have not anticipated a response and you get caught out in having no clear thoughts of a counter. Of course, experience helps here but you cannot easily substitute for inexperience while face-to-face.

- Probably better to focus on learning about the unanticipated response by asking the target questions and trying to assess how serious the listener is about the content of the response.

- Forgetting your prepared counter or fluffing its delivery happens. Apart from more careful preparation there is not much you can do once you have spoken, except apologies and move on. You can always come back to the topic when you are better prepared. One way to fluff your lines is to cut into their statements with your head shaking and saying variations on the theme of ‘No, you are wrong’. I once saw that done in a law court where the witness interrupted a question from the prosecutor with the statement: ‘I can see where you are going and your imputation is wrong because…’, and then he launched into an explanation which was more incriminating of his friend in the dock than the prosecutor could have hoped for before her convoluted question (which in my view was going nowhere) had been interrupted by the witness!

Epilogue

- Influencing games are not for the faint-hearted! They do not always – if ever – operate with ‘sweetness and light’. There are choices to be made, many of which carry risks; and the wrong choices create self-inflicted and unintentional setbacks. Dithering between choices is no option either, but effective influencers consult with friendly allies before they make irreversible choices. They make what Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls ‘ sanity checks’

- As information accumulates about the people, the arguments and the situation, a Force Field tool captures the initial detail in an economical manner and allows the influencer to continue to capture detail as it changes. The Grid brings this information together and also monitors what is being done and what remains to be done.