Influencing
Influencing maps the tactics people use to move others without formal authority - rational argument, personal appeal, exchange, coalition and more - so you can choose deliberately instead of defaulting to the one tactic you know.
Nine cards spread out, each naming a different lever, from straight argument to citing the authority behind the ask.
Reach for this when…
- You need buy-in from people who do not report to you.
- You keep reaching for the same tactic (usually pressure or logic) regardless of the audience.
- A cross-functional project is stalling because nobody owns the authority to force it.
How to run it
- Introduce the tactics: rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, coalition building, personal appeals, exchange, ingratiation, pressure, legitimating.
- Take a real scenario and identify which tactics actually fit the audience.
- Practise delivering the influence attempt using the chosen tactics.
- Debrief which tactics worked and why.
- Build a concrete influence plan for one live challenge.
A worked example
Situation. Maria Coy ran an agricultural cooperative's outreach team in Antigua, Guatemala, and needed forty smallholder farmers to adopt a shared seed-storage system, with no authority to require it.
Applied. Instead of pressing the case herself, she ran a consultation round with three respected farmers first, then built a small coalition of early adopters to bring to the wider group.
Result. The system was proposed by farmers to farmers. Uptake reached two-thirds of the cooperative within one planting season, something a directive from the co-op office had failed to do twice before.
The catch
The tactics are easy to name and harder to read live - most people default to whichever one matches their own style rather than the situation in front of them. Pressure, legitimating and coalition building are the fastest route to short-term compliance but the weakest at building real commitment; consultation and personal appeals take longer but tend to hold. The list is not a script; used mechanically it reads as manipulation.
If you only ever reach for one tactic, you do not have an influence strategy, you have a habit.
Origin: Gary Yukl