It's always important to reach the state of knowledge proficiency and practice expert power to amplify influence.
It’s about aligning incentives, decision rights, narratives, data flows, and capability so that desired behaviors and outcomes emerge from the system’s core..
Why it matters
-Durable change: core influence produces sustained direction, not one-off wins.
-Scalability: centralized levers cascade across the organization or system.
-Resilience: when core norms and incentives align, execution is less fragile to personnel changes or short-term shocks.
Six core domains to hold influence
Strategy & priorities: Set what gets resourced and measured. Influence here decides what matters. Tactics: make strategic choices explicit, publish transparent priority sheets, embed strategy in budgeting cycles.
Incentives & rewards: Align compensation, promotions, and recognition with the behaviors you want to scale. Tactics: redesign scorecards to weight desired outcomes; create promotion criteria that include collaboration, learning, and long-term impact.
Decision rights & governance: Who decides, when, and by what process determines how influence is exercised. Tactics: codify decision authorities, create escalation ladders, and use small empowered councils (with rotating membership) to avoid capture.
Information & narratives: Data, stories, and framing determine what leaders and teams pay attention to. Tactics: surface causal metrics (not vanity metrics), craft crisp narratives for different audiences, and institutionalize regular storytelling (demo days, public postmortems).
Processes & Tactics: Regular routines (planning cycles, standups, reviews) encode priorities and behaviors. Tactics: design rituals that reinforce core practices (daily focus metric, monthly learning reviews, quarterly strategy reset).
People & capability pipelines: Talent systems decide who executes and who rises; influence embedded here shapes future culture. Tactics: hire for desired mindsets, run internal mobility programs to rotate people through critical roles, and build leadership development aligned to core values.
Practical levers to operationalize influence at the core: Translate strategy into "what to stop doing"
Force rationing: require leaders to eliminate projects when approving new ones. Influence comes from both what you start and what you stop.
Create a small set of true north metrics: Limit to 3–5 cross-cutting measures that align incentives and get top-of-mind attention. Display them everywhere.
Use pre-commitment and binding escalation: Publish commitment triggers (if X reaches Y, then Z follows). Binding ladders reduce political backsliding.
Institutionalize red-teaming & pre-mortems: Regular adversarial review prevents groupthink at the core and changes incentives toward rigorous planning.
Protect and amplify early wins publicly: Use demo days, internal press, and leader spotlighting to reward and signal what success looks like.
Bake learning into governance: Make each major decision come with a learning hypothesis, test plan, and sunset clause if assumptions fail.
Operate through networks of influence: Build "micro-coalitions" across functions with delegated authority to act; keep them small and trusted.
Design role-level KPIs to be interdependent: Ensure KPIs require cross-team coordination (shared customer outcome) to prevent siloed optimizations.
Automate enforcement where appropriate: Use policy-as-code, feature gates, and automated checks to enforce core rules without constant policing.
Use symbolic but meaningful rituals: Launch ceremonies, badges, or permanent artifacts (hall of learning, lessons wall) that keep cultural influence visible.
Checks & balances:
-avoid heavy-handed capture
-Rotate authority and publish decisions to prevent ossification.
-Maintain transparent appeal processes so affected parties can surface concerns.
-Keep a minority oversight (ethics, audit, ombudsperson) with real access to pause decisions.
Quick diagnostic: is influence at your core by Ask these 10 yes/no questions:
-Are the organization’s top three metrics visible to everyone daily?
-Do promotion and pay criteria explicitly reference strategic priorities?
-Is decision authority mapped and published for major domains?
-Do teams run structured pre-mortems and adversarial reviews?
-Are there binding resource commitments tied to objective thresholds?
Is there an internal marketplace or rotation program for critical roles?
Are learning outputs (post-mortems, experiments) public and rewarded?
Do rituals exist that consistently surface critical trade-offs?
Are policy-as-code and automated checks used for core guardrails?
Can mid-level staff escalate and successfully change a decision if evidence demands it?
If you answered "no" to more than three, core influence is likely weak—focus on aligning incentives, decision rights, and information flows.
With high velocity and hyperconnectivity, people and organizations are becoming more interdependent with each other. Influence is made via negotiating & exchanging, to get others’ see your point of view, make tradeoffs, enforce trust, harness changes, etc. It's always important to reach the state of knowledge proficiency and practice expert power to amplify influence.
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