Fifty five

It was exactly two months since the away day, and we all reconvened. I could sense the anticipation.

We started by reviewing our business goals and testing the strategies we were currently executing to see how they might benefit from our new vista. And we defined our influence objectives:

• Whose opinions and behaviors are we seeking to influence and how?
• What opinions would we like them to hold and how would we like them to behave?
• How are we seeking to be influenced and by whom?
• What does success look like and how do we intend to measure it?

We answered the first three of these at a high level at first. Obviously, we couldn’t answer the last in full just yet as metric design requires an understanding of the tactics to be employed, and we couldn’t define the tactics until we’d developed the strategy.

We distilled our influence strategy, namely the influence processes we felt would give us serious competitive advantage if we became prodigious at them.

Interestingly, our recently acquired appreciation of the nature of complexity and big data meant we had to recognize that if prioritizing some influence flows meant entirely neglecting others then we were heading down a rocky road. Therefore, one of our strategies involves our striving to collate and synthesize insight and knowledge from all influence flows in combination. And I can tell you now we won’t have this down pat any time soon!

Without giving too much away (although we have presented all of this to our partners and suppliers and channel, we’re still adjusting to being open in the fullest sense), other strategies encompass social analytics, CRM, internal communications, greater collaboration with our suppliers and partners and resellers and customers and anyone else come to that, improved digital capture of workshops and meetings, improved capabilities and revised policies for data and digital asset management, and expansion of our enterprise social network.

Having said “without giving too much away”, you shouldn’t be greatly interested in the detail here anyway simply because your business isn’t Attenzi. As you’ll know, no part of our influence strategy is necessarily relevant to your organization.