The Six Influence Flows and the Influence Scorecard

The Six Influence Flows

You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

There is influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it doesn’t do. Influence is the common denominator linking all the CxO titles and every facet of business, making it an ideal basis from which to contemplate organizational (re)design.

Business invests to better manage the flows of time, money and materials, and now it must be equally adept with influence flows. Developing this capability is pivotal to working as a network and to responsiveness.

In his book The Business of Influence, Philip Sheldrake introduces the Six Influence Flows.

The Six Influence Flows is a prompt, a check-list, perhaps a provocation. It is not a taxonomy. And the numbering does not convey relative importance; they’re just labels.

To underline its relevance, ask yourself this question. What is the intended outcome of the design of your organization if it’s not to get stakeholders to think and behave as you’d like, and to be sensitive to how they’d like you to think and behave?

In attempting to understand how such an outcome is materialising, the Six Influence Flows informs the Influence Scorecard.

The Influence Scorecard

Our Influence Scorecard assists the design, transition to and management of the Social Business.

Knowing that organizational change is hard, we pay attention to the dominant way some of the world’s largest and most successful businesses seek to articulate and guide performance – the Balanced Scorecard – in order to tap into the monster’s own strengths, jujitsu style.

We call the resultant framework the Influence Scorecard, and Robert Howie, then the Director of the Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy, penned the foreword to the book in which it was introduced, The Business of Influence.

The Influence Scorecard is a subset or view of the Balanced Scorecard that contains all the influence-related objectives and metrics removed from their functional silos. Once the influence strategy is defined and influence objectives are articulated, influence flows can be drawn explicitly in the enterprise strategy map with all the influence-related strategic themes, objectives and metrics.

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