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Implications

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Influence

University of Pennsylvania

4.8 (121 ratings) | 7.4K Students Enrolled

Course 4 of 4 in the Achieving Personal and Professional Success Specialization

What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.

Reviews

4.8 (121 ratings)

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JS

Nov 07, 2018

Excellent course. Great skills for everyone interested in understanding how power works and how to be a more influential individual in general.

JW

Mar 23, 2018

Great course. Long enough to get into the meat of the issues but short enough to keep your attention. Nice mix of content. Highly recommend.

From the lesson

Module 1

In this module, we’ll begin by defining influence. You’ll weigh the pros and cons of proactivity and political ability, and find the right balance to get any job done within your organization. You’ll learn different models of power structures and dynamics, and discover the importance of flexibility, situational awareness, and agency. By the end of this module, you’ll be better able to analyze organizational structure, recognize processes within your organization that need improvement, and use your power of influence to optimize these processes.

Course Introduction2:31

What Is Power?6:47

Just-World Fallacy5:43

Case: Sergio de Mello11:54

Themes from de Mello4:06

Foundations of Social Power: French & Raven8:07

What About You?2:29

Situation Awareness6:50

Case: Cuban Missile Crisis6:48

Allison's Three Models of Power13:09

Implications8:42

Case: Robert Moses8:26

The Sources of Moses' Power3:35

Themes from Moses10:45

Taught By

Cade Massey
Practice Professor

So what are the implications of this model for you as you think about your

organization and the organizations you're trying to navigate and negotiate with?

So, first, the models reveal sources of power and constraints on power.

So each of these models point out ways in which decisions get made.

Those are opportunities, but they're also limitations.

So this suggests that savvy analysis requires using multiple perspectives.

One of the reasons this is so

important is that we tend to bring a particular lens to situations.

We tend to have chronic ways of thinking about situations.

So Allison's entire motivation was to push the field of political

science away from their chronic lens of rational analysis.

What is your chronic lens?

Do you tend to think of organizations and actions as rational actions?

Some of you might have a chronic lens of bureaucratic politics.

You think all of it is fed up from the individual bargains that are cut

at the lower levels.

And then, few of us, and we're going to emphasize this more,

few of us have this middle model, this model two, the scrutinize process,

where a lot of organization's behavior is just inertia, it's just routine.

But it's not a very interesting one, so it usually doesn't draw our attention.

We don't tend to explain behavior that way.

Allison's point is we're going to better understand organizations if we bring

multiple perspectives.

If we move from one to the other as we try to understand what happened or

predict what is going to happen in the future.

This is connected a little by some recent research by Phil Tetlock.

Tetlock is now here at the University of Pennsylvania.

This book was written when he was at Berkeley.

And it was a unique study of judgement in the field of psychology.

Usually when judgement study in psychology, especially historically,

is done with experimental research, often using students.

And they're short little stimuli.

Tetlock did something quite unusual.

He decided to study the judgement of real world experts, economists,

political commentators, political scientists, about real world problems.

Things like, what's going to happen in South Africa?

What's going to happen with the dissolution of the Soviet Union?

What's going to happen in future elections?

Where is the economy going?

So, over a ten year period of time,

which at the time was unheard of to study judgement this way,

over a ten year period of time Tetlock captured people's predictions.

And then followed what actually happened in the world to figure out how good they

were at making these predictions.

And what he found was that there is rampant overconfidence.

The overconfidence we observe in the lab, we also observe in the real world.

And importantly,

he was trying to understand what distinguishes those who are overconfident

from those who are well-collaborated, and he couldn't find anything.

Nothing that you might think would predict that, education, political orientation,

gender, these things don't relate to that.

He did find one difference, though, and he called it Cognitive Style.

And he differentiates what he called foxes,

borrowing framework from Irving Berlin, foxes from hedgehogs.

This actually differentiated those who were overconfident from those who were

better calibrated.

What does he mean by it?

Hedgehogs, Tetlock says, are thinkers who know one big thing.

They aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that

one big thing into new domains.

They display bristly impatience with those who don't get it.

And express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient

forecasters, at least in the long-term.

Foxes, on the other hand, are, Tetlock says,

thinkers who know many small things, tricks of the trade.

They're skeptical of grand schemes.

They see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises, but

rather exercises in flexible ad hocery that require stitching together

diverse sources of information.

And these judges are rather diffident about their own forecasting ability.

This is the big distinction, and this is the only distinction he found,

that predicts good judgement in these real world, meaningful situations.

We bring it up now because foxes are exactly the kind of folks that would use

all three levels from Allison's models.

Foxes are those who don't go to the mat believing in model one, or

go to the mat believing in model three.

They just think, well,

I need to look at these situations from multiple perspectives.

I'm going to be a better judge of what happens next if I bring

multiple lenses to the situation.

Finally, on the implications from Allison's models,

not all models are equally appreciated.

My hypothesis is, that while Model 1 has been long dominant in political analysis,

and many of us obsess on Model 3, especially in our own organizations.

We're all too familiar with the bureaucratic negotiations that go on

in ours.

We sometimes might neglect what happens in other organizations.

But we tend to think some about Model 3.

What really gets neglected is Model II, these organizational processes.

So you might think, just to make it a little more real.

What are some examples in your organization where

routinized processes are driving what you guys are doing?

Routinized processes would be the best explanation of why some outcome occurs or

some decision is made.

Over time, I've collected some examples from students of these things.

They talk about things like the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf a few

years ago.

How BP responded to that.

Some of the MMS licensing issues that led to in the first place.

How the government responded after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Al ot of it was just routinized behavior not well adapted to

the circumstances that were taking place then.

The intelligence gathering that took place before and after 9/11.

These are all government examples, but

there are non-governmental examples as well in hospitals.

Many routinized procedures in hospitals, and for good reason.

Sometimes they have those procedures in order to protect downsides, but so

much becomes routinized as a result.

An example, some students gave a few years ago was campus recruiting.

This at the time I was at Yale and some students said, I'd like to think that

these organizations come and they recruit at Yale because we're the best school.

But it could just be, and

in fact sure is in some cases, just because that's what they've been doing.

Or somebody set it in motion ten years ago because they were close or

they knew somebody and now it's just the way things are done.

We have examples of students who worked at newspaper.

How much of newspaper's operations are just built around that daily cycle

of producing the newspaper?

So again, pushing you on this kind of underappreciated aspect of what happens in

organizations, this underappreciated model for why organizations do what they do.

What organizational processes are driving your organization?

What organizational processes might you attend to

if you want to influence what happens in organizations?

We have one more implication, and it doesn't flow as immediately for

Allison as from all of the psychology research that's come since Allison.

And that is, don't forget about chance.

A danger of the framework that Allison is suggesting is that you can fully explain

what happened.

But if you fully explain what happens,

you're going to leave out the rule of chance.

And that's going to make you a bad predictor of what happens in the future.

Because there's always a lot of uncertainty and

chance in what happens in the future.

So, one last admonition, don't forget about chance.

So it turns out that even those

in the administration at that time were thinking about chance.

I mentioned before that this was where the terms hawks and doves comes from.

But in subsequent analysis,

people have talked about there's kind of an owlish group, neither hawk nor dove.

This included McNamara, Bundy and Ball, and

it came from the weight that they assigned to the risk of

desperate irrational Soviet action or inadvertent escalation.

In other word, they knew that things may not happen exactly according to plan.

They knew that there was a chance of accident that would lead to disaster or

the initiation of nuclear war.

And that consideration of chance informed their decision making.

McNamara, late in life, they did a documentary on him,

and he talked about this crisis.

This is 45 years after it happened.

And he says, I don't think the Cuban missile crisis was unique.

The Bay of Pigs, Berlin in 1961, Cuba and then later events in the Middle East and

Libya and so on, all exhibit the truth of what I'll call McNamara's Law.

McNamara's Law is, it is impossible to predict with a high degree of confidence

what the effects of the use of military force will be because of the risks of

accident, miscalculation, misperception and inadvertence.

In my opinion,

this law ought to be inscribed above all the doorways in the White House and

Pentagon, and it is the overwhelming lesson of the Cuban missile crisis.

Again, he's talking about military, but

we know that chance applies to non-military situations as well.

And the last implication is, we've got these perspectives,

we've got these models, but we need to also account for chance.

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