Influence strategies are everywhere.

Influence strategies, colloquially referred to as "plays," are everywhere. Every organization and every person employs influence strategies to increase their relative competitive advantage in busy marketplaces. Some do it well. Some try to avoid it. Some do it directly. Some use surrogates. Some run one play at a time. Some run many simultaneously. Almost all do so on instinct but fewer with the support of stated objectives, policies and augmenting research.

Whether as soaring rhetoric, like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, or nervy deeds, like the lone Chinese dissident daring the tanks of Tiananmen Square, influence stratagems are the bridges that take us from what we wish would happen to what we do to get it. Every advertisement is represented and explained by influence strategy. So is every grassroots campaign, special promotion, mass mailing, press release, position paper, speech, protest, and legal brief. Every effort whose core motivation is to prod, position, or persuade, even subtly, is based on and executed through influence strategy, or plays.

Who calls plays? Who runs them?

There is no distinction between people who call the plays from those who run them, at least not by name. By their nature, influence stratagems require constant adjustment to the marketplace and involvement at every level to refine the strategy and its execution, so anyone who calls or runs a play might simply be called a playmaker by virtue of the fact that they run plays. Baseball catchers, coaches, quarterbacks, and point guards are playmakers of course. So are poker players and chess grandmasters. Even spouses, partners, parents, siblings, relatives, preachers, and teachers run plays. We all do.

Remember the surly waitress that wouldn’t serve you last week? She was perhaps running a Pause, a strategic suspension of activity. Remember when your minister asked each family of the congregation to give a little more? It was a Challenge, albeit a most polite one, to cross a line from a position of comfort.

When Oprah Winfrey gives away one new car to every member of her studio audience she’s running a Peacock, a play that moves a marketplace through the raw power of showmanship. Unlike most other plays, the Peacock doesn’t bother much to leverage the marketplace. It manhandles it. It is the news and when well-run, it elevates mere stuntery to a decisively competitive advantage. For Oprah, the Peacock creates incredible residual goodwill that accrues to her brand and various ventures.

An innovative look at influence strategy

The Standard Table of Influence Strategies answers four crucial and constantly recurring questions for playmakers:

• What are we doing?
• How are we doing it?
• What is our competition doing?
• How should we react to it?

The Standard Table of Influence Strategies (see below) is a carefully organized framework of 25 classified play types, the influence strategist's most basic tools and the building blocks of the discipline of influence strategy. Each play type bears distinct differences from the others, but unlike the nearly 120 chemical elements of the periodic table, which are physically and precisely unique, play types are more akin to colors on the spectrum of light, visually distinct but ultimately connected to one another. As products of the soft-edged social sciences, the play types of playmaking are a continuum of related concepts, not a collection of unique compounds.

The Table is the product of field observation, working experience, literature review, previews, and pilot testing. (For more information on the research and development process, see The Elements of Influence, The Making of The Playmaker's Standard, p. 299.) Each play type is placed on The Table according to its primary strategic function, assigned to one of three overarching classes (shown along The Table's top row) and then to one of the eight underlying subclasses (shown in The Table's second row). And each is represented by a distinctive square-shaped icon.

Classes represent the first raw cuts in the classification process, a gathering of all eight subclasses and twenty-five plays into three broad categories called Assess, Condition, and Engage. These constitute a playmaker's full and entire spectrum of activities and considerations. If a marketplace is worth a player's time and attention, there is always some mixture of assessment, conditioning, or engagement to be planned and carried out, and because there is no such thing as a noncompetitive marketplace, the game is played around the clock, in real time and without breaks—always assessing, conditioning, or engaging. In other words, a playmaker's work is never done.

Source: The Elements of Influence, pp. 43-50