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