Subtle Influence

Sometimes Influence can be very subtle. People are often driven by feedback and visibility, socialising ideas (on a positive manner) might have a dramatic positive impact on the things you would like to accomplish but don't depend solemnly on you. This article comes after discussing it with someone that wanted to gain visibility on a topic.

If you are a software engineer like me think about Eventual Consistency and Gossip Strategies.

The background idea is if you propagate an idea then you are allowing other people to think about it, mutate it, grow it, make it theirs till it comes back to you polished as if you have never heard of it. If it's a bad idea it can just die or branch into something new, nevertheless this will keep people aligned with your ideas/visions and help you build it as it also became theirs.

When is this helpful?

Any time :D well let me give you some simplified examples. Once i really wanted to pick up an interesting project on a team but I was not the senior and was working on other things. How to make my manager aware or give him space to think about it. Just drop comments about it and how exciting it looks. Ask around to get to know if someone is working on it. Learn and Socialise.  How will this impact the team and your manager? The team starts seeing you as a person of interest on the topic and start going to you for that topic, even if you know nothing about it they know you have an interest towards it. Your manager learns that you like the topic and that you are willing to drive it, this is very important. Do NOT assume that people know what you like and your motivations, they are not mind readers and need constant feedback to adapt.

Yes that was a simplified example.. let's scale it!
Once i saw that my team was spending too much time because there was no tool to create customers on particular states and with very specific payment profiles. They had to go through a bunch of steps, use different tools from different platforms, call APIs to setup customers, etc. Now scale this to testing 100 different states with a population of 5000 different customers each to be able to load test the services. We came up with some interesting solutions but still any new scenario or a team needing the same would go through the same battle.
The priorities were very strict at the time and we had a bunch of new incoming projects that were very satisfying but would inherit the same problem.
How do you make it a top priority, should you dismiss the other projects and focus on it? Well it's all about trade offs ;) On this scenario I thought why not having another team do it?
Some steps i took:

• I had an Engineer needing to lead design for his growth . We spoke and he picked up the design of an MVP of a testing tool that would override the grants of a particular customer (opposed to actually creating a customer on a particular state). This fitted our immediate needs and gave an opportunity for the engineer to meet other teams and do some design.
• My Engineer, me and my Product Manager started meeting with teams that either already had a tool or needed one. This allow us to open up teams to the concept and the realisation of a need. It was also very useful to create a very comprehensive backlog of stories that people needed for automation and tooling within the organisation. 

• I took the opportunity while organising a Summit for my organisation, to create a track for QA, Tooling and Automation. I invited key stakeholder teams (selected because they had needs for the it) and Product Managers.  This had a great outcome as many actions came out from it and Product Managers saw incredible benefits on having it for their products, namely for beta testing and to be able to created promotions to a segment of customers.
• I wrote a document on how the organisation would benefit on having a team dedicated to Tooling and Automation. This was distributed to my manager and peers and the document contained key features that the teams on the org required (not the ones i had learned from the other teams).
• The product managers that had attend the summit had by now created specific projects that relied on this capability and were pushing it to gain priority. It's worthwhile mentioning that there was a lot of corridor and coffee talk where i mentioned "if we had this tool that would be achievable", "what would you think about the possibility of being able to give a video streaming permissions for a collection to a well defined group of customers and be able to add and remove the customer from it?". It is also worthwhile saying i was in touch with customer services, stakeholder that would massively gain from this type of tooling for the customer benefit and to be able to troubleshoot, customer services were outside of the organisation but still a key player.

It worked! Upper management decided that the org had a need for a Tooling and Automation team, they wrote their won documents, a lot of people at the time took initiative and ownership of it, i just passed on information.

I have many other examples of smaller and bigger ideas. Sometimes it was just coffee and corridor talk and it still worked. 

Why does it work?

When an idea is shared people take ownership of it, it becomes their vision. The idea will mutate, branch and arrive to even better places. If it's a bad idea someone might use it to build a better one in opposition. This works internally and externally to a team. Sharing a vision is an enabler.

Making someone aware of a need, motivation or idea will adjust expectations, openness and considerations towards it. This is critical to be able to drive change or impactful new projects. As said above making people aware you have an interest makes you part of the topic, sharing an idea will give space for that idea to grow  and the degree of acceptance will be higher when you actually start doing it.
This is my experience, I am open to debate!

But you aren't you losing credit ?? Shouldn't you claim that it was your idea?
This is exactly what the person (happens to be an engineer previously in one of my teams)  i was chatting with asked straight away! . Here is my take on it:
If you want to own the idea you need to lead it which means you are coming prepared and started writing about it so no one will "steal" your idea. Still... socialising your idea will create openness for acceptance and collaboration as it won't arrive on dry land. Let people participate on it and iterate on it opposed to closing your work, this will make your reputation shine by example and not by imposition.
An important trade-off is when you want something to be done or you think and idea is worth exploring but your have different priorities and your workload has reached it's threshold. Propagating the idea as a thought can make it happen and sometimes this can prove to remove blockages from your team or even change the priorities of the team, that is what i call a WIN-WIN. Does it hurt that much that your name isn't on it if it brings success to your team?