Origin story

How a joke during a coffee break named a problem-solving technique.

"You never heard about the Tree of Influence?"

The Tree of Influence got its name from a joke, during a coffee break.

A software organization had gathered 20 to 40 of its technical leaders, engineering managers, and developers for a week-long offsite. They flew in from development centers in several time zones. The schedule was packed with facilitated sessions on everything that had been festering for months.

One session stood out. Two engineering managers had led the group through an exercise nobody recognized. By the end, sticky notes covered the wall: trust issues between teams, silos, skill gaps, and the culture people wanted instead. Arrows ran from note to note across the wall.

During the break, someone asked the facilitators what the technique was called. One of them answered with mock surprise:

You never heard about the Tree of Influence? It's a really good book, you should buy it!

There was no book. The name stuck anyway.

The habit behind the name

The technique was not invented that day. One of the 2 facilitators had been reaching for sticky notes and arrows for years.

Faced with an architecture decision, a staffing problem, or a customer escalation, the instinct was always the same. Write down what is going on, draw arrows, and map the problem before trying to solve it.

At that point in time it was not a methodology learned in a workshop or read in a book. It was a way of thinking. The offsite gave it a name, enough structure to repeat it, and a way to do it with a whole room.

The problem it was made for

That first session was not about code or process. It was about trust.

The organization had grown fast. Its teams were spread across several development centers, and many people had never met face to face. People hesitated to give each other frank feedback. Teams saw each other as blockers rather than collaborators. The norm people wanted, "your problems are my problems," felt far away.

You cannot mandate trust, but you can map it. The group put on the wall the problems people had been afraid to say out loud. They traced those problems to causes: some organizational, some interpersonal, some technical. Then they named the outcomes they actually wanted.

The tree did not solve those problems. It made them visible, shared, and structured enough to talk about honestly. Months later, participants still referred to its nodes by name: "Remember the reluctance to give feedback? I think we're seeing it again."

That has been the pattern ever since. A Tree of Influence does not hand a group its answers. It gives the group a shared map, and with a shared map, the answers become findable. Read more in the trust workshop case study.

From joke to practice

After the offsite, the technique kept being used, and each use adapted it to the situation: a team that could not deliver reliably, the technical debt of a whole product line, deep dives, and so on.

Each use kept the same core: sticky notes, arrows with a direction, problems at one end and outcomes at the other. Everything else varied. Some trees had actions and some had none. Some used one kind of arrow, others three. Some were built live by a room, others mostly by one person, with comments from the rest.

That flexibility is deliberate and is now a fundamental part of the core principles.

Why the joke matters

There is something fitting about a technique named as a joke. It carries no pretense, no trademarked vocabulary, no certification, no claim to solve everything. Someone made it up because they needed it, and it worked well enough to keep using.

The joke is also memorable. People who were in that first room still tell the story. It is a fair warnng that this is not ancient wisdom or academic theory. It is a practical tool with a funny name. For how it relates to frameworks with more serious origins, see compared with other frameworks.

Why write it down now

Some problems span technical debt, team structure, culture, and strategy all at once. A backlog or a Gantt chart cannot hold them. A group first needs to see the whole system, trace causes, and agree on what blocks what, before anyone assigns work.

A Tree of Influence does that, and it insists on understanding before solving. That discipline can be rare in groups under pressure, which is arguably where it is needed most.

So far, the technique has mostly been used by the people who developed it. This website writes down what they learned, under an open license, so anyone can try it, adapt it, and report back. If it grows, it will happen the way it started, through use.

If you have read this far, you may already reach for sticky notes and arrows when things get tangled. Now the habit has a name. There is still no book, but there is a Quick Start. You should try it. :)