Tree of InfluenceFacilitation
How to plan and run a Tree of Influence session with a group, step by step.
A session moves through 6 steps, always in the same order: Prepare, Seed, Group, Connect, Prioritize, and Decompose. The steps stay the same for 5 participants or 30. What changes with group size is how long each step takes.
This section assumes you know the basics. If you have never run a session, read the Quick Start first.
Planning
- When to run a session
- Situations where a Tree of Influence session helps, and where it does not.
- Planning a session
- Group size, medium, scope, and materials.
- Timing templates
- How long each step takes for small, medium, and large groups.
Steps
- Prepare
- Set up the board and pre-seed it before participants arrive.
- Seed
- Fill the board with a high volume of diverse nodes.
- Group
- Cluster related and duplicate nodes without losing contributions.
- Connect
- Draw directional arrows to build the influence graph.
- Prioritize
- Vote and rank to find what matters most.
- Decompose
- Break the highest-priority nodes into deep-dive sub-trees.
The facilitator
- The facilitator's role
- When to steer, when to contribute, and when to step back.
- Difficult situations
- Disagreement, cycles, solution nodes, dominant participants, and a stuck board.
- Exercises for first-time groups
- Short warm-ups that help a new group contribute from the first minute.
Patterns
- Origin pattern
- Start from a single anchor node and expand outward.
- Convergence pattern
- Find connections between clusters the group treats as separate.
- Challenge pattern
- Question a connection that looks too obvious, to find the conditions and hidden causes behind it.
- Prioritization pattern
- Read voting results with the group and discuss the surprises.
- Zoom pattern
- Treat a single node as its own tree.
- Evolution pattern
- Walk the previous tree node by node at the start of a new cycle.
After the session
- Running a deep-dive session
- A follow-up session that builds a sub-tree around one node.
- Evolving the tree
- When and how to review and update a tree across planning cycles.