Facilitation

How to plan and run a Tree of Influence session with a group, step by step.

A typical Tree of Influence session is comprised of these steps: Prepare, Seed, Group, Connect, Prioritize, and Decompose, followed by a short Close. The steps stay the same for 5 participants or 30, with varying durations depending on group size.

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, where it does not, and when to work on your own instead.
Planning a session: Scope, who facilitates, who takes part, the medium, and the materials.
Timing templates: How long each step takes for small, medium, and large groups.
Starter boards: Ready-to-use boards for popular online diagramming tools and how to set up a board in any other tool.

Steps

Prepare: Set up the board and pre-seed it, so the session starts with something to react to.
Seed: Fill the board with many different nodes, without judging any of them.
Group: Cluster related and duplicate nodes, and park what does not fit, without losing any contribution.
Connect: Draw arrows between nodes, and give each node its type as its role becomes clear.
Prioritize: Vote on the nodes that matter most, then read the result together.
Decompose: Break the highest-priority nodes into deep-dive sub-trees, in subgroups or as one group.
Close: End the session with a saved board, a complete legend, and agreed next steps.

The facilitator

The facilitator's role: When to steer, when to contribute, and when to step back, including when you facilitate from inside the group.
Difficult situations: Disagreement, loops, solution nodes, a dominant participant, and a board that stays empty.
Exercises for first-time groups: Short exercises that help a new group contribute from the first minute and go deeper than a list of complaints.

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.