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.

This page helps you decide whether a group session is the right tool for a problem, and when one person working alone is enough. For what the Tree of Influence is and where its job ends, see what it is and is not.

When to run a session

• A group needs to understand a complex, interconnected set of problems before deciding what to do about them.
• People hold different views of what the real problems are, and those views need to be seen side by side.
• A strategic decision is coming, and the group needs a shared map of the landscape to make it.
• A tree from an earlier planning cycle needs to be reviewed and updated. See evolving the tree.

When not to run a session

• Don't reach for the Tree of Influence when the decision is already made. If the group needs an execution plan, the tree is the wrong tool. Planning comes after the tree's job is done.
• When a problem space is simple enough for a list of problems, actions and outcomes, you don't not need a map.
• When the group is not open to being wrong, don't try to run a session. The Tree of Influence needs genuine openness to discovering that current assumptions about problems and solutions are mistaken. Without it, a session would only confirm what people already believed.

On your own

You do not need a group to use the technique. One person can build a tree to think a problem through, and it works well.

On your own, the steps of a session stop being steps. They become activities you move between more freely: adding nodes, clustering them, drawing arrows, and going back to add more. What the group sequence does for you instead is a periodic self-check. Every so often, stop and ask:

• Have I captured enough before I start connecting?
• Have I asked what causes my deepest problems?
• Is the board mostly problems, or mostly solutions?

A tree drawn alone is a thinking aid. When the goal is shared understanding, build the tree with the people who hold the knowledge rather than presenting a finished tree to them. See the core principles. A tree you drew alone still makes good preparation for a session: its nodes are a ready-made seed list, offered to the group as hypotheses.

Example

The renewals session met the first 2 conditions. Three of the company's top 20 customers had left in one quarter, and each of the 5 functions involved had its own explanation: engineering pointed at sales commitments, sales at outages, support at tooling. The customer success lead, who owns renewals, could have drawn a tree alone. She decided that the explanations mattered more than her own map, and called a session instead. See planning a session.