Run the Room

If it doesn’t stick, it wasn’t change.

↓

Influence happens at three levels.

Individual → Interpersonal → Institutional

Most people never leave the second.

Individual

First, you get clear.

Clear on your value.
Clear on the problem you solve.
Clear in 30 seconds or less.

Without this, you’re invisible.

Your work gets misunderstood.
Overlooked.
Left out of the rooms where decisions happen.

Clarity gets you in the room.

Interpersonal

Then you learn to operate inside the room.

You surface hidden resistance.
You create urgency without panic.
You challenge authority without triggering ego.

You turn polite agreement into real commitment.

Now things start to move.

People say yes.
Decisions get made.
Momentum builds.

This is where most people think they’ve cracked it.

Institutional

They haven’t.

Because systems don’t change when people agree.

They change when standard operating procedures change.

A policy.
A budget line.
A requirement.

In other words:
Default behaviour.
Repeatable ways of working.
What happens without you in the room.
How it gets done every time.

And that doesn’t happen because you were persuasive. It happens because you designed how it would stick:

Who must move.
What must change.
When the decision can happen.
What makes adoption easier than ignoring it.

Try this:

The next time something gets a yes, don’t celebrate yet.

Ask about the path from agreement → adoption:

“Where does this become the way it happens every time?”

If you can’t point to the mechanism, you don’t have influence.

You have alignment.

🌿 Most people stop at alignment. The real work is uptake.

More on The Uptake Engine—the set of moves required to take a standard from concept to institutional adoption—in the coming weeks.

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