Influencing Without Authority

Authority is a tool for compliance. It gets you the minimum. Influence is the tool for adoption—the thing that makes underwriters *want* your customer graph because it closes deals faster. This lesson is about building that influence as a repeatable system, not a personality trait.

The Currency Model: Trade Before You Ask

Every functional leader operates on a currency they actually care about, and it is almost never "better data governancedata governanceData governance is the set of policies, roles, and processes that ensure data is accurate, secure, well-defined, and used responsibly across an organization.View full definition →." The COO cares about cycle time. The CMO cares about pipelinepipelineAll active sales opportunities across the stages of the sales process, together with their combined potential value and probability of closing.View full definition → and CACCACCustomer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers gained in a period. It measures how efficiently you grow.View full definition →. The CFO cares about forecast accuracy and audit exposure. When you show up asking them to adopt your standards, fund your platform, or assign you their best analyst, you are asking them to spend *their* currency on *your* balance sheet.

Influence begins when you invert this. The framework, adapted from Cohen and Bradford's work on exchange, is simple: identify the counterpart's currency, then structure your ask as a deposit into their account before you make a withdrawal from it.

Practically, this means you do reconnaissance before you pitch. Before approaching the Chief Underwriting Officer, the insurer's CDO should have known: underwriting's loss ratio was under board scrutiny, and their pricing models were starving for external risk signals. That is currency. The pitch is no longer "adopt the CDPCDPA Customer Data Platform unifies customer data from all sources into persistent, actionable profiles that other systems can use.View full definition → for data consistency." It becomes "I can wire three new third-party risk feeds into your pricing model in six weeks—and the only condition is they flow through the platform." The governance win rides along inside the currency the counterpart already wanted to spend.

Mapping currencies systematically

Do this on paper for your top eight stakeholders. For each, capture four things:

• Their scarce resource (what they never have enough of: time, headcount, forecast accuracy, board air cover)
• Their active pain (the thing keeping them up this quarter)
• What you can offer that touches it (a data productdata productA data asset managed like a product, with an owner, defined users, guaranteed quality, and measurable business value.View full definition →, a metric, an automation, an insight)
• What you need from them (adoption, funding, headcount, sponsorship)

The discipline is refusing to make an ask until the first three columns are filled. A CDO who walks into a business review with a slide titled "Data QualityData QualityThe degree to which data is fit for purpose: accurate, complete, consistent, timely, valid and unique. Poor quality data undermines analytics, reporting and AI.View full definition → Maturity" has already lost. A CDO who walks in with "Here's the £2.3M in duplicate spend I found in your vendor data, and here's how we stop it recurring" has bought a year of goodwill.

Coalitions: Sequence the Room Before You Enter It

Change across functions is never a single sale. It is a sequence of sales, and the order determines the outcome. The most common CDO failure mode is the premature all-hands mandate: gathering every stakeholder into one room, presenting the grand vision, and asking for collective buy-in. In that room, the risk-averse anchor the conversation, the skeptics feed off each other, and consensus collapses to the lowest common denominator.

Coalitions are built in private, one relationship at a time, *before* the group convenes. The public meeting should ratify a decision that is already 80% made in the hallways.

The three roles you must fill

Every successful coalition needs three archetypes, and you should name real people for each before launching an initiative:

1. The Executive Sponsor — not the CEO who signed your mandate (that's authority, not influence), but a peer P&L leader who will spend their own political capital defending the initiative in rooms you're not in. You earn this by making them look good first.

2. The Lighthouse Adopter — a mid-level leader in a respected function who goes first, generates a visible win, and becomes your reference customer. Choose them for credibility with peers, not for how easy they are to convince. An easy adopter no one respects proves nothing.

3. The Bridge — someone with informal network centrality who isn't senior but is trusted across silos: a chief of staff, a veteran product manager, a beloved principal engineer. They tell you where the bodies are buried and pre-socialize your ideas so they arrive warm.

The sequencing rule: secure the Bridge first (intelligence), then the Lighthouse (proof), then the Sponsor (protection), and only then take it wide. Reversing this order—starting with the big public pitch—is how the insurer's CDO ended up at 11%.

Managing the resister

You will have a resister, often a powerful one. The instinct is to route around them or overpower them with sponsorship. Both backfire—routed-around executives sabotage quietly, and overpowered ones wait for your first failure to say "I told you so."

The better move is to convert the resistance into a design input. Bring the resister in *early* and give them a specific, bounded veto: "I want your team to define the data qualitydata qualityThe degree to which data is fit for purpose: accurate, complete, consistent, timely, valid and unique. Poor quality data undermines analytics, reporting and AI.View full definition → thresholds for the underwriting feed, because if these aren't right, the whole thing fails." You've transformed an opponent into a co-author. People rarely torpedo what they helped build. If they remain hostile, at least you've documented that they were consulted—which changes the politics of a later escalation entirely.

Trust as Infrastructure: The Slow Compound

Currency and coalitions are tactics. Trust is the balance sheet that makes the tactics work, and it accrues or erodes with every interaction. The mental model that serves CDOs best is the trust equation: trustworthiness rises with credibility, reliability, and intimacy, and falls with self-orientation.

For a CDO, three of these deserve specific attention.

Reliability is your cheapest, most underused lever. Data leaders overpromise on transformation and underdeliver on the boring commitments—the report that was due Thursday, the access request that took three weeks. Nothing erodes influence faster than a CDO who talks about enterprise strategy but can't reliably provision a dashboard. Build a reputation for doing exactly what you said by the date you said it, especially on small things. Reliability on small commitments buys permission for big bets.

Self-orientation is the killer. The moment a stakeholder senses that your recommendation serves your empire-building—more headcount, a bigger platform budget, centralized control—your influence craters. This is why "everything should flow through my platform" is such a losing frame. The winning frame is visible self-restraint: recommending the solution that's best for them even when it's smaller for you. One CDO built enormous credibility by telling a business unit, "You don't need our platform for this; your existing tool is fine—here's how to govern it properly." That single act of not-grabbing bought her the next three yeses.

Credibility for a CDO is domain-specific and must be re-earned per function. Being right about data architecture does not make underwriters trust your judgment about pricing. Invest in enough domain fluency to speak each function's language—not to do their job, but to prove you understand what winning looks like in their world.

The reciprocity ledger

Keep an actual record—mental or literal—of favors extended and owed across your stakeholder mapmapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition →. Influence operates on reciprocity, and the CDOs who thrive are net creditors: they've done more for others than others have done for them. When you need a fast yes on a governance policy, you're drawing down a balance you deposited months earlier by fast-tracking someone's data request or covering for them in a steering committee.

A simple way to make this concrete is to track it like a pipelinepipelineAll active sales opportunities across the stages of the sales process, together with their combined potential value and probability of closing.View full definition →:

The point isn't the file. It's the discipline of never making a major ask from a debtor position.

From Influence to Adoption: The Monday-Morning Playbook

Influence that doesn't convert to adoption is just popularity. Here is how the pieces assemble into action for a real initiative.

Start with a wedge, not the platform. Pick the single highest-currency use case for your Lighthouse adopter and deliver it end to end, fast. The insurer's CDO should have picked *one* underwriting team, wired in the risk feeds, and demonstrated a measurable loss-ratio improvement in a quarter. A narrow, undeniable win is worth more than a broad, contested rollout. Adoption spreads by envy, not mandate—other teams ask for what a respected peer already has.

Make the win legible. A result that only you can see doesn't build influence. Quantify it in the counterpart's currency, and let *them* present it. When the underwriting VPVPA clear statement of the benefits your product delivers, the problems it solves and why customers should choose you over alternatives.View full definition → tells the board "we cut our loss ratio by 4 points using the new data feeds," you have manufactured a sponsor who is now publicly invested in your success. The CDO who grabs the credit gets one win; the CDO who gives it away gets a champion.

Convert the win into a standard—quietly. Once the wedge works, the governance and platform standards that made it work become the price of admission for the next team, not a policy imposed from above. "Here's how underwriting did it" is a far stronger mandate than any council charter. You are now spreading standards through demand rather than decree.

Watch for the adoption-vs-compliance signal. The insurer's shadow pipelines were the tell. When people build workarounds, they are voting against your solution with their behavior while nodding in your meetings. Treat every shadow system as market feedback, not insubordination: it means your official path is slower, harder, or less useful than the alternative. Fix the product, and the workarounds disappear on their own.

Key Takeaways

• Fill three columns before every ask. Never request adoption, funding, or headcount until you can name the stakeholder's scarce resource, their active pain, and what you offer that touches it. Frame the data win as a deposit into their currency, not a withdrawal.

• Sequence coalitions privately: Bridge, then Lighthouse, then Sponsor. The public meeting ratifies a decision already made in hallways. Choose your first adopter for peer credibility, not for how easily they say yes.

• Convert your most powerful resister into a co-author by giving them a bounded, specific role in the design. People don't sabotage what they helped build.

• Run as a reciprocity creditor. Deliver flawlessly on small commitments, visibly refuse to over-grab, and make deposits before you need withdrawals. Never make a major ask from a debtor position.

• Win narrow, make it legible, then let the standard spread by demand. Give the credit away to manufacture sponsors, and treat every shadow system as product feedback telling you the official path isn't good enough yet.