 Hi, I'm Geoff Watts, and this video is about battle mapping. Battle mapping can be a really helpful technique to help you think through a challenging and complicated stakeholder management situation. And this video will explain what battle mapping is, how to create and use a battle map, and what to be careful of when creating a battle map. Battle mapping is a stakeholder management and influencing technique adapted for the military. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by a seemingly unchangeable situation or needing to influence a rather powerful or perhaps obstinate person, then battle mapping can be a useful mental exercise that helps open up possibilities. Before I explain the technique though, I'll just begin with a caveat. This is a military metaphor, and not everyone will feel comfortable with it, but please remember it is simply a metaphor. By all means, use the technique with a different metaphor if you prefer. The first step with battle mapping is to lay out the battlefield. This involves identifying who all the stakeholders are. So to use an example, let's say I've got a manager in the organisation who's interfering with the work of me and my development team. There we are. We'll call this manager Ian. Now my goal is to stop Ian negatively interfering with me and the team. Oh, I could try talking to Ian directly. That would be great. But let's say I don't feel comfortable doing that, or let's say perhaps I've already tried that and it hasn't worked. When I lay out the battlefield, I look for who else is on the field of play. So perhaps we have a product owner who's responsible for the overall return and investment of the work we're doing as a team. Perhaps we have a line manager who's responsible for our development and has got an interest in our output and our happiness levels. Perhaps Ian has colleagues, customers and managers. Perhaps there's another team that Ian interacts with. We would try and find out as many people who are involved or who could become involved with the situation at hand and draw them on our battle map. Step two is to identify the allegiances. Now we might colour in green anyone who we could consider to be an ally. That's someone who's actively on our side and might go to battle with us metaphorically. We might colour in blue anyone who supports us but in a less proactive and perhaps more passive manner than our allies. Grey would be for those who've got no interest in whether we succeed or not but anyone who would rather we failed, we could colour in orange and label them threats. And anyone who may actively seek to undermine sabotage or perhaps otherwise challenge our aims, we could colour red and label an enemy. Of course, there will always be some stakeholders whose allegiance we're unsure of and that's OK, we'll just leave those unknowns as white for now. Now our battlefield's looking more colourful and it could already give us an insight into what to do next. Perhaps just by looking at this we can see and understand the pressures that Ian is under that are driving his behaviours. And this might allow us to talk to him with greater empathy and help us find a way to make his situation easier without negatively influencing us. Anyway, after we've identified the allegiances, step three is to map out the influences. Here we simply draw arrows to represent the direction of the influence and the thick of the line the more influence that person holds. Now influence could be formal, such as management power or informal, such as respect. But once we see the lines we can then start to look for some what we might call tactical strikes. For example, we may be able to use our influence with the product owner and our line manager's influence with the product owner to indirectly influence Ian. And this could reduce Ian's influence over us and possibly even reduce his threat level. Some influence strategies might be more long term and what we might call strategic plays. For example, we might lobby our product owner to use her network within Ian's customers and her relationship with another product owner to influence Ian. Battlemappings are a tool that I've seen help many people and teams take greater control over their situations, see more possibility and begin to make progress when influencing stakeholders. It's not magic though and there are many other factors that affect the success of your influencing strategies, not least of which your ability to empathize with those involved and avoid appearing manipulative. A couple of complementary techniques I've found useful are the use of powerful questions and persuasion techniques. Powerful questions such as if a future version of yourself were here, what would their advice be to you? And who do you think would handle this situation brilliantly? What would they do? And what are you assuming about this situation that might not be correct? And persuasion techniques such as helping them to visualize the future and make a change more attractive? Or gathering social proof to justify your point of view? Well, of course you should be careful with the metaphor, especially if it extends into bringing in air support and assassinations and other aspects of warfare. And of course you need to be careful labelling colleagues as threats and enemies because that could easily backfire. But the idea of visualizing your stakeholders and the influence maps between them, then identifying quick wins and strategic plays could be very helpful for you or your team.