What’s the difference between influence and collaboration?

I might begin to believe that I’ve come to a conference of salespeople, not enterprise architects. Sheesh.

(I have nothing against influence by salespeople. No commercial organization can be successful without salespeople. Having once done sales, I have a deep appreciation for the profession; I’m not very good at sales)

When we sell, we “influence”. We have an idea which we are trying to get others to agree with, or product to buy.

And certainly, architects must be influential, persuasive. But I do not believe that “influence” is at the heart of architecture. Influence is a byproduct of successful collaboration. We hone the architecture until it meets the requirements. We incorporate stakeholders’ concerns. Selling is not the operative action, in my opinion.

Rather, I believe that what we architects do is synthetic, perhaps highly synthetic?

If we’ve done our job correctly, when our architecture is successful, we will need no pitch. Or, we must bring the bad news that requirements cannot be met, that tough decisions need to be made.

I just posted to this blog about the importance of forming and maintaining relationships based upon understanding, trust, and mutuality.

Since writing that post, I’ve been sitting in presentation after presentation by enterprise architects. And most of them have pointed to “influence” as a key factor of our practice. But none of them has used the word “collaboration”. None have spoken about relationship building, about understanding as a fundamental prerequisite to “influence”

I would fault the presenters at this conference with missing the point. Influence cannot be thought of by itself. It’s a product. Influence comes naturally from acquired trust and earned authority.

Otherwise, our work as architects is a one-way monologue. And I cannot understand how a monologue produces architecture in an enterprise.

I believe that it’s the interaction, both our influence and the understanding of the needs and influence of our stakeholders that drives the relationships that are fundamental to the acceptance of system architecture in the enterprise.

I can’t believe that I had just written about this subject?!? Synchronicity in action.

cheers

/brook from Bangalore, India