Every one of them feels like good practice while it is happening.
Since publishing Advocates and Enemies in 2008, I have continued training and coaching executives and senior experts in the practice of influence.
The same mistakes appear repeatedly. They cross industries, seniorities and abilities. A first version of this list was published in 2011. It has been rewritten because the conditions have changed, and the list has changed with them.
Starting late
Influence work is usually triggered by trouble. A project stalls, a sponsor withdraws, a stakeholder objects. Only then does anyone consider who needs to be brought along.
By that point positions have formed and the available moves have narrowed. Work started early shapes the conditions in which decisions are made. Work started late repairs what those decisions have done.
Mapping hierarchy, not power
The organisation chart shows reporting lines. Power travels elsewhere. It sits with the adviser whose view the executive trusts, the gatekeeper who controls access, the colleague whose quiet opposition ends proposals.
Beyond the organisation, boards, investors and regulators press on senior people in ways the chart never shows. A map of formal structure misses the person who decides before the meeting starts.
Leading with the case
The argument is built from the influencer’s evidence and the influencer’s priorities. The stakeholder’s situation is assumed.
A well-evidenced case reaches a person preoccupied with a different problem. The result is read as resistance. The cause is a difference in attention.
AI has made competent analysis cheap and widely available. The quality of the analysis now separates one proposal from another far less than it once did.
Taking agreement for commitment
Support voiced in a meeting costs nothing. Nods and kind words are easy to produce.
Resistance that finds no outlet there moves out of sight. It surfaces later, at the approval stage or in the budget cycle. Silence is read as consent. It is frequently only silence.
Acting on a stale map
Positions shift. Stakeholders change roles, priorities move and other people make their own moves. A picture of the stakeholder environment drawn at the start of an effort describes a situation that has since changed.
The picture is usually held in memory, unrecorded and unrevisited. Recall fades quickly. What remains is a confident impression of a landscape that no longer exists.
Thinking small
Influence is used to defend a project, remove an objection or rescue a proposal. The goal becomes surviving the next decision.
That protects what already exists. It misses the larger use of influence, which is to increase the impact of the work and extend its reach across the organisation. Effort goes into avoiding objections. Little goes into creating advocates.
Working alone, including with AI
One person’s reading of other people is partial. It carries their blind spots, their history with the stakeholder and their wish for a particular outcome. A second view exposes what the first has missed.
An AI tool offers a second view that looks complete. It works from what it has been given and has no knowledge of who will act, or why. Without independent evidence, it can return a picture close to the one it was shown. The influencer receives their own assumptions back, better formatted.
What the seven share
None of the seven requires poor intent. Capable people make them in good faith, which is why they persist and why they are rarely examined.
Errors of method cost time. Errors of trust cost the relationships on which every later attempt depends. The standard that holds Strategic Influence together is set out in Ethical Influence: The Standard That Strategic Influence Cannot Afford to Ignore.
Colin Gautrey, October 2026