You may know that I am a sucker for applying military thinking and ideas to business. Last night I discovered a little of what sitting cross legged, drinking green tea and eating pistachio nuts with the Taliban can do to enhance regional influence and gather human intelligence for British forces operating in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. At one of Graham Spivey’s excellent CXO Dinners at the Oriental Club, Emma Dutton MBE and her team related what they had learned gathering human intelligence in the most lethal of circumstances, on the real front line.

Emma and her ex-miltary colleagues have founded Applied Influence Group, and are putting what they learned in the heat of conflict in to practice for organisations (like yours and mine) on a very different landscape. They gave a little taster of their methodology talking of their three cornerstones of Understanding, Communication and Influence. They talked micro-expressions (as made famous by the excellent Lie To Me with Tim Roth), social proof and developing trust. They mentioned Robert B. Cialdini, and that’s pointed me towards another book for the reading list - Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion. If you want to find out more about Emma in Afghanistan there is a great interview here. I’ll certainly be finding out more and thinking about building influence plans for the next campaign, change or project I’m involved with.

And if you want to find out more about how Graham’s organisation creates value for CxOs, go here.