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Allison's Three Models of Power

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Influence

University of Pennsylvania

4.8 (130 ratings) | 7.9K Students Enrolled

Course 4 of 4 in the Achieving Personal and Professional Success Specialization

What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.

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4.8 (130 ratings)

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JS

Nov 07, 2018

Excellent course. Great skills for everyone interested in understanding how power works and how to be a more influential individual in general.

JW

Mar 23, 2018

Great course. Long enough to get into the meat of the issues but short enough to keep your attention. Nice mix of content. Highly recommend.

From the lesson

Module 1

In this module, we’ll begin by defining influence. You’ll weigh the pros and cons of proactivity and political ability, and find the right balance to get any job done within your organization. You’ll learn different models of power structures and dynamics, and discover the importance of flexibility, situational awareness, and agency. By the end of this module, you’ll be better able to analyze organizational structure, recognize processes within your organization that need improvement, and use your power of influence to optimize these processes.

Course Introduction2:31

What Is Power?6:47

Just-World Fallacy5:43

Case: Sergio de Mello11:54

Themes from de Mello4:06

Foundations of Social Power: French & Raven8:07

What About You?2:29

Situation Awareness6:50

Case: Cuban Missile Crisis6:48

Allison's Three Models of Power13:09

Implications8:42

Case: Robert Moses8:26

The Sources of Moses' Power3:35

Themes from Moses10:45

Taught By

Cade Massey
Practice Professor

Transcript

In 1969, political scientist Graham Allison published a profoundly influential

paper called Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

His motivation was to suggest that there were

multiple ways we could understand why countries do what they do.

And yet political science had only focused on one of those ways.

So he used the Cuban missile crisis as a case study to better understand,

to illuminate, three different models you could bring

to explaining international behavior, governmental behavior.

So the three models.

We'll go to each of these in more details.

But the three models were.

Model 1, the Rational analysis.

Model 2, Organizational process.

And Model 3, Bureaucratic politics.

So Model 1, Rational policy, Rational analysis.

In this model, the national government is a unitary actor.

So there's no dispersion of interests underneath it, it's just a solitary actor.

You can think of it as a person essentially, a single, solitary actor.

And then that actor's rational, this is a critical bit.

There's no room for biases or misunderstanding or lack of information,

this is a rational decision maker.

And each action you observe then

is part of a strategic objective according to some plan to accomplish the goal.

And this has been the default way of analyzing governmental behavior.

So in the Cuba case, how might that explain what we observed?

So consider the options that the US had in responding to

discovering these missiles in Cuba.

They could do nothing, this wasn't going to happen.

They could use diplomacy, which is one option that was definitely debated.

They could approach Cuba secretly to see if they could work out a deal.

They could use the blockade which is ultimately what they decided.

They could have used surgical air strikes which is probably the single

most heavily considered alternative to the blockade.

Or they could do a full scale invasion.

What does the rational model say about what we observe?

Well, it suggests that it was the rational choice to do the blockade.

It was best because it was the middle course of action.

Not as extreme as either diplomacy or military intervention.

It put the onus back on Kruschev.

So the Kennedy administration felt the burden of choice here.

And they might have wanted to return it back to Kruschev and

find out what he wanted to do.

And then it limits the engagement.

This was a critical part of the debate there that it's not as,

it's not as big a commitment obviously as involving your military.

So there's a little bit of an engagement, enough of an engagement to show

that they're serious, but not a full scale engagement.

And then finally and importantly, it showed that the US has a military

advantage, especially in this part of the world.

So conventional military arms at this time, the U.S.

had an advantage, and it would demonstrate that.

And that would be an important signal to the Soviet Union

as they decided how they wanted to respond.

So there are all these rational reasons.

And there's a single interest that the government wanted to accomplish, and

that would help us explain what happened.

But that's only one way.

Another model, this is where Allison really starts digging in,

is what he called Organizational Process.

And in this model, the government is not a unitary actor,

it's a semi-feudal, loosely allied organizations.

So we can think of it as, you've got different departments.

You've got different interests.

You've got different groups trained in different ways.

And they may not all have the same way of thinking about things,

they may not all even have all the same interests.

In this model, the governmental actions are outputs.

They're not a choice an organization makes,

it's just an output of a routine as they went about their business.

Interestingly, few problems in organizations, especially governments,

are strictly the domain of a single part of the organization.

They're factored, they get divided into split across organizations and

this can lead to difficulty in coordination.

It leads to factionalization.

And it emphasizes that this isn't in fact a choice the organization is making.

As much as just the outcome of these factionalized

parts of the organization going about their business.

So there's a great quote that Allison has in this article.

He says, the best explanation of an organization's behavior at t Is t-1.

What he means by that is, if you want to understand why an organization

did what they did today, just look at what they did yesterday.

There's so much inertia.

There's so much routine in an organization that a lot of what we observe at any given

moment is just a product of what they've been doing.

So how does this explain Cuba?

What organizational routines influenced the outcome here?

So one set of routines were around intelligence gathering.

So there were bits of information that were collected by various intelligence

agencies.

Lumber ships rode very high in the water.

That was odd because lumber ships should be full of lumber and

therefore they should be low in the water.

There was a Cuban in a bar ranting about what was going on down there.

There was a view, at one point, of a missile profile.

But these were in different parts of the organization.

There was no routine for aggregating those and

so they never rose up into some conclusion.

This anticipates some of the critique of the intelligence

community at 9/11 as well.

The routines just weren't built for aggregating into a solitary organization.

There was a delay in scheduling surveillance flights due to inter-agency

conflict.

The intelligence agencies wanted to fly the planes, but

the military organizations wanted to fly the planes.

And until they could get that settled, they didn't fly the planes.

And so they gathered intelligence more slowly than they would have otherwise.

And then, in one of the most profound examples,

the configuration of the Soviet missile bases made a difference here.

So here's a map and this actually comes from the lower level

reconnaissance flights that took place later in the crisis.

But you can see the installation here.

And this is a close up version of what they observed on the first day of

the crisis, when they thought there might be missile installations in Cuba.

How did they know that?

They knew that because each of the elements of this missile site.

The tanks, the truck, the tents that covered the missile

materials, are laid out in the exact same way in Cuba.

As they are at every other Soviet missile site in the world.

So there is a routine, the Soviet military had for setting up missile sites.

The commander that is in charge, here, locally, gets there.

His materials arrive.

He opens up the Soviet handbook for how to set up a missile site and

he starts following the plan.

That routine made it trivial really, for the U.S.

to diagnose, when I saw this picture that this was a Soviet missile site.

Purely the product of Organizational Process.

Other examples.

So analysis, at one point the US considered these mobile missiles.

They classified them as mobile missiles.

And that changed the way the administration thought about how they

should respond.

Because they thought if they're mobile they're going to move

as we deploy surgical strikes.

But it turned out that was merely semantics, essentially.

That even though it's called mobile, it wasn't so

mobile that the strikes wouldn't have worked.

And yet, it affected the decision making at the most important moment,

the decision making of the US government.

The processes around implementing the blockades.

So for example, in a moment that's caught in the movie 13 Days,

which is a fantastic movie about this whole thing.

The naval blockade, there's a certain way naval blockades are set up.

They've been done the same way for essentially centuries, and

yet the Kennedy administration wanted to set them up differently.

The Kennedy administration wanted to set them up closer to the country.

To give the Soviets more time, they wanted more distance between the ships and

the blockade.

They wanted to give the Soviets more chance to turn around essentially.

This was a major point of contention with the Navy.

Because as they said,

we've been setting up blockades since the days of John Paul Jones.

And they were reluctant to do it differently,

even though it was fundamental to how the US navigated this crisis.

And then finally, there were all these routinized activities

that sent kind of false signals about what was going on.

We mentioned the U2 flight over Russia.

Also, there was a nuclear test off in the Pacific theater, that was, again,

completely unrelated to what was going on between the US and Soviets in Cuba.

But how would the Soviets know that?

As one person said, in fact this was Kennedy,

there's always one son-of-a-bitch who doesn't get the message.

Just routines, just organizational processes, but

dangerously provoking the situation as a result.

The third model that Allison suggest is Bureaucratic Politics, and

in this model policy it's the outcome of bargaining games.

He, in this model, thinks about organizations as participants.

Players with different positions, interests, ambitions.

And where you are, what position you're in,

what placement in the organization, influences your decision.

And the outcome, rather than a solitary actor making a single rational decision,

it's jut this output of all these different negotiations.

So a quote he has here that captures it well is,

where you stand depends on where you sit.

This, I hope, begins to demonstrate to you the connection between

this military governmental situation and your organization.

Because we think things like this, greatly apply to most organizations,

where you stand depends on where you sit.

So some examples here from this case, what were the interests and

abilities of the key players here?

This whole event carried extra weight for

Kennedy because he was mid-term.

He was three years away from election, a year away from the campaign beginning.

He had been seen as weak among his critics on military matters.

And so he faces extra risk of anything on the diplomatic side of things

because of the political consequences.

Moreover, the Bay of Pigs still loomed large for them.

This was a complete fiasco in his first year in office and

that meant that there was extra weight on this crisis as well.

And then there were key alliances within the organization.

So probably the most important was between Kennedy and his brother Robert,

the attorney general.

What if Robert Kennedy had been in favor of bombing?

Would that have made a bigger difference than

the advocates that did exist were typically military guys.

President Kennedy was closer to his brother than the military leaders.

So the fact that Robert Kennedy was inclined that way probably

made a difference.

What if McNamara hadn't been reluctant to employ the military?

McNamara was the Secretary of Defense and

again somebody that had a lot of influence over Kennedy.

McNamara was slow, he was reluctant to engage the military in the way that

the actual military leaders wanted them engaged.

So it seems like, in this situation, the dispositions of the individuals and

the alliances they had made a very big difference on what happened.

So, when you approach problems with a Model III mindset,

you not only navigate the politics of your own organization.

But it helps you understand the politics of the other organization,

perhaps the organization that you are negotiating with.

So, this led to Kennedy responding to the first of Kruschev's messages,

not the second of Kruschev's messages.

There are tapes of the conversations of the EXCOMM meetings.

Where advisors are trying to,

they're advocating different views of what's going on in the Soviet Union.

And they're trying to understand how can you

reconcile the first message with the second.

And some of them come to believe, well we think Kruschev is in this position.

He has these interests, he has these constraints.

And the best way to get to him is to ignore the second letter,

appeal to the first.

And that kind of reasoning helped Kennedy offer the exchange and

ultimately encourage, persuade Kruschev to pull missiles out of there.

So to recap, Allison's Models of Organizational Politics,

which we're talking about here in governmental situations.

Because we think they're relevant and non-governmental.

Model 1, Rational Analysis.

This model explains an outcome as the optimal response for

the organization as a whole, to a specific set of conditions and objectives.

Very rational, and

this has been the traditional way of thinking about organizations.

Model 2, Organizational process.

This model explains an outcome as the result of systemic pressures and

routinized behavior.

The key to applying this framework is to think of an outcome as being the byproduct

of activities and

imperatives not specifically intended to produce that outcome.

And then Model 3, Bureaucratic politics.

This model explains outcomes as a product of the accumulated preferences and

strategies of people or sub organizations.

Sometimes negotiations are between parts of the organization

making up an organization.

So here's a quick summary.

You could think about the logic of these models being rational, in Model 1 routine,

in Model 2 in bargaining, rational routine or bargaining.

You can think about the locus of them varying as well.

Model 1, the locus is the organization as a whole, Model 2 is more the division or

function.

And then Model 3 is more the individual.

And you could also think about what they manifest.

Model 1 manifests choice, choice of the organization.

Model 2 is more an output, more by-product, and

Model 3 is more an outcome.

All these individual bargains,

negotiations going on bubble up to an outcome for the organization.

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