How do you get cross-functional buy-in? It’s hard and ambiguous. People on my teams over the years often come trying to get advice on this: how do I get people to participate in my program? How can I get people on board with what I’m doing? Everyone has to influence without authority at some point at work. I’ve noticed that people always default to two levers: 1) persuasion 2) power. But there’s a third, overlooked option that’s far more effective and it’s almost silly. I just say: make it fun. 

First, let’s talk about the usual options. Persuasion is the combination of all of the mind-changing strategies ranging from subjective salesmanship to quantitative data-gathering. It always results in weeks spent on decks, docs and analysis. This is definitely “good business” but doesn’t always yield change. Power is basically just escalation: “Hey boss, can I create a new global policy to force my colleagues not to do this thing I don’t like?” You get the idea. In both of these scenarios you’re trying to bend peoples’ wills to your agenda. You’re trying to force it. There are many great alternatives to power and persuasion – many creative ones – but the one that has worked for me over the years is to “make it fun” instead. 

The idea of “make it fun” is that you just engage peoples’ brains in the problem space in a happy and enjoyable way. In a workplace, this is very powerful because everything (especially persuasion and power) is pretty boring. So the entertainment bar is very low. 

Let me tell you a story of this in practice. When I was at Sony developing and producing shows for streaming services, the promotional artwork and merchandising assets were one of the lowest-priority to-dos for the content executives. They would obsessively develop scripts and produce video, but the “thumbnails” or key art that was used in the apps to promote them were an afterthought. So much so, that some of the execs never looked at them, or they waited until the very last day of the project to delegate them to the lowest-level person who could operate Photoshop. The problem with this is that often, the visual imagery that accompanies an episode of TV has more influence on whether and how long someone watches the episode. It’s incredibly important and I needed them to pay more attention to it. I needed more of their limited work hours and brainshare to switch over to promotional artwork. 

Instead of creating a new policy that people had to follow a checklist with their packaging assets or sitting everyone down in a meeting to review reams of data to prove to them once and for all that they should pay attention to visuals… I made it fun. I commandeered a prominent corkboard near the exit of the main office. I printed out notecards with everyone’s names on them. And then large and in color, I had the graphics team print out the 4 different candidates for promotional artwork each week and paste them to the board. Each person could assign their name tag with a pushpin to the artwork they thought would perform the best. When we got the data back each week from the platform, I’d add labels declaring the top performers. 

The office became hooked on this “game” of which image viewers were most likely to click on and engage with. People would hover in front of the board psycho-analyzing the audience and hypothesizing about what made each item more or less eye-catching. There were office rivalry moments where the personnel split perfectly in half across two options. And there were thrillingly instructive moments – where the whole office voted for an obvious top choice– and the lone intern won, making a daring solo vote on a fringe art concept. The whole construction turned an afterthought deliverable into a watercooler discussion. This resulted in higher and higher quality promotional art with better performance and more thoughtful design. I never had to “get buy-in” to accomplish this big behavioral change. I just had to make it fun.

Thanks to my friend Kelly Sutton for reading a draft of this.