Founder of the UX 365 Academy. Consultant, author, speaker. Proud to have helped 400K+ UXers and designers sharpen their skills + propel their careers forward.
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Not every decision is yours to influence. And once you recognize that, you’ll be a lot better off — and a lot more effective.
As a profession, we talk endlessly about “getting a seat at the table.” Being included earlier. Having a voice in strategic decisions. Being RESPECTED, DAMMIT!
All reasonable ambitions; I get it.
But I also spend far too much of my time as a consultant watching people expend enormous amounts of energy trying to influence decisions that were never actually open for discussion. To wit:
– A deadline’s already been promised to a customer.
– A budget’s already been approved.
– An executive’s put their foot down about how something onscreen looks.
– A regulatory requirement no one agrees with dictates what needs to happen.
And yet…there is always someone still trying to convince the person or the team — or hell, the entire organization — to reconsider the underlying constraint.
AS. IF.
Look, I get it. Sometimes a push is needed. Sometimes commitments *can* be changed, strategies can be reconsidered. And I agree fully that shitty decisions should never be protected just because they're already made.
But sometimes those constraints are REAL. And the opportunity to influence is NOT what or where you think it is.
Here’s what I mean by that:
Maybe you can't change the deadline…but you CAN influence scope.
Maybe you can't change the budget…but you CAN influence how the money is allocated.
Maybe you can't change the strategic direction…but you CAN influence how the team measures whether or not it's working.
So the question you need to be asking yourself is “what part of this decision is actually still OPEN to being made?”
You’ll get a lot more mileage outta that one than from trying to figure out how to get someone to agree with you.
Influence, more often than not, isn't about changing the decision someone has made. It's about finding the decisions still available to be made — and helping people make them. Responsibly.
And sometimes it's acknowledging that you've reached the limit of your authority and influence.
And as I tell people all the time, this is NOT failure.
It usually just means you've done your job: made the risks visible, presented the alternatives and done your best to make sure all responsible parties understand the consequences of their decisions.
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One of the most important skills you’ll ever develop is learning how to disagree with someone who has a lot more authority than you.
And let me clarify:
NOT because you need to become more confrontational.
And not because every disagreement is worth having.
I tell you this because there will absolutely be times when some decision maker is about to make one you know is gonna cause some *serious* shit to hit the fan.
And your unenviable task in that moment is to figure out how to raise that concern —without making the situation worse.
For most of my career, I’ve watched people approach these conversations in two equally terrible ways:
1) Avoid the disagreement entirely. They recognize the problem, usually complain quite a bit about it privately. But ultimately decide it's a lot safer to just keep their heads down.
2) Approach the conversation believing that the strength of their evidence will automatically determine the outcome. They explain why the decision is wrong, present their research and point out the consequences.
And when the person in authority doesn't immediately reconsider, they’re frustrated.
Often visibly so.
The problem here that no one acknowledges, folks, is that authority CHANGES the dynamics of a conversation.
That person you're challenging may be accountable for things you know less than nothing about.
They may have already made commitments, they may be stressing about looking indecisive or, they may just believe their judgment is better than yours. That’s a thing too.
Now, do any of those possibilities means you should abandon your concerns?
No.
But they DO mean you had better understand the situation you're walking into well before you open the door.
The place to start is by establishing exactly WHAT it is that you're both trying to accomplish.
Not as some bullshit rhetorical trick (“echo their words back to you so that…PLEASE) — but as a genuine, honest attempt to understand whether you're working toward the same outcome. Or not.
Once you know that, you share the risk you see in terms of that outcome:
“If we’re saying we want the end result to be X, I think this approach pretty much guarantees we aren’t going to get it. Can I walk you through what I'm seeing?"
You're still challenging the decision and you’re still exercising good, solid judgment.
But you're doing it in a way that doesn't discount the other person's role or step on their toes. It invites them to examine along WITH YOU, instead of feeling like they have to defend their authority.
Which, I promise you, goes a very long way in changing what comes of your time together. Not to mention your working relationship.
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You can be beyond incredible at your job and still struggle to get people to listen.
You can understand the problem, have the evidence, make a sound recommendation and STILL watch the decision go in another direction entirely.
And if you've been doing this work long enough, you probably already know that explaining yourself more clearly doesn't always help.
There’s a reason for that and it’s this:
Influence is NEVER only about the strength of your argument.
It's about understanding the *people* involved in the decisions at hand: what they're accountable for, what they're trying to protect, what risks they're willing to accept and what might make them reconsider their position.
On December 15, I'm teaching a free, live Maven Lightning Lesson called Gaining Influence (Without Authority).
We'll look at why capable professionals struggle to influence decisions, how to recognize what's actually driving stakeholder resistance and how to CHANGE that conversation — without needing a more impressive title or a bigger role.
This isn't about manipulating people, becoming more charismatic, or learning clever ways to win arguments. I hate that shit.
This is about understanding HOW decisions actually happen — and becoming a lot more effective in the conversations that shape them.
If you're responsible for outcomes but don't always have the authority to determine how they're achieved, I'd love to have you join me.
Again, I'm teaching a free, live Maven Lightning Lesson on December 15:
Gaining Influence (Without Authority)
We'll explore how to understand stakeholder resistance, frame concerns more effectively, and influence decisions without relying on formal authority.
Register here:
maven.com/p/260ca8/gaining-i…
ALT Landing page promoting Joe Natoli's free 30‑minute lesson titled "Gaining Influence (Without Authority)" with date/time, an email registration field and Register button, instructor headshot on the right, and a "What you'll learn" list of outcomes.
I have a wish I would like to share with you all. It’s this:
I really, REALLY wish we'd stop pretending organizational politics are something that happens *only* in dysfunctional companies.
Politics exist wherever people have different interests, different responsibilities and unequal authority over decisions.
In other words…pretty much EVERYWHERE:
– A dept. head wants to protect their budget.
– A product manager wants to deliver on a commitment.
– An executive wants to demonstrate progress to the board (or to investors or shareholders) on some strategic, high-visibility initiative.
– An engineering manager wants to avoid introducing a headache their team will have to support for the next three years.
– A designer wants to prevent an experience that creates unnecessary friction for customers.
Those interests, as you might imagine, do NOT automatically align — and more importantly, the people involved don't have equal power to determine what happens.
That, my friends, is politics.
It isn't necessarily dishonesty, or manipulation, or people acting like assholes.
It's just reality, OK? Decisions happen inside organizations where people have very different incentives — and equally different consequences — to manage.
The mistake I see too many folks make is treating those realities as *distractions* from the actual work. They fall into the trap of believing that if the research is good enough, the design is strong enough, or the reasoning is clear enough, then the correct decision should be obvious.
But decisions aren't made in those kinds of vacuums; they’re made by HUMANS.
Humans who have bosses, budgets, deadlines, reputations, relationships, and obligations that may have very little to do with your recommendation.
Now — am I suggesting that you have to become manipulative in order to navigate that environment successfully? Play games with people instead of being honest and straightforward?
No, I am not.
But you DO have to understand the playing field:
– Who’s accountable for that decision?
– Who has the authority to approve it?
– Who can prevent it from happening?
– Whose cooperation is necessary?
– And what does each of those people stand to gain, lose, or RISK?
I’ve had people tell me those are cynical questions.
Bullshit. Those are PRACTICAL questions.
And if you refuse to ask them because you think good work should speak for itself, you're giving up a CRITICAL opportunity to influence what *happens* to that work.
Now...I want you to copy what I say next and paste it somewhere you’ll see it every single day.
Understanding organizational politics is NOT the opposite of having principles — it’s what allows you to ACT on those principles effectively.
Capisce?
ALT Consultant Joe Natoli, a bald man wearing clear-rimmed glasses and a gray button-up shirt, looking directly at the camera with a short gray goatee and small hoop earring; microphone arm and office posters/books visible in the background.
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People don't ever trust you just because you're right.
They trust you because they believe you GET IT: you understand what matters, you exercise sound judgment and you won't ever put them in a difficult position without first acknowledging the consequences.
As you can see by word count alone…there’s a difference.
I've seen extraordinarily sharp, knowledgeable and experienced people lose credibility because they approach every disagreement as an opportunity to prove their expertise.
And I've also seen people with a lot less experience become trusted advisors — because they consistently helped others understand their options.
They didn't pretend every recommendation was risk-free, they didn't hide tradeoffs, they didn't EVER treat disagreement as evidence that someone was ignorant and when they didn't know something…they said so.
That last one matters more than you may realize.
If every single recommendation you make is presented as unquestionably correct…folks eventually start wondering what you're leaving out.
But when you're willing to say, “look, here's what I believe, here's why, here's what we don't know and here's the risk I think we're accepting," you give people something they can actually USE.
You're helping them exercise good judgment.
And as I have said many times in many ways, over time that changes how they SEE you.
You stop being someone who shows up with opinions that need to be approved — and you start being someone they want involved BEFORE a decision is made.
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"Users won't understand this."
I've heard designers say some version of that thousands of times. And depending on the situation, they may be absolutely right.
But there's a problem with that statement:
While it tells someone what you're concerned about, it doesn't tell them why they should SHARE your concern.
Go with me for a second here: imagine you're presenting a recommendation to the product management team.
You've identified a confusing workflow; the research shows that people struggle to complete a critical task.
Your recommendation is to simplify the process before launch, but management pushes back because the change affects the schedule.
So you explain how the experience violates established usability principles, you show examples of where people got confused; you point out that the design isn't intuitive.
All legitimate observations.
But what if the people you're talking to... are NOT primarily concerned with whether the interface is intuitive?
What if they're concerned with the cost of the project? The launch commitment? Internal operational efficiency? Customer retention? An outcome THEIR boss wants and has subtly threatened their job over?
My point: while your evidence is far from irrelevant, it isn’t serving you. Nor does it have any shred of influence or leverage in this situation.
Why?
Because you haven't connected it to the decision(s) THEY’RE responsible for making.
Now — consider what happens when you frame that same concern a little differently:
“We watched people struggle to complete a task that's essential to them getting value from this product. If that continues after launch, we're likely to see more support requests, more abandoned attempts and more people who never reach the outcome we're investing in this system to deliver.”
Same underlying problem, right? but now you're having a VERY different conversation.
You're not asking management to give a shit about usability just because you do.
You're showing how that usability problem creates very specific CONSEQUENCES for something the organization **already cares about.** Something those managers are already directly responsible for, the outcomes they will be held accountable for.
Understand me here: this is NEVER about dressing up design concerns in business language to make executives happy.
It's about understanding that any and every recommendation you make does not ever exist in isolation — it is ALWAYS competing with other priorities, investments, risks and commitments.
And the people making decisions need to fully understand those tradeoffs.
So here’s the takeaway after far too many words:
Your expertise identifies the problem, yes — but your ability to explain its consequences helps other people decide what to DO about it.
No matter what your title is, this is a skill you *must* develop.
Joe Natoli retweeted
A good conference program starts long before anyone steps on stage. 💛 Thank you to everyone who put time and thought into a WebExpo 2027 proposal.
We're deep in the selection process, considering how your ideas could fit together and looking forward to calls with potential speakers. More to come.
Here's something I wish more product executives and managers understood:
You CANNOT hold someone accountable for an outcome while denying them influence over the decisions that determine it.
Well…
OK, technically you can. Organizations do it every day; I have no doubt you’ve seen this happen as often as I have, probably in just as many ways:
– A design leader is accountable for experience and design quality…but has no influence over scope.
– A product manager is accountable for delivery…but can't secure the resources required.
– An engineering lead is accountable for stability…but isn’t allowed to challenge the release schedule.
– A department head is expected to improve performance…but has no power to change the policies creating those problems in the first place.
And then, of course, when the results are disappointing….everyone wants to know WHO FAILED.
The conversation becomes about execution: Who didn't communicate? Who didn't escalate? Who didn't take ownership?
Listen, sometimes those *are* legitimate questions. But all too often, they're a way to avoid examining how the authority and accountability in question were distributed in the first place.
If someone’s responsible for an outcome, they need at least ONE of these two things:
1) The authority to make the decisions necessary to achieve it.
2) A reliable way to influence the people who have that authority.
Without either thing, you're not empowering someone — you’re assigning them responsibility for consequences they have ZERO control over.
And I am here to tell you, as someone clients don’t call until they’re in trouble, this is absolutely NOT a sustainable way to run...well...anything.
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When someone says no to something you propose or recommend, your first instinct is likely to try and change their mind. Or start down the road of figuring out how to do so.
I think that's the wrong place to start.
Why? Because in most cases, that NO doesn't tell you nearly enough about what's really happening.
It could mean they disagree with your reasoning; maybe they agree with you but can't accommodate the cost; maybe the timing is wrong; maybe your recommendation threatens something they're accountable for.
Or…maybe they've already made a commitment they don't think they can reverse.
Those are all very different situations — but I regularly see people respond to all of them in exactly the same way:
They explain why their recommendation is right.
*Again.*
Only louder, longer and with more evidence.
I’ll give you an example. A product manager rejects a designer's recommendation to delay a launch for additional testing. Each person here has a different POV:
1) The designer sees a serious usability risk.
2) The product manager sees a delivery commitment that affects customer expectations, revenue and — the thing that really drives the bus here — their own credibility.
If the designer keeps arguing that usability testing is important, they may very well be right — but they’re not necessarily addressing the product manager's concern.
The product manager may *already* believe testing is important. But that in no way means they’ll be willing to miss the deadline.
So a much more productive conversation starts with questions relevant to all concerns on the table:
“What happens if we don't meet the launch date?”
“Which part of the commitment is actually nonnegotiable?”
“What's the biggest consequence you're trying to avoid?”
Those questions don't guarantee agreement — but answering them WILL tell you what problem you're actually trying to solve here.
Maybe there's a smaller test that addresses the highest-risk assumption; maybe the launch can be staged…and maybe organizational management just has to explicitly accept the risk.
And, of course, maybe the answer really IS “no.”
Doesn’t really matter to me which one it is, to be honest. The difference I want you to see here is that now you're working with the ACTUAL CONSTRAINTS instead of arguing against someone’s position on the topic.
I’ll put it another way: there is no way you can respond intelligently to resistance you don’t fully understand.
And understanding it requires doing something a hell of a lot harder than making a convincing argument:
Being willing to see that the other person's concerns may actually be just as legitimate as yours.
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For the record: I couldn’t care less about either political party. I don’t have much faith that either team will do anything other than serve themselves.
But what I saw last night was a clear rebuke of the mean-spirited, callous, cruel, impossibly selfish spirit that has infected politics in this country — and its people.
It was a clear message: “it is NOT OK to treat other humans like this.”
That’s a start.
Joe Natoli retweeted
Memes don’t win elections
Millions spent don’t win elections
Demonizing each other doesn’t win elections
Partisan redistricting doesn’t win elections
Apathetic cynicism doesn’t win elections
Conspiracy Theories don’t win elections
Ai 🤖 ads don’t win elections
People exercising their constitutional right to vote
Wins
Elections
Whichever way we choose 🇺🇸
“This is not about Republicans or Democrats. We have a choice as a people: continue excusing cruelty from our preferred political camp, or summon the courage to condemn it wherever it appears…
And God help us if we have reached the point where winning an election matters more than protecting the dignity of a wounded human being.”
I have been holding my tongue about something that happened during the Ohio gubernatorial race. I refused to speak while the election was underway because I did not want my words mistaken for an attempt to influence anyone’s vote.
But now that the election is over, I have something to say.
For nearly twenty years, my ministry has taken me among the homeless, the abused, the exploited, and the forgotten. I have sat with victims of sexual violence and witnessed the lifelong wounds of childhood trauma.
What Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign did to Amy Acton was among the most morally repulsive things I have witnessed in American politics.
They took a woman whose stepfather was indicted for raping her when she was twelve years old and featured her mother, from whom she had been estranged for nearly fifty years, in a political advertisement attacking her credibility.
The advertisement challenged Acton’s account of her childhood without mentioning the sexual abuse allegations or the circumstances of that estrangement. When people expressed their horror, the campaign defended it.
Imagine examining another person’s childhood suffering and fractured family relationships, then deciding those wounds might help win an election.
Anyone who has worked with survivors of childhood sexual abuse understands the painful realities of denial, betrayal, shame, and estrangement. A child growing into a successful adult does not erase what happened. Nor does a parent’s denial make that suffering disappear.
I find it equally disturbing that an elderly mother, whom Acton herself described as unwell, was brought into this spectacle. Whatever her own struggles or responsibility for the past, exploiting that fractured relationship was grotesque.
To everyone who defended this, consider the message you sent to survivors. To the young woman whose family refuses to believe her. To the man who has carried the shame of childhood abuse for forty years. To the frightened child who has yet to tell anyone.
What did you teach them about the value of their suffering?
I am a priest. I believe in repentance, forgiveness, and redemption. But none of those things requires me to pretend that deliberate cruelty is anything less than a grave moral failure.
Your political allegiance does not absolve you of moral responsibility. You do not get to set aside your conscience during an election and retrieve it afterward.
If your loyalty requires you to defend the exploitation of a childhood sexual abuse survivor, your loyalty has become an idol. And if your conscience cannot recognize the wrong here, examine what political tribalism has done to it.
This is not about Republicans or Democrats. We have a choice as a people: continue excusing cruelty from our preferred political camp, or summon the courage to condemn it wherever it appears.
Amy Acton deserved better. Every survivor who watched this unfold deserved better.
And God help us if we have reached the point where winning an election matters more than protecting the dignity of a wounded human being.
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Organizations (or more to the point their leaders) love to tell employees they should "speak up."
Challenge assumptions! Bring new ideas! Don't be afraid to disagree, we're all in this together and by golly, we welcome and VALUE YOUR OPINION!!
And then someone does just that.
They question an unrealistic deadline, or point out that a proposed solution doesn't address the actual problem, or (gasp) have the gall to ask whether the organization has evidence to support a major investment.
And THEN…the party line changes.
They're told to be more collaborative, more of a “team player.”
To understand the business.
To stop being so negative.
To focus on solutions instead of problems.
My polite take on this situation is…it’s an *interesting* contradiction:
Leadership wants people who think critically, but only until that critical thinking challenges something they’ve already decided.
Now, to be fair, HOW you raise a concern certainly does matter. After all, there is a very clear difference between identifying a risk and making everyone in the room feel stupid.
But there's an equally clear difference between (1) asking people to challenge assumptions and (2) actually being willing to have those assumptions challenged.
To their credit, I have worked with a number organizations where people were genuinely encouraged to disagree — and where executive and middle management were absolutely open to hearing and working with or through that disagreement in the service of BETTER.
And… I've also worked with organizations where everyone knew which subjects were off-limits — regardless of what execs, dept. heads and managers said publicly.
You can tell the difference by what happens AFTER someone raises an uncomfortable question:
– Do people become curious?
– Do they investigate?
– Do they reconsider?
Or…
– Do they start talking about that person's *attitude?*
If you’re an executive or a manager, please consider this: when raising a legitimate concern is turned into a performance review problem…people will eventually stop raising concerns.
And when that happens, you will NOT get better alignment — you’ll get less information.
And if your job is to make high-risk, consequential decisions, that’s a damn dangerous tradeoff.
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One of the hardest lessons I've learned in 30+ years of working with organizations is this: being good at your job does not and WILL not automatically make people *listen* to you.
You may have the research, you may understand the problem at hand better than anyone ever will — and you may have clearly identified the risks, anticipated the consequences and recommended a solution that makes perfect sense to anyone with half a brain.
And yet, it’s entirely possible that you’ll still watch your management make a completely different decision.
Is that frustrating? Hell yes. Especially when you can see those problems coming several hundred miles away.
So you do what most conscientious professionals do:
– You explain your reasoning again, more clearly.
– You bring even MORE evidence to bear.
– You create yet another presentation.
– You try like hell to help people understand what it is that you're seeing.
And sometimes…absolutely NONE of it makes any difference.
I tell you all this to get here, to something that took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand:
The quality of your recommendation and your ability to influence a decision on it are two COMPLETELY different things.
YES, your expertise helps you figure out what should happen and why — but INFLUENCE is a different animal. It requires you to fully understand what makes other people willing (or unwilling) to make it happen.
And despite what you probably think and feel in those moments when you’re shot down or dismissed, the reason those people are ignoring you *isn’t* necessarily because they don't respect your expertise — or you.
Could be that they’re protecting a commitment you know nothing about, could be that they’re accountable for a risk you haven't thought of, or it could be that they have seriously competing priorities, painfully limited authority, or intense political consequences to manage.
And hey — it may just be that they don’t agree with your assessment.
My point here is that until you know WHICH of those things is happening, there’s really no way to know how to respond appropriately (or effectively).
And this, my friends, is where I see SO many talented humans get stuck.
They’re banging their heads and hearts against the wall, trying to solve a problem of influence with more evidence.
But like I said, sometimes the evidence isn't the problem; sometimes it’s the conversation.
The ability to recognize that difference is a big part of what separates someone who does excellent work from someone whose work actually changes what an organization DOES.
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One of the weirdest things about organizational change — to me, at least — is how often leaders COMPLETELY underestimate what they're asking people to give up.
YES, that new process may be more efficient. YES, that reorg may create clearer reporting relationships. YES, that new super-improved flavor of AI-driven iterative development may make perfect sense on paper.
But people do not EVER experience change only as a set of logical improvements.
They experience it through what happens to them personally as a result; what CHANGES about their own work.
Their authority, their expertise, their relationships, their sense of competence and maybe most importantly, their ability to predict what happens next.
Someone who's spent fifteen years becoming really damn good at navigating an existing process or system suddenly finds that the majority of their accumulated knowledge no longer applies.
Someone who was previously trusted to make decisions now needs approval.
Someone whose role gave them visibility becomes just another number in a larger structure.
And what I've seen all too often, by the time I'm brought in to right the ship, is that executive leadership has interpreted their resistance as "unwillingness to embrace progress."
And I'll admit that yeah, sometimes it IS that.
But more often than not...
People are responding in perfectly normal ways to LOSSES that those executives or managers have neither considered or acknowledged.
Now — does this mean every concern should prevent change? Of course not.
But it DOES mean that to understand resistance, you also have to fully understand what that change MEANS to the people on the receiving end of it.
I've found that organizational leaders often spend a *ridiculous* amount of time and effort explaining why some change is necessary — and not nearly enough time understanding what they're really asking people to absorb.
Yeah, I get it — I know the business case is compelling, the implementation makes technical sense.
But that change is still VERY LIKELY TO FAIL because the human consequences were treated like an afterthought.
Listen, folks...if what I just said wasn't true, I wouldn't have a job.
My point already: people are NEVER just obstacles to organizational change. They're the people through whom that change has to become real. And the only way that happens is if it benefits THEM in some significant way as well.
Otherwise, you have no hope in hell of a remotely positive outcome.
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Joe Natoli retweeted
Did you know that when you purchase a paperback from Rosenfeld Media, you also get three eBook versions—ePub, MOBI, and DAISY—for free?
There's no catch; at Rosenfeld we believe you should be able to read and learn in the way that best suits your needs.
rfld.me/2Bb7vQL
Why do teams keep revisiting decisions they've already made?
I realize that's somewhat of a rhetorical question; after all, sometimes circumstances change or new information shows up. Constraints shift, some previously acceptable risk is now unacceptable.
That's all normal, and any team made up of responsible UXers, designers and developers should be willing to reconsider decisions when evidence changes like this.
HOWEVER... there's another reason those decisions keep coming back...
...and that's because they were never *really* resolved in the first place.
Maybe a manager chose the approach, but he sidestepped the concerns that made people disagree in the first place. Or maybe someone (or the group) accepted a compromise they didn't really believe was gonna work.
Maybe that agreement was based on assumptions that some specific condition would be met, or that some person who wasn't in the room would agree.
Or, as I've seen happen far too many times, leadership declared the discussion finished — without ever once considering what would happen if their underlying assumptions were wrong.
So the disagreement went underground, only to show up again in full force two weeks later. "Shit, how are we HERE again??"
Now the team (and the org) has two problems:
1) The original disagreement that's STILL not resolved.
2) The time, money and credibility ALREADY INVESTED in the decision.
I want you to take note of that second problem — because it makes the first one a hell of a lot harder to deal with.
Because as I'm sure you've experienced, people often *really* dig in their heels defending what's already happened.
Why?
Because to them, changing direction feels like ADMITTING FAILURE.
Raising the original concern again feels like reopening a wound, which is the argument everyone is really, really tired of having.
And that's exactly why I often counsel teams and their leaders to distinguish between (a) making a decision and (b) resolving a disagreement. They're not the same thing.
Now, you CAN make a decision without resolving every single concern — and the truth is that sometimes you have no choice; you HAVE to.
But you should always be clear on what's still unresolved, what risk that presents for everyone involved and who's accountable for the consequences that will inevitably show up at the door.
When that clarity doesn't exist, the fact that some "final decision" has been made is irrelevant — because even if unspoken, the underlying disagreement will absolutely shape and influence what happens next.
ALT Audience of conference attendees listening attentively to a speaker, some taking notes and smiling in a packed lecture hall. Photo by Marc Thiele.
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