Influence Requires a Way Forward
- May 12
- 6 min read
A clear ask and precise steps turn receptivity into action.
It’s the kind of meeting you’ve likely been in before.
A cross-functional team gathers to review a proposal from Tomás, the head of digital product.
The company—a mid-sized consumer financial services firm—has been losing younger customers at an increasing rate. Tomás’s proposal focuses on launching a simplified mobile onboarding experience designed to reduce friction, improve conversion, and reposition the brand for a more digitally native audience. If successful, it could reverse a multi-quarter decline and create a new pathway for growth.
Tomás walks the team through the thinking. The current experience is too complex. Drop-off rates are highest in the first three steps. Competitors are winning by being faster, clearer, and easier to engage with. He and his team have mapped a streamlined flow and modeled a meaningful lift in completed applications.
And his point, the Trunk, is clear:
If the company wants to win back younger customers, it needs to make onboarding faster, simpler, and easier to complete.
The stakes are real. The logic holds together. The opportunity feels tangible.
By the time the conversation winds down, there is little resistance left in the room. Heads nod. Tomás smiles. Around the table, posture softens. The room signals success. A few leaders voice their support. Alejandra, who leads operations, says, “This feels like the right direction.”
And then the meeting ends.
No decision was made. No next step was defined. Within a week, the momentum dissipates—not because the idea lacked merit, but because no one translated agreement into action.
The proposal doesn’t resurface in the next leadership meeting. Other priorities take over. What felt like a promising shift in direction becomes, in practice, another initiative that never quite begins.
This is not unusual. It is one of the most common failures in leadership communication. And it reveals something important: agreement is not the same as movement—especially when no one has defined what movement looks like.
In Rapid Fig’s Cultivated Communication model, influence is ultimately measured at the level of the Harvest—the outcome you are trying to create in your audience. Not what you said, but what changed.
But even when that outcome is clear—well-defined, well-supported, and broadly agreed upon—messages still stall. Not because the vision is wrong. Because the way forward is missing.
The work of communication does not end when full receptivity is achieved. That is only the first half of the equation. Influence is completed when that receptivity is translated into a clear way forward and brought “back to earth.”
Why Agreement So Often Stalls
Most communicators are trained—formally or informally—to focus on clarity, persuasion, and engagement. They learn to sharpen their thinking, structure their message, support it with evidence, and deliver it with presence. When those elements come together, the audience responds as hoped: they understand, they align, and they become receptive.
At that point, it is tempting to assume the work is done.
But decades of behavioral research suggest otherwise. People do not reliably act on ideas simply because they agree with them. Even strong agreement often produces surprisingly little follow-through unless the next step is made explicit.
Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer explored this dynamic through his work on implementation intentions. Participants who specified in advance when and how they would act were significantly more likely to follow through than those who simply intended to act. The act of defining the next step created a bridge between intention and behavior.
Without that bridge, even motivated individuals tend to delay, defer, or abandon action altogether.
The constraint is rarely motivation. It is friction.
Friction Lives in Ambiguity
When a message ends without direction, the burden quietly shifts to the audience. They are left to interpret what should happen next, determine who is responsible, and decide when or how to begin. Each unanswered question introduces uncertainty. Collectively, that uncertainty becomes friction.
Behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have shown that even minor frictions—unclear processes, undefined ownership, vague timing—can significantly reduce the likelihood of action.
In most organizations, people are not short on ideas they agree with. They are short on clarity about which one they are expected to act on, and how.
This helps explain why so many well-received ideas fail to produce change. The audience is not resisting the idea. They are hesitating in the face of what comes next.
The Moment Where Influence Is Won or Lost
Consider how differently that financial services onboarding meeting might have unfolded with one critical addition: a clear way forward.
Instead of ending with a summary, Tomás might have said:
“This faster, clearer onboarding experience will convert more of the right customers and start to reverse the decline we’ve been seeing. What I’m asking for today is approval to move forward with a 60-day pilot. If we align on that, we’ll assign a cross-functional lead by Friday, begin onboarding next week, finalize the simplified flow within two weeks, partner with Marketing to drive targeted traffic into the pilot, work with Alejandra’s team on operational readiness, launch June 1, and review conversion data at the end of the pilot to determine scale.”
That shift does more than create motion. It connects directly to the intended outcome.
Questions become more focused. Not whether this is the right direction, but how to make it work. Whether the timeline is realistic. Whether the organization is ready to support it.
Within minutes, a decision is made. Tomás leaves not just with alignment, but with authorization. Owners are clear. Timing is set. The work begins.
Clarity about the outcome matters. Clarity about the next step determines whether that outcome ever materializes.
From Insight to Execution: The Role of the Ladder
Within the Root to Fruit framework, this transition from receptivity to action is captured by the Ladder.
It is important to distinguish the Ladder from the Harvest. The Harvest defines the change you are trying to create. The Ladder defines what happens next. One is the destination. The other is how you begin to reach it.
At the top of the Ladder – the top rung – sits the clear ask. It is not implied. It is named.
Below it are the steps – the descending rungs – that make the ask real. Ownership, timing, sequence, and follow-through.
Without those steps, the ask remains conceptual. With them, it becomes executable.
This is how ideas move.
Why This Feels Harder Than It Should
If a well-planned Ladder is so critical, why do so many communicators stop short?
Part of the answer lies in discomfort. Asking for a decision introduces a level of directness that can feel risky, especially when authority is shared. The internal voice often asks, “Who am I to push for a decision here?”
There is a cognitive bias at play. What feels obvious to the communicator rarely feels obvious to the audience.
The result is a gap: shared understanding without shared movement.
There’s also a misconception that specifying a next step diminishes collaboration. In practice, it sharpens it. Clarity about what happens next gives the audience something concrete to respond to. It turns agreement into execution.
You see this in sports. In critical moments, coaches do not end with why the game matters. They define what happens next—what to execute, where to focus, how to move.
Energy matters. But direction determines whether that energy becomes performance.
Putting It Into Practice
Before you close your next message, ask a simple question: If the audience agrees with everything I’ve said, what will they do immediately afterward?
If the answer is unclear, the message is incomplete.
Define the ask. Define at least the first step and ideally the most important series of next steps that will ensure visible movement.
At Its Core
Leadership communication does two main things: It generates receptivity, and it offers a way forward.
The first ripens the fruit. The second brings it down to earth.
Many messages succeed at the first, then fall short at the second. Influence is not measured by how well an idea is received, but by what happens after.
The Harvest defines the envisioned successful outcome, but it is the Ladder that makes it possible. The rungs of action are where influence is either completed, or lost.
Without a way back to earth, even the ripest fruit remains unrealized.
This is Part 8 of a 10-part series on the Principles of Cultivated Communication—each one exploring how leaders influence, align, and move others to action.
Previously:
Up next: Leadership Communication Holds Up Under Pressure
About Root to Fruit
rapid fig's Cultivated Communication framework is brought to life in its signature Root to Fruit program, offered both in-person and as a virtual series.
Root to Fruit helps rising leaders strengthen how they prepare their thinking (Foundation), deliver with clarity and presence (Intention), and remain steady under pressure (Grounding).
Together, these capabilities enable leaders to guide communication that GROWs—Generating Receptivity and Offering a Way forward.
Participants don’t just learn communication techniques. Through structured practice, real-world application, expert coaching, peer collaboration, and reflection, they learn to think, communicate, and lead more strategically—across presentations, pitches, meetings, and real-time conversations.
Root to Fruit helps leaders move from intention to impact.
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