Vaud — Managing through influence: how can trade-offs be opened to scrutiny across functions?
The canton of Vaud brings together EPFL and UNIL, medtech, food-industry headquarters on the Riviera and a dense network of SMEs, alongside fast-growing scale-ups across the Lake Geneva region and established organisations undergoing change. In this environment, also shaped by international sport, the “Manager par influence” programme raises a precise question: how can different professions examine a trade-off when they assess its consequences differently?
What the literature establishes
Paul Carlile (2002, Organization Science) examines knowledge boundaries between functions in new product development. His study shows that difficulties concern more than vocabulary: knowledge is embedded in practices and interests that collaboration may challenge. Shared tools, such as product representations, can help reveal these dependencies and enable people to work through their consequences.
A complementary mechanism: being able to flag a problem
Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) identifies an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviour. Psychological safety is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, including reporting an error or asking for help. A shared tool may therefore be insufficient on its own: people must also be able to challenge an assumption without fearing damage to their working relationships.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that bringing different functions together around a chart and inviting everyone to speak is enough. These studies establish no such recipe: making constraints visible removes neither conflicting interests nor the need to make trade-offs. Managing through influence instead involves making a proposal open to examination and revision, without treating every objection as a lack of buy-in. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
Carlile’s study concerns product development, while Edmondson’s examines teams in a manufacturing company; neither is a study of organisations in Vaud. Applying their findings to a university–medtech collaboration, a scale-up or an international sports organisation remains a transfer that needs testing. They do not warrant a promise that a more open discussion will automatically produce a faster or technically better decision.
A practical check in Lausanne
In Lausanne, an exercise in the “Manager par influence” programme could use a hypothetical medtech project involving a university to explore a trade-off between speed to market, scientific validation and regulatory requirements. Before the discussion, each function records a constraint, an expected consequence of the proposal and grounds for revising it on a shared sheet; afterwards, the sheet documents how each objection was handled, through a modification, an assigned verification task or a reasoned rejection. The measure is the proportion of recorded objections receiving this explicit treatment, with before-and-after versions retained: it checks the traceability of the examination, not the ultimate quality of the decision. To go further: explore the Influence Management training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Influence Management in Lausanne
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