Duncan Stevens

Duncan Stevens is the founder of the Influence Association and an author and speaker on leadership, influence and high performance. He works with organisations on the behaviours that affect how individuals and teams make decisions, collaborate and respond to change. His current speaking also considers the human capabilities organisations need as AI becomes part of their operating environment.

Stevens' work combines corporate training and facilitation with an interest in performance across business and sport. His writing includes Effective Influence, which translates persuasion concepts into practical applications for professional relationships. He has developed a series of proprietary models, including the Effective Influence Model and the MAGIC Wheel of High Performance, to give teams a common structure for discussing how they work.

The MAGIC framework connects self-management, growth, persistence, motivation and collaboration. This places individual performance within a wider set of relationships and conditions, rather than treating it as effort alone. Stevens also uses live demonstrations and audience participation to make questions of attention, influence and cooperation tangible. The practical emphasis is on behaviour that people can examine in a meeting, a difficult conversation or a shared task.

For leaders, the relevance is the transition from knowing what good performance should look like to creating repeatable ways of achieving it. His programmes address accountability, communication and resistance to change alongside persuasion. That combination is useful when teams need to coordinate across boundaries or maintain judgment and ownership under pressure, while adapting to new expectations and increasingly capable tools.