The model of the influenced person as a goal-directed control loop, in which every influence attempt reaches one element of the loop and only what reaches the goal state survives the room.
The classic image of influence is an arrow from sender to receiver. The research points to a loop. The influenced person runs from input through a comparator and a selector to an output, with a feedback predictor on the way back and a goal state above it (Carver and Scheier, 1998), and influence attempts can be sorted by the element they reach (Weiß, Gollwitzer and Hewig, 2023). Arguments reach the goal state, norms and obedience reach the selector, and coercion reaches only the output.
Kelman (1958) had described the consequence decades earlier with three processes of very different durability. Compliance dies with the next change of leadership, identification dies with the person, and internalisation keeps working after the influencer has left the room.
Change itself is discontinuous. Courage is the control parameter of a moment of truth, the act of naming the discrepancy that everybody knows and nobody says, and alignment is the order parameter that turns the following instability into a new order (Haken, 1977; Kruse, 2004). The loop is the unit of practice in the Practice Loop, and its ethics are influence by design.