Over on the Economic Gardening Google group, I posted some thoughts changing the culture of a community to support innovation and entrepreneurship. I have updated and expanded the post.
Changing a community's culture -- the patterns of thought and behavior in an organization or community -- seems daunting. Where do we start?
In Economic Gardening, Chris Gibbons introduces the Myers-Briggs framework, and that approach is helpful. As a good friend of mine told me once, "We are all watching our own movie." Sadly, we often forget that simple insight.
Insights from cognitive science
Understanding personal temperaments is one matter. Changing a culture is something different. Here, advances in cognitive science provide a foundation to design these shifts. Aaron Beck is the founding thinker and practitioner in this field. (Learn more.)
Beck pioneered notions that an individual's perceptions and patterns of thought drive their behavior. By becoming aware of these thoughts (he refers to "automatic thoughts") and intentionally changing them, we can shift how we both feel and behave. Beck's work is one important component of Strategic Doing. We are designing experiences to shift people's thinking and their subsequent behavior.
Another important component comes from Appreciative Inquiry, a large group practice pioneered by David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University. David was a colleague of mine when I ran the Center for Regional Economic Issues at CWRU. He has figured out that by guiding conversations, we can move large groups of people. As he says, "People move in the direction of their conversations." David's work aligns tightly with Beck's notions. We can change how people think (and behave) if we deliver powerful experiences -- deep, focused and purposeful conversations.
Adding the strategy dimension: Starting with strategic planning
Strategic Doing is a close cousin of Appreciative Inquiry, as well as Open Space, designed by Harrison Owen. Yet, I designed the Strategic Doing discipline to include another component: strategy. To transform our "civic spaces" -- to build complex collaborations needed to spur productive investment -- we need to think and act strategically. We need to make choices and act on those choices to learn what works. How do we do that?
Let's start at the beginning. An effective strategy answers two questions -- "Where are we going?" and "How will we get there?".
Much of what we know about strategy comes from the discipline of strategic planning, initially developed in the late 1950s and early 1960's to guide hierarchically organized, multi-divisional companies. My practical exposure to these models came as I was working for an offshoot of Boston Consulting Group, one of the pioneers in this field. When I left the world of corporate consulting to enter the field of economic development, my initial purpose involved deploying these strategy models to help communities and regions meet the new challenges of global competition.
It didn't work out all that well.
Two root causes of the difficulty: First, strategic planning models assume there is an organizational envelope, defined by a command and control structure. Yet, with economic development, we operate in a "civic space" outside the four walls of any organization. Here, no one can tell anyone else what to do. To be effective in the civic space, we need to forge focused, pragmatic collaborations across political and organizational boundaries. Strategic planning can do that, but only with a lot of difficulty. (This is why most strategic plans "sit on the shelf".)
Second, strategic planning -- a deliberate, linear process -- has difficulty keeping up with the accelerating change brought on by the integration of global markets.
Moving strategy into open, loosely joined networks
By the mid to late 1990s, it was clear that we needed to do our strategic thinking differently if we hoped to prepare our communities and regions for the challenges of global competition.
Luckily, we did not have to travel far to find inspiration.
This work provides a firm theoretical foundation for Strategic Doing. But of course, practitioners don't care much about theory. They need tools and practices that work.
To develop these tools and practices, I have been working in a range of settings, starting with Oklahoma City in 1994. We have continued to build on the success we started in Oklahoma City. Now we are developing a national network of practitioners who are testing these new tools of agile strategy in open networks.
The results are encouraging. We are seeing the we can design and develop clusters. We can accelerate the development of support networks for start-ups and Stage Two companies.
We have a group focused on how the discipline of physical planning -- preparing comprehensive plans -- can be made more responsive, flexible and agile. We have even taken on the difficult challenges of innovating in education and workforce development, with some remarkable results.
Some proof points in a difficult area: workforce development
A few years ago, the federal government invested $15 million to each of 13 regions to experiment with workforce innovations. At Purdue, we deployed agile, network-based strategic models -- Strategic Doing. With 8% of the money, we generated 40% of the results. We designed over 60 complex collaborative experiments. 80% of these are growing after the initial funding.
The reason: They created sustainable value. We designed an Opportunity Fund to invest in promising collaborations. We designed the fund using proven principles of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, initially designed by Roland Tibbetts at the National Science Foundation in the 1970's. (As a staff member for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee in the early 1980's, I was lucky enough to interview Roland.)
As part of the investment evaluation for our Opportunity Fund, we designed a stage-gate process to select proposed collaborations that were replicable, scalable, and sustainable. We agreed on a clear set of success metrics. We then launched pilots to validate our hypotheses about how the collaboration could "co-create" value. Most did, some didn't. The successful ones have continued to prosper.
Example: The nation's first "green collar" certification for front line manufacturing workers, which is now deployed in nationally. We also accelerated the adoption of the pre-engineering program Project Lead the Way in our region's high schools, to the point that we now have the the highest concentration of these high schools in the county. (Project Lead the Way recently moved their national headquarters to Indianapolis.)
Equally important, we spotted the failures early, and either redesigned them or cut them off. Each initiative was funded on a 30 day evaluation, so we did not have to wait more than 30 days to pull money out of a failure.
Most impressive, perhaps, we managed the strategy and implementation process of 60+ complex collaborations with over 200 metrics by adding only one full time administrator. That's the power of network-based strategies that focus on linking and leveraging our assets. In open networks, metrics provide an opportunity for learning and control becomes more consensual and distributed.
Using agile strategy to develop regional innovation clusters
Using these agile strategy disciplines, we can develop clusters that innovate.
In 2008, we worked with our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to demonstrate how these agile strategy tools could launch a cluster in a matter of months. The result: the Milwaukee Water Council, now a global leader in fresh water technologies.
We have done similar work with a clean energy cluster on the Space Coast of Florida, and we are working with our colleagues at Arizona State to develop a solar cluster. In our home region we are working on an ag-bio cluster and a new cluster based on high performance automotive technologies (remember the Indy 500). In the comping 2 months, we will be working in Alaska, West Michigan, Western Nebraska and Missouri.
These new data-driven approaches work to generate major shifts in the productivity of federal and state investment. We are now build a anchor for these new practices at the Purdue Center for Regional Development.
We are working with others at a wide range of universities across the country, including Michigan State, Arizona State, Northern Illinois University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Akron, the University of Alaska, the University of Missouri, the University of Southern Maine, Indiana University and others. Using Strategic Doing, we are forming our own network to develop and deploy Strategic Doing nationally.
More proof points: Oklahoma City and Charleston, SC
I began developing this approach to agile strategy beginnning in the mid-1990s with core group opf civic leaders in Oklahoma City. Now some see Oklahoma City as a model for the country. Beginning in about 2000, I began working with Ernest Andrade to build out the Charleston Digital Corridor with "link and leverage" strategies.
The message: We can build these innovating networks in our cities and regions. It takes patience, persistence, and relentless strategic focus. Flexible federal funding is helpful, but not essential. (We transformed both Oklahoma City an Charleston without relying on federal funding.)
The federal/foundation disconnect
Sadly, in my view, few people at the federal level or in the foundation community (who are increasingly drawn to making large scale regional economic development investments) have taken the time to learn or understand these new network-based perspectives, theories and disciplines.
I'm not sure why.
Instead, we hear only rhetoric about "regional innovation clusters" or "entrepreneurial ecosystems" with little understanding of the underlying network dynamics at work.
(Example of the superficial understanding: The current wave of multi-agency grants to encourage regional innovation clusters is not much of a policy innovation at all, in my view. The feds have simply bolted together programs that are not really designed to work together -- Here's one. The result: major administrative head aches are shifted to the grantees on the ground.)
One exception stands out: the folks at the Edward Lowe Foundation. They have taken the time to study and learn about both Economic Gardening and Strategic Doing. As an operating foundation, they are unusual: a think tank with muddy boots.
The promising path out of the woods
In the end, our work at Purdue demonstrates that we can design and guide large scale change by following some agile strategy disciplines. These disciplines are not simplistic or easy. They take practice to master.
With Strategic Doing, people are not starting over with yet another tedious strategy process. Rather, they are distilling their current strategic thinking and moving it to the next level.
The good news is that Strategic Doing works because, in the end, people have fun and see results. They enjoy the experience. They meet new people and find new purpose, all by forming complex, productive collaborations quickly and keeping them on track with simple rules.
So, the task of culture change is not so daunting after all.
