So what's a Strategy-Net?
We're moving ahead with deployment of a powerful and easy-to-use platform to build Strategy-Nets. These are networks designed to innovate. Unlike an interested community, a learning community or a community of practice, members of a Strategy-Net are committed to close collaboration in order to develop and launch transformative innovations.
Typically, members of a Strategy-Net are focused on transforming an important dimension of a complex system, like a regional education or workforce system, a collection of local governments, a business cluster, or an entrepreneurial ecosystem.To be successful, the members of a Strategy-Net must engage in sustained, complex thinking. That means they need to be skilled at the practice of conducting purposeful conversations. They make strategic decisions about how to link and leverage their assets toward new opportunities. They quickly develop prototypes to test new ideas. They measure their progress, in order to figure out what works. And they design new ways of learning continuously and quickly at a low cost in both time and money.
Strategic Doing is a discipline of thinking and acting strategically within a Strategy-Net. Unlike strategic planning, a set of disciplines designed to guide complex, hierarchical organizations in relatively stable environments, Strategic Doing sets forth the disciplines needed for strategic action in open networks, in which no one can tell anyone else what to do. Strategic Doing adjusts quickly to environmental shifts because the discipline is simple, fast and iterative.
As we can figure out low-cost, productive ways to replicate, scale and sustain Strategy-Nets, we open the door to transforming the large industrial age administrative organizations -- public, private and non-profit -- that are struggling all around us. We are leaving the era of reform and entering an era of transformation: designing whole new systems for creating sustainable prosperity on a fragile planet.
