Last week, hundreds of citizens gathered in Cleveland for a sustainability summit. Over on a local blog, Brewed Fresh Daily, some folks raised questions about "what's next"?
 
I offered a few thoughts and suggested it might be helpful for me to post some key points about Strategic Doing that might help people in Cleveland along as they translate their ideas into action.

Appreciative Inquiry is a marvelous process to identify and clarify opportunities that emerge from linking together assets. Strategic Doing, a process we’ve developed at Purdue University, is a close cousin to Appreciative Inquiry.

We have focused on the challenges of implementation. George is right to be a little cynical. Often, people go through these exercises without a clear, focused approach to implementation. The Voices and Choices exercise — also based on principles of Appreciative Inquiry — failed for lack of attention to translating ideas into action.

This is tricky stuff. I am posting over at http://edmorrison.com some of the lessons we have learned.

The most difficult challenge implementation is keeping the networks that form at these events focused on their next steps. Typically, large forums generate exciting ideas, but we spend too little time at the tail end of the process focusing on how we will stay connected and understanding clearly our next steps.

In addition, we do not do a good enough job leveraging the Internet. This has proven to be an especially difficult problem for us to master. Collaboration in the “civic space” represents a difficult challenge.

People are attempting to create complex innovations (a new approach to regional food systems, for example) in open networks where nobody can tell anybody else what to do. Further, we have no centralized IT department that can dictate and support a single technology platform (Drupal, Ning, BaseCamp?). Lastly, the skills of participants in mastering Web 2.0 tools varies all over the map. We have everyone from twentysomethings comfortable with the latest social networking craze to Baby Boomers who can barely do e-mail.

Even so, we have found that the technology is not the major obstacle. We have found that the major obstacle is discipline. In studying open-source software development, we’ve learned some of the basic rules of developing highly complex projects and open networks.

We have distilled these rules and develop new tools around a discipline which we call Strategic Doing.

Strategy is critically important, because resources are constrained. We are dealing with complex systems where there are leverage points: places where 20% of the effort yields 80% of the results.

But the way in which we typically develop a strategy — “strategic planning” — represents a basket of tools and disciplines invented for another age. Strategic planning presumes hierarchical organizations operating in relatively stable markets. The basic notion is that a small group of people at the top of an organization do the thinking, while a larger group at the bottom of the organization does the doing.

Strategic Doing focuses on the disciplines needed for strategic thinking and action in open networks which emerge through civic collaboration.

In open networks, there is no separation between thinking and doing.

Strategic Doing follows some of the same logic as the Appreciative Inquiry model. (Indeed, I started to develop Strategic Doing working closely with David Cooperrider and Ron Frye at Case Western Reserve University.) I like to think that Strategic Doing takes up where Appreciative Inquiry leaves off. The two approaches are deeply compatible, close cousins with the same DNA.

At Purdue University, we’ve proven that Strategic Doing can be a powerful set of disciplines to focus innovation in the open networks that characterize regional economies. Strategic Doing leads to “link and leverage” strategies that are continuously refined as implementation takes place. Strategic Doing builds the “social capital” we need to transcend old political and organizational boundaries.

Here’s an example of how productive this approach can be. Several years ago, the federal government held a competition called Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED). The governors from each state were invited to select two proposals for submission. Nearly 100 regions submitted proposals. The Department of Labor selected 13 and awarded them $15 million each. Purdue University received one of these 13 grants.

We applied Strategic Doing models and tools to implement our grant across 14 counties in Indiana. Fast forward 3 1/2 years: we now have four focus areas, over 50 different initiatives (each with their own metrics), all administered by one full-time person. Each of these initiatives has been screened to make sure that it is replicable, scalable and sustainable.

On the basic metrics maintained by the Department of Labor, our region accounts for 40% of the total training completed by all 13 regions.

In other words, Strategic Doing is remarkably productive.

That’s why people all over the country are now asking the Purdue Center for Regional Development to conduct Strategic Doing workshops. In the past six months, we’ve conducted workshops in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Louisiana, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, Illinois, Georgia, Texas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Baja in Mexico. Purdue University is forming a partnership with Oklahoma State University to develop “sister regions” to share the learning that we generate from deploying these open-source models.

We are making plans now to introduce Strategic Doing through free webinars from the University Economic Development Association. Later this fall, Purdue University and the Economic Development Institute at the University of Oklahoma will be launching a certificate program to teach these disciplines and tools.