Why strategic doing works and strategic planning doesn't
Tomorrow, I'll be heading to New Orleans, where a small band of leading edge thinkers in rural development are getting together in the second of our retreats. This group, pulled together by Dave Ivan at Michigan State and Norm Walzer at Northern Illinois, is working to expand the innovations that are currently underway in a number of places throughout rural America.
Dave Ivan asked for a brief summary on strategic doing, so I passed this along:
Strategic doing represents a new approach to designing and implementing strategy in loosely joined networks. Our regional and local economies are characterized by these networks: loose relationships formed in a “civic space” outside the four walls of any one organization. Within these civic spaces, we confront some of the most profound challenges of economic transformation: underperforming school systems, sudden bursts of unemployment as companies either shut down or move, environmental degradation, and so on.
Conventional approaches to strategic planning do not work well to meet these challenges. The reason is simple. Strategic planning does not work in open networks. Traditional strategy practices emerged from large hierarchical, "command and control" corporations. A small group of people at the top of the organization did the thinking, while rest of the people did the doing. In our civic spaces, there are no hierarchies. No one can tell anyone else what to do.
Yet, we still need to do strategic thinking. And now, more than ever, we need to act strategically.
We're all facing constraints in time, money and attention. So, how do we focus our limited resources where they are likely to have the largest positive impacts? Strategic doing answers that question. It provides a new discipline for developing and implementing strategy within the loose networks that characterize our communities and regions. Where strategic planning is slow, linear and costly, strategic doing is fast, iterative and inexpensive. Strategic doing is catching on, I think, because people can understand it, apply it, and have fun, as they move their ideas into action.
