Trenton Business Week News
September 27, 2016
What is Strategic Doing?
The Trenton Business Innovation Project will use "Strategic Doing" to advance four sectors initially: Waterfront Development, Shop Local, Food Industry and Arts Economy. As collaborative work evolves, we can use this template to develop other areas as well. We welcome your participation in this Project!
The Strategic Doing sessions will be led by Purdue Center for Regional Development (PCRD)'s Scott Hutcheson.
From the PCRD's website:
Strategic Doing
Strategic Doing teaches people how to form collaborations quickly, move them toward measurable outcomes and make adjustments along the way. In today’s world, collaboration is essential to meet the complex challenges we face. Strategic Doing enables leaders to design and guide new networks that generate innovative solutions. It is a new strategy discipline that is lean, agile and fast—just what organizations, communities and regions need to survive and thrive.
What is Strategic Doing?
It is a new strategy discipline specifically designed for open, loosely-connected networks. Unlike strategic planning that was designed primarily to guide strategic activity in hierarchical organizations, Strategic Doing is designed for situations in which nobody can tell anybody else what to do. Collaboration is the only way to move forward.
How does Strategic Doing work?
Strategic Doing works by teaching simple, but not easy, skills of strategic collaboration. The skills are simple to understand, but they take practice to master. We teach the skills primarily through three to four hour strategy workshops.
For organizations, communities and regions that do not have a strategic plan, Strategic Doing can generate an initial plan in a matter of hours with an intensively focused and custom workshop. The process quickly forms new collaborations among workshop participants and moves them into learning by doing.
As these collaborations form and participants learn from each other, Strategic Doing advances quickly. Short, focused strategy reviews take place regularly, usually every 30 days. With Strategic Doing, strategy becomes more like software development. New versions of the strategy appear frequently as participants learn what works.
What if we already have a strategic plan? Can Strategic Doing help us?
For organizations, communities and regions that are stuck with their strategic plan, Strategic Doing provides an agile process to accelerate implementation. By producing rapid-fire strategic action plans, Strategic Doing moves existing strategic plans to new levels of performance.
Where has Strategic Doing worked?
We have applied Strategic Doing in a wide variety of contexts from the development of new clusters and regional innovation ecosystems to the launch of new workforce innovations and the regeneration of inner-city neighborhoods. So, for example, Energy Florida and the Water Council both launched with Strategic Doing. Rockford, IL, and Northern Illinois University adopted Strategic Doing to build their aerospace cluster and organize a network of community development groups across the city.
The Charleston Digital Corridor designed its innovation ecosystem using the principles of Strategic Doing. Purdue University used Strategic Doing to accelerate the development of workforce innovations in a 14-county Indiana region. Michigan State University is using Strategic Doing to rebuild inner-city neighborhoods in Flint and Detroit. To learn more about these and other applications of Strategic Doing, connect with us.
Video introduction to Strategic Doing.
Additional Resources to learn how to maximize Strategic Doing.
Visit the schedule page for the 4 Trention Business Innovation Project Strategic Doing sessions.