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“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Aristotle
About ten days ago, members of the President’s auto communities task force asked a group of us from Purdue to guide a strategic doing session in Lansing, MI.
Despite all the funding going into Michigan, federal officials from the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Labor wanted to find some new approaches to accelerating collaborations among their partners in Michigan. They turned to Strategic Doing.
Strategic Doing is a disciplined, practical process for developing and implementing strategies in open, loosely connected networks (like a regional economy).
The steps are simple to understand, but not easy for groups to follow. Conversations in loosely connected groups are difficult to guide (think cat herding). To create effective collaborations, we must think clearly, communicate concisely, and stay focused on translating ideas into action.
Innovative (and often complex) initiatives take sophisticated thinking and a commitment to learn from experience. We also need reservoirs of trust to execute quickly, so we can figure out “What works”.
Strategic Doing, in the end, enables us to do complex projects by following some simple rules. The trick comes in following the rules. Like any new habit, practice matters a lot.
The place to start is with civic forums, where people can practice these new approaches to sophisticated civic thinking and doing. I-Open has been promoting these civic forums with initiatives like Midtown Brews. (We started these forums with Tuesdays at REI at Case Western Reserve some years ago.)
You can look at a resource page for the participants of the Lansing, MI workshop here. If you are interested in learning more about network-based approaches to economic and workforce development, check out Purdue’s new certificate course in Open Source Economic Development.
Last 5 posts by Ed Morrison
- Food and cancer prevention - August 31st, 2010
- BFD Learning Moment: Detroit moves on design as a strategy - August 30th, 2010
- More on the video gaming software cluster - August 30th, 2010
- Building NEO's clean energy economy - August 29th, 2010
- Mentor Technology Greenhouse - August 29th, 2010
