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7 Responses to “Moses comes down from the mountain”

1. John McGovern Says:
   August 16th, 2009 at 8:06 am

   Hi George:

   Why the sarcasm in the headline?

   Are you familiar with the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) process? This Summit was my first experience with it and as you may be aware, it is a rather grueling, but rewarding and inspiring process. On the last day, action items and goals are developed for time lines of 3 weeks, 3 months, and several years. Stay tuned; I wholeheartedly believe that once the massive amount of hand written information is organized, you will begin to see implementation actions and the emergence of an overarching strategy.

2. Ed Morrison Says:
   August 16th, 2009 at 8:48 am

   George, John:

   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.

3. George Nemeth Says:
   August 17th, 2009 at 3:05 pm

   Thanks John. Handwritten notes? Seriously? Is that why it’s 3 weeks and not “as soon as we’re done here”? Or is the sense of urgency I get about the issues incorrect? The only sarcasm I see in the title is the fact that there’s no single Moses… is there? It’s also homage to the cities namesake.

   From your description Ed, the outcome of AI is predicated on the group of people attending the summit. One of the requirements for attending was attending all three days. I couldn’t attended because for that long because since I’m freelancing now, I had several personally important conversations. If I have to move from CLE because it isn’t financially viable to remain here any longer, what’s the point of sitting around jawboning about what’s going to happen in 2019?

   Norm Roulet raised a very important question to me the other day. He wondered who is analyzing the Total Cost of the summit as in how much did we invest by having 600 of the regions leader focused on this topic for 3 full days?

   I think that number will surprise quite a few people and illustrate the magnitude of the issue.

4. John McGovern Says:
   August 18th, 2009 at 12:32 am

   George, you said
   “Norm Roulet raised a very important question to me the other day. He wondered who is analyzing the Total Cost of the summit as in how much did we invest by having 600 of the regions leader focused on this topic for 3 full days?”

   Is the Total Cost that you/Norm are attempting to extrapolate based on the cost of each attendees daily pay X 3? Or is there something else all together?

5. Ed Morrison Says:
   August 19th, 2009 at 11:26 am

   George, you raise a very important point about guiding strategy in economic and workforce development. Appreciative Inquiry Summits involve a large expenditure of time and effort.

   Here’s a rough calculation. Assume every participant’s time is worth $100 an hour. That means that every participant over a three day period invested $2,400 in time. Multiply that times the number of participants, and you get the rough value of time devoted by 600 participants: $1.4 million.

   It’s one thing to conduct these types of summits within the company. The investment does not dissipate quickly. In the civic space, where the ties are weaker, this investment time can quickly evaporate. You can measure the half-life of these summits in days and weeks.

   To tackle this problem, we designed Strategic Doing to generate transformative initiatives quickly. We can generate an initial strategic action plan within a few hours. We use this action plan as a framework within which to revise our strategy continuously.

   We use metrics on each initiative to measure what works. When we find an initiative lagging, we quickly figure out the reasons and, if necessary, redeploy our resources. In our case, each initiative is guided by a one-page contract that defines a strategic outcome and metrics.

   Our initial plan (which we normally call an alpha plan) is quickly followed by a beta plan. With a public release, we start numbering our plans in different versions. In Indiana, we’re now up to version 3.18. That means we’re in the third year and the 18th revision this year.

   With this type of discipline, you can run strategic doing sessions in as little as an hour. Indeed, as people get comfortable with their strategic action plan, the revisions come faster and more frequently. In other words, we are building resilience into the strategy.

   What’s missing from Cleveland is an understanding of how to implement. Cleveland has gatherings, summits, meetings, plans… and so little action.

6. Betsey Merkel Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 9:06 am

   FYI: Twittered @betseymerkel as

   Learn: powerful conversation abt Cleveland intended Open Source regional gathering, civic participation, ED clusters. http://is.gd/2qanr

   >Thanks for this discourse on BFD. Your insights offer important conversational knowledge other regions (as well as our own!) and leaders need to know and understand to act smarter in a networked world.

7. John McGovern Says:
   August 23rd, 2009 at 11:20 am

   @ Ed Morrison:
   You said”Here’s a rough calculation. Assume every participant’s time is worth $100 an hour. That means that every participant over a three day period invested $2,400 in time. Multiply that times the number of participants, and you get the rough value of time devoted by 600 participants: $1.4 million.”

   well enough i suppose though a tad one dimensional dontcha think?

   for instance, how to measure the value of each of those attendees going back to their respective workplace; seeing things in a different light and making changes towards ’sustainable systems’ right off? I’ve heard several cases of this already and i’m hardly well connected in the local biz community!

   this is but one way of measuring value in a different way…