Ed Morrison · Will Strategy-Nets emerge in NEO?

December 31st, 2009

Over the past month, a group of us have been moving ahead with deployment of a powerful and easy-to-use platform to build Strategy-Nets. These are networks designed to innovate. Unlike an interested community, a learning community or a community of practice, members of a Strategy-Net are committed to close collaboration in order to develop and launch innovations.

Over at the Purdue Center for Regional Development and here locally with I-Open, we have been learning how to form, manage and measure Strategy-nets.

Typically, members of a Strategy-Net are focused on transforming an important dimension of a complex system, like a regional education or workforce system, a collection of local governments, a business cluster, or an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Within companies, Strategy-Nets are emerging to manage the process of open innovation in specific product or service markets.

To be successful, the members of a Strategy-Net must engage in sustained, complex thinking. That means they need to be skilled at the practice of conducting purposeful conversations. They make strategic decisions about how to link and leverage their assets toward new opportunities. They quickly develop prototypes to test new ideas. They measure their progress, in order to figure out what works. And they design new ways of learning continuously — quickly and at a low cost in both time and money.

Strategy-Nets balance open participation with leadership direction. (The approach is neither “top down” or “bottom up”, since there are no tops or bottoms in networks.)

Strategic Doing is a discipline of thinking and acting strategically within an open network. Unlike strategic planning — a set of disciplines designed to guide complex, hierarchical organizations in relatively stable environments — Strategic Doing sets forth the disciplines needed for strategic action in open networks, in which no one can tell anyone else what to do. Strategic Doing adjusts quickly to environmental shifts because the discipline is simple, fast and iterative.

As we develop even lower-cost, and more productive ways to replicate, scale and sustain Strategy-Nets, we open the door to transforming the large industrial age administrative organizations — public, private and non-profit — that are struggling all around us. These structures are simply too slow, inflexible, and costly to remain competitive in the emerging world of open networks.

2010 will see us leaving behind the era of reform and entering an era of transformation: designing whole new systems for creating sustainable prosperity in regions.

Within Northeast Ohio, there are three potentially transformative opportunities to watch in 2010:

  • Next week, the Cleveland Schools head Eugene Sanders will present a path forward. We will quickly be able to gauge, I suspect, whether we are on a path of transformation fueled by a sense of urgency or lost yet again in a cul-de-sac of slow walk “reform”. Will this plan trigger the formation of Strategy-Nets within the county capable of transforming a collapsing public education system through fast-spark innovations?
  • Cleveland’s Sustainability Summit is rapidly approaching its moment of truth. Can this emerging set of networks translate big ambitions into practical next steps? Can it move from a community of interest to a Strategy-Net?
  • The Fund for our Economic Future also faces strategic challenges. The pullback of the Cleveland Foundation fundamentally alters the Future Fund’s role in NEO’s regional economic development. Can the Fund now move from a formal, somewhat secretive and Cleveland-centric mindset to a new more open and collaborative catalyst for the region?

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