Ed Morrison, the developer of Strategic Doing, describes how to use four questions to guide a conversation that results in an actionable strategy ..read more

As an exploratory approach to identifying and deploying potential solutions to problems, Design Thinking has a lot in common with Strategic Doing. Many Strategic Do-ers are interested in learning more about Design Thinking, and people steeped in Design Thinking are attracted by the Strategic Doing approach. In this episode, you'll hear a brief overview of the basics of design thinking, from José Lugo of the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez, and Lab director Ed Morrison's report on conversations with the Darden School of Business about how the groups might collaborate to solve big problems ..read more

Leaders are often looking for THE big change that will lead to lasting transformation or market dominance. But the reality is that the most successful strategy is usually a series of small changes. In this episode we make the case that “Small is Beautiful,” with a hat tip to economist EF Schumacher, who argued for limiting growth where needed to ensure the wellbeing of future generations. The guest for this episode is Sandy Jacobs, the mayor of Hays, Kansas, a community in the western part of the state. Over the last few years, Hays has been in the center of a growing effort to use Strategic D ..read more

The challenge of how to help groups of people that haven’t worked together before do so effectively, without spending hours, or more, on “getting to know one another” - is nearly universal. It spans every field and kind of organization, from large multi-national corporations to small rural churches, and everything in between. In this episode, we look at that challenge in the particular domain of university-led research, through a conversation between the developer of Strategic Doing, Ed Morrison, and Jeff Agnoli of Ohio State University ..read more

A key concept in agile strategy is the idea of tossing out “if only.”  “If only” serves to keep us stuck, because it says that we’ve become victims of our circumstances. But we don’t have to view our situation that way. In fact, one of the lessons of the pandemic, because it’s stretched out so much further than we could have imagined last March, is that most of us haven’t had the luxury of ‘waiting it out.” We’ve been forced to think about alternatives, new ways to get to a desired outcome, or even choosing a new outcome to steer toward. In this episode, Lilly Cavanaugh, the executive dir ..read more

If you've  missed the ability to plan ahead more than a few weeks - and honestly, isn't that most of us? - you may be enthusiastically diving back into the world of timelines, metrics, and continuous improvement. Before you get too far down the road, join us as we dive into the idea of effectuation and effectual innovation. Effectuation posits that a startup has to rely on a largely emergent strategy, tapping resources they already have, and the networks they can partner with, to navigate an unpredictable environment. Effectual innovation takes that concept and moves it into a larger orga ..read more

One of the conversations that has woven through Strategic Doing over the past few years has had to with its use in an entrepreneurial context - both by entrepreneurs, and by people who are focused on building an entrepreneurship ecosystem in their community or region. Even within a single state, however, entrepreneurs' needs can vary tremendously - and the Strategic Doing approach need to be tailored appropriately for different audiences. In this episode, Lauren Goldstein from New Mexico State University talks about her work with a wide range of entrepreneurs in very different kinds of communi ..read more

Our modern world is full of large, complex systems - so many, in fact, that we often don't notice them until something goes wrong, or we're trying to work within a system ourselves to bring change about. Those systems aren't discrete entities - they overlap and interlock, adding even more complexity. In this episode, we talk about what agility might look like in the context of a large institution trying to accomplish a specific mission-oriented goal, and how a set of interlocking complex systems make that agility difficult. The sector is higher education, but the underlying ideas are applicabl ..read more

Today’s episode focuses on diversity that's not visible in any kind of demographics we encounter in a dataset from the Census Bureau. It’s the diversity that springs from how our brains approach various kinds of problems. Cognitive diversity, just like other kinds of diversity, manifests itself in every team we’re a part of, whether it’s recognized or not. Just like other kinds of diversity, cognitively diverse teams can be better teams, especially when it comes to working in spaces that require creativity and innovation. In this episode Sebastian Hamers of Human Insight teams up with Tabitha ..read more

In this episode, we speak with John Morley. The breadth of John’s professional experience - across continents, sectors, and business phases - gives him a unique vantage point from which to think about the concepts of trust, vision, and strategy.  ..read more