Ed Morrison, Author at Agile Strategy Lab

This week, a colleague from the National Institutes of Health asked some important questions about trust. How do we build trust in Strategic Doing? How do we measure trust? First things first. Trust emerges from patterns of behavior in which words align with actions. In our work, we have learned that we can induce feelings…

For decades, the ground underneath our universities has been shifting. Universities have been slow to respond. Yet, transformation is clearly on the horizon. as our political economy evolves, universities adapt. In his Jonathan Cole notes in his book, The Great American University, “the history of universities in America is inextricably bound up with the history…

For so many years, our economic thinking has run backwards. We have thought that the key to prosperity involves reducing tax burdens at the top of the pyramid to stimulate growth at the bottom (supply side economics). Or, prosperity involves a “free market” — unfettered by any concerns other than profit and shareholder value —…

Yesterday, I participated in a learning session with professionals from a large multinational company. One of the first questions: Can you give us some background on your work? I explained briefly my experience as a strategy practitioner and researcher. However, I did not situate this work in the transformation taking place in strategic practice. The…

Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate, came up with one of the dumbest quotes of all time: “if the government were to take over the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in five years.” (He was actually adapting an old joke about communism.) But the attitude prevails and still inflicts damage. Here’s why. …

Yesterday our colleagues gave us an update on our Strategic Doing Flint Model. For seven years, a team has been transforming their neighborhoods with practical collaborations formed by following simple rules. Think for a moment about complex challenges — the wicked problems you face. They can paralyze us. We don’t know where to start. Now…

Our work with the Agile Business Consortium continues to grow. The Consortium’s Framework for Business Agility is designed to help organizations become more adaptive, creative and resilient. One dimension of this framework includes “agile strategy”. But what does that mean? In a word, agile strategy involves shifting your organization from a linear to a circular…

Here’s an exceptionally good article on leadership in a crisis. We’ve seen this emerging trend for some time: in an era of growing complexity, coherence is more important than vision. We are seeing lessons in this pandemic, as we move closer to the edge, toward chaos and loss of meaning. The leaders who inspire us…

The coronavirus can teach us a lot about the true nature of our economy. The most important lesson: for decades, we’ve fundamentally misunderstood how our economy works. Our economic policy has been driven by neoclassical economics. The basic idea: you have a government, and you have the private sector. Their interests diverge. For a prosperous…

Our universities need a redesign. The good news: the changes are not dramatic, and they can be managed. The bad news: those that do not change will be disrupted. Christensen warned us. (https://amzn.to/2vw484E) The needed changes go beyond cost-cutting. It’s a mind shift, a deep embrace of multidisciplinary approaches to complex, “wicked” challenges. This shift…