Recent Blog Posts
Loose Hierarchies
MIT professor Thomas Malone wrote an important book, The Future of Work, nearly two decades ago. In it, he introduced "loose hierarchies," a valuable concept lost mainly to practice. It's time...
Teaching Strategic Doing Skills in Higher Education
Recently, the Agile Strategy Lab worked with college faculty to develop courses that teach collaboration, teamwork, and networking to their students. Three courses were developed- one 3 credit hour graduate...
Developing Entrepreneurial & Innovation Ecosystems
Developing entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems matters to regenerate our economies. But too few civic and political leaders know why this step is so important. What's worse, they don't know how...
Collaboration
Collaboration is a process of creating shared benefits. It’s also a process of co-evolution, of growing and adapting. Business punditry too often presents collaboration as a thing, or, worse, as...
Adaptive Challenges
Yesterday, a colleague asked why we don't use the term "goals" with Strategic Doing. Instead, we focus on outcomes that we can measure. What's the difference? The drawing below explains....
How to Become Better at Implementation
The US is good at invention but not very good at implementation. We have generated a boatload of Nobel prizes but stumble at the broader challenges of technology adoption and...
Take a New Approach to Strategy
Strategy in turbulent environments is different from conventional strategic planning. Traditional approaches are too expensive to formulate, too challenging to implement, and too brittle for a rapidly shifting environment. WHY...
Adapting through Knowledge & Learning
Let's start here: Knowledge and learning are critical to adaptation. Both guide our actions as we respond to our environment. By learning by doing, we generate new knowledge. With a...
Visual & Verbal Strategy Practice
Strategy practice now requires both verbal and visual language. Both must be clear and simple. But here's the rub. Finding the simplicity on the other side of complexity is not...
The Ingenuity Gap
Our ingenuity gap continues to grow. Our inability to design and guide "innovating networks" has led to the gap. But here's the good news. We can close the gap if...
Strategic Doing and Positive Deviance
In a turbulent world, strategy becomes everyone's business. Effective strategy requires us to link, leverage, and align resources to achieve shared outcomes. Collaboration can create new solutions to wicked problems. But...
Celebrate the Small Wins
In our work, we emphasize the importance of small wins when generating solutions for big, complex problems. The reason: that's how you develop and leverage the power of networks. WHY...
