Case Studies
Designing an Agile Strategy Game for KSU-Olathe
The Kansas State University Olathe campus presents an opportunity to design the future of the land-grant university within a metropolitan campus. To address these challenges, our colleagues at Kansas State engaged the Agile Strategy Lab to introduce Strategic Doing to faculty and staff from the Olathe campus. In order to make this introduction, we designed…
Read MorePartnerships with Fraunhofer IAO and New Jersey Innovation Institute
Over four years ago, we began exploring with Fraunhofer IAO how we might integrate our work in agile strategy with their work in technology and innovation management. Both of us realized that the challenges of innovation, especially for small and midsize companies, were becoming far more complex. These companies do not have the internal resources…
Read MoreThe core team in Flint continues to rebuild neighborhoods using Strategic Doing
Several years ago, a colleague at Michigan State University, Bob Brown, asked us to question: could Strategic at doing help us reduce the teenage homicide rate in Flint? Since that time, we have worked closely with Bob and his growing network of civic leaders who are rebuilding the devastated neighborhoods of Flint. Their work is…
Read MoreLab expands partnership with Rowan Cabarrus Community College (NC)
It’s all about networks. A year ago, we conducted a Strategic Doing training at Rowan Cabarrus Community College (RCCC), north of Charlotte. We conducted the training at the invitation of Craig Lamb, vice president of corporate and continuing education at RCCC. Formerly, Craig had been with Ivy Tech in Lafayette. While at Ivy Tech, he worked…
Read MoreTransforming Mechanical Engineering: What We Are Learning
In August 2016, during a faculty retreat for the School of Mechanical Engineering, we launched teams to begin the transformation of the School. (We are working under an NSF grant. We launched this work under the umbrella of re|course. You can visit the re|course web site here.) What have we learned? For one thing, we…
Read More200 in Kansas play Strategic Doing: The Game
We completed a leadership training this week at Kansas State University. Our Agile Strategy Lab team led about 200 participants in Strategic Doing: The Game. Participants learned to apply the deep skills of collaboration to design and guide strategies to address wicked problems or seize shared-value opportunities. This approach helps us scale the learning. We can play…
Read Morere|course: Transforming Purdue Mechanical Engineering
The Agile Strategy Lipids in the midst of forming teams of students, faculty and staff to transform the School of Mechanical Engineering. Under a National Science Foundation grant, we are experimenting with a new approach to transforming engineering education. Research underscores the challenge. While numerous initiatives have focused on transforming engineering education within the classroom,…
Read MoreDesigning complex workshops using simple rules: NASA Life Sciences
The discipline of agile strategy is designed for open, loosely connected networks. These networks do not stand still. They are complex and shifting. How do we design and guide collaborations in the midst of this complexity? In a seminal Harvard Business Review article some years ago, Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull provided the answer: follow simple…
Read MoreWorkshop with NASA Space Biology
For the past month, the Lab has been working with NASA’s Space Biology program, a unit that is spread across three centers — Ames, Johnson and Kennedy — and NASA headquarters in Washington. The program faces some complex challenges. It is a relatively small program within the NASA portfolio that focuses on exploring how spaceflight…
Read MoreEconomic Development’s Next Big Opportunity: Horizontal Innovation
The next big transformation in economic development is coming. It’s about time. Remarkably, most economic development organizations are still playing a game invented in Mississippi in the 1930s. It goes something like this. Make a quick assessment of your economy to figure out your community’s Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats, the SWOT analysis. (Hint: Hire…
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