Lab 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 with us on a $15 million workforce innovation grant.

Craig designed Advancing Manufacturing, a dynamic initiative to fill the manufacturing skills gap.

When Craig moved to North Carolina,  he took Strategic Doing with him.  He launched a similar initiative in North Carolina, called the North Carolina Manufacturing Institute.

A month ago, Craig  asked for some guidance in introducing Strategic Doing to 20 civic leaders in Rowan County.  These 20 leaders will guide a larger network of over 200 civic leaders, determined to set their county on a new trajectory.  On June 23, this larger network will meet to assemble citizen teams in 8 areas.

Rowan  County will use Strategic Doing to guide these teams. To introduce the disciplines of agile strategy to the 20 leaders, we designed a new type of workshop.

The Morning Session 

In the morning, we held two sessions. The first introduced Strategic Doing and its history. The second morning session focused on going through the 10 simple rules of  complex collaboration.

The Afternoon Session

We broke the afternoon session into three parts. The first afternoon session walk the leaders through a Strategic Doing Action Pack and introduce the roles table guides and knowledge keepers. The second afternoon session explored the challenging skill of drafting effective framing questions to guide a strategy workshop. The last afternoon session focused the design of a Strategic Doing process.  Here, we used the experience we had with Lockheed to illustrate how Strategic Doing workshops build on one another.

We will keep a close eye on what is happening in Rowan County. It will serve as a good testbed for North Carolina.