Testimonials
What a great day of engagement and learning. Janyce and Rena moved our students through the concepts of Strategic Doing in a manner that resonated with them. One student remarked, “The in-person seminar, online materials, and book worked well together to teach us the tenets and reasons behind creating Strategic Doing, a concept that applies to our current roles [students] and future as engineering management professionals.” The experience was a great compliment to their traditional engineering education.
“You want to embrace everybody’s individual personalities and the way they operate, but you also have a common goal—they’re managing these projects for this business unit. That class really gave some interesting insight into how you can organize and lead groups to make decisions when you have that very different set of personalities or backgrounds.”
Strategic Doing provided me with a framework for thinking through new projects, communicating with stakeholders, and managing a staff. By thinking in terms of our existing assets and not what was outside of our control, it has revolutionized the Shoals Chamber’s programming and made us a more efficient, productive organization.
Strategic Doing helps the Voinovich Academy accomplish its mission of building leadership capacity in Appalachian Ohio. It does this by providing our community-based partners tools to better lead complex collaborations and achieve positive outcomes that benefit the entire region. By learning the skills of Strategic Doing, our partners can effect real change as they face the region’s wicked problems. Thanks to the training provided by the Agile Strategy Lab, we now have a network of Strategic Doing Practitioners prepared to make change happen in their communities.
My work as an urban planner changed after experiencing a Strategic Doing workshop. The workshop experience and subsequent work helped me see how to co-create and advance ideas and strategies with others. As a result, I’ve embedded the ten agile leadership skills into my practice to help clients develop actionable roadmaps to implement their projects. If you have waning hope in addressing challenges or are frustrated by previous change initiatives, then I encourage you to experience a Strategic Doing workshop.
I come from a background in economic development and chambers of commerce. In the last couple of years spent running a fair sized chamber I became aware of Strategic Doing from LinkedIn posts on workforce development in different places. I liked what I was seeing and kept thinking that i would take the introductory course but time never worked out. Then, three years ago I started my own consulting firm to work with chambers, economic development organizations, city governments and others. The first couple of clients wanted facilitation for board planning so that’s what I did. But at the end, I left knowing the nicely lined-out goals and strategies would likely end up sitting on the shelf because the board members were not engaged to the level of taking action themselves. When the Strategic Doing introductory course was offered on-line in the fall of 2020 I jumped on board. It was all I believed it to be. I am excited to share this with client communities and organizations.
I had never heard of Strategic Doing …it has been revolutionary! I own my own consulting business and plan to use this with clients, as well as through the [local] network of folks to help solve complex issues facing our local community. My previous job was at a global Consumer Packaged Goods company where we did lots of SWOT analysis and “strategic” planning, yet we rarely acted on ANYTHING after many rounds of planning, sharing and aligning. It is so refreshing to see a planned out process that achieves results!
“I had a strange urge to drop everything, and follow! This is very clearly a game changing way to approach a critical business function. It was just so clear to me why people get held up with planning and the pain of strategy meetings (yuk). I can’t wait to hear and learn more.”
“Boy, I gotta tell ya… The response to the training last November has been outstanding! I can already point to several different examples of how the trainees have been putting the principles into practice. Our Delaware Sea Grant SD-trained staff (me, Jame and Chris) conducted a mini-SD exercise at our advisory council meeting in early-DEC and according to one of our state senators who participated, it was the “best meeting this group has put on in the past 18 years!”
“For me it was about behavior change. The reality of our innovation-driven world is that companies need to collaborate to compete. This as not a natural orientation for Lockheed or the companies in the NJ defense supply chain. Strategic Doing gave us a roadmap – a set of protocols to start forming the behaviors companies need to compete in the 21st Century.”
“The CommPlexity workshop was great! Tools are taught that help researchers better present their research. The practice time and peer feedback allowed participants to get real-time feedback and try adjustments in their approach. I am confident that even our most experienced presenters in the group learned something new that will help them be successful.”
“I’ve been involved in strategic planning committees, and produced strategic plans that got filed on the shelf. If you use the tool, it focuses you on getting something done immediately or in the very near term – not just coming up with grandiose plans of things to do, none of which ever get started…I have recommended the process to the provost and upper echelon [leadership] as a way to do the overall planning for our new school of entrepreneurship.”
“I’ve worked with other large companies trying to do open innovation, but this process is unique. This is the most clear and concise open innovation process I’ve seen.”
“Thank you for yesterday! Your work is powerful – and so needed in organizations of all types today. Your process is simple and elegant – and most importantly effective. It build community and at the same time distributes leadership in a very powerful way. I wanted to shout “amen” over and over again yesterday many, many times!”
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