The Agile Strategy Lab Podcast

Leaders are often looking for THE big change that will lead to lasting transformation or market dominance. But the reality is that the most successful strategy is usually a series of small changes. In this episode we make the case that “Small is Beautiful,” with a hat tip to economist EF Schumacher, who argued for limiting growth where needed to ensure the wellbeing of future generations. The guest for this episode is Sandy Jacobs, the mayor of Hays, Kansas, a community in the western part of the state. Over the last few years, Hays has been in the center of a growing effort to use Strategic Doing to identify and implement community improvement strategies. 

The challenge of how to help groups of people that haven't worked together before do so effectively, without spending hours, or more, on “getting to know one another” - is nearly universal. It spans every field and kind of organization, from large multi-national corporations to small rural churches, and everything in between. In this episode, we look at that challenge in the particular domain of university-led research, through a conversation between the developer of Strategic Doing, Ed Morrison, and Jeff Agnoli of Ohio State University.

Agile strategy has an inherent creative tension between big transformations and small wins. Can we do both at the same time? New Ecuadorean Minister of Production and Trade, Julio Prado, is committed to making it happen in his country.  Prado attended a Strategic Doing training in the US, a few years ago, hoping to use the discipline to expand his understanding of how to grow clusters. He now has the opportunity to do that work on a national scale. It's an enormous audacious goal. It will take many, many, *many* small wins to get there - but particularly as Ecuador tries to climb out of the pandemic, there's the need for big, fast transformation across the economy. In this episode, the Lab's director, Ed Morrison, talks with him at the end of the Lab's training sessions and workshops there about how Prado sees Strategic Doing enabling change in Ecuador, leaning into that tension to address both the big and the small simultaneously.

If you've  missed the ability to plan ahead more than a few weeks - and honestly, isn't that most of us? - you may be enthusiastically diving back into the world of timelines, metrics, and continuous improvement. Before you get too far down the road, join us as we dive into the idea of effectuation and effectual innovation. Effectuation posits that a startup has to rely on a largely emergent strategy, tapping resources they already have, and the networks they can partner with, to navigate an unpredictable environment. Effectual innovation takes that concept and moves it into a larger organizational context and the need to constantly nurture innovation to stay competitive. Our guest is Paidi O'Reilly, an Irish leader in innovation thinking.

Remember when “bad behavior” was something that we talked about mostly in reference to toddlers and pets? It's abundantly clear that the old definition of bad behavior has changed dramatically. In the last few years in particular we seem to have lost the capacity to engage in the kinds of civic conversations our communities need. The incivility isn't limited to town meetings - it's spread into companies, schools, and anyplace else people gather - including and maybe even especially - into our online gathering spaces. So how do we get it back - or maybe get it in the first place? This episode is drawn from a recent Third Thursday event that featured three speakers: Lisa Hutcheson, Hunter Morrison, and Ruth Ellen Whitt - each tackling the topic from a different professional perspective.  

Our modern world is full of large, complex systems - so many, in fact, that we often don't notice them until something goes wrong, or we're trying to work within a system ourselves to bring change about. Those systems aren't discrete entities - they overlap and interlock, adding even more complexity. In this episode, we talk about what agility might look like in the context of a large institution trying to accomplish a specific mission-oriented goal, and how a set of interlocking complex systems make that agility difficult. The sector is higher education, but the underlying ideas are applicable to many sectors. Our guest in exploring these ideas is Jim Woodell, who works with higher education institutions as they pursue what's called in that world “engagement” - the way in which the university reaches out beyond its own walls to the community or region around them. 

There's something quite ironic about the idea of  teaching new ways of working within an organizational structure that is almost 1000 years old - the first university was the university of Bologna, founded in 1088. That irony is not lost on Steve Hart and Wayne Tarken of the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, they discuss how changing the way we do basic kinds of work, such as how we hold meetings, can change even the oldest organizations, and why they're optimistic on what's ahead in the workplace.

Today's episode focuses on diversity that's not visible in any kind of demographics we encounter in a dataset from the Census Bureau. It's the diversity that springs from how our brains approach various kinds of problems. Cognitive diversity, just like other kinds of diversity, manifests itself in every team we're a part of, whether it's recognized or not. Just like other kinds of diversity, cognitively diverse teams can be better teams, especially when it comes to working in spaces that require creativity and innovation. In this episode Sebastian Hamers of Human Insight teams up with Tabitha Scott of Southern Growth Studio to explain cognitive and strategic diversity and how to use these underappreciated concepts to power effective teams and organizations. 

The past year has in some ways been a forced practicum in experimentation, as organizations sought ways to respond to the COVID crisis. Every part of every organization has participated in this practicum, but at the heart of it all has been the human resources function. In this episode, we talk with Steve Hart and Wayne Tarken. We talk about the 10 skills in the Strategic Doing book, as well as the questions they're built around: what could we do? What should we do? What will we do? When will we come back together? What do these ideas look like in Human Resources specifically, now and in the future - and can we hang on to the lessons we've learned?

When we see a change movement - whether it's within a company, an institution, or a region - how can we learn to see what's not in plain sight? And more importantly, can we take advantage of the properties of change to get a movement started in such a way that it will have increasing impact and grow? In this episode, you'll hear from Greg Sattell, the author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. Greg's work aligns with our own, particularly as we think about three groups of people; the enthusiastic “pioneers” who are the first believers, the persuadable “pragmatists” that need to be brought on board, and the “soreheads,” - the implacable opponents of change. Greg was living in Kyiv (Kiev) in the early 2000's, leading a media company, and saw political protests  transforming into something bigger. What he observed propelled him into a new phase of his career as he explored what was behind this kind of phenomenon and how to apply those principles within organizations.   

Perhaps you've listened to grandparents or great-grandparents tell stories about the Great Depression and the Second World War - saving tinfoil, making a birthday cake then they didn't have ration coupons for sugar and eggs, or having to give up the pleasures of the Sunday drive because gasoline was too precious to be used frivolously. 2020 and 2021 will be remembered, in part, through the stories that individuals and organizations tell about how they got through the hard times of the pandemic. Kathy Hagler of K2OH Solutions has combined the insights of Edward Deming, Peter Drucker and Strategic Doing in her work with nonprofit organizations. In this episode, she makes the conceptual very practical by sharing a case study of one nonprofit organization and how she's used all three toolsets to help them weather this remarkable time.

Today's episode has at its heart a really good story, about not a fictional character but someone very real - Edward Deming, revered as a management thinker who unlocked the secrets of quality by studying how manufacturing in Japan was being done. We hear from Kathy Hagler, who was presented with the opportunity to learn from Deming up close and personal. She then took what she learned and combined it with some other tools - including Strategic Doing to create an effective approach to working with nonprofit organizations. Kathy, a great storyteller, is the principal of K2OH Solutions.

Innovation has long since ceased being something that happens within the four walls of a single lab or even company - it happens in networks. Most of us have at least some sense when the work we're doing is engaging an increasing number of people and organizations - when our networks are expanding. But how can we get more precise about measuring that? In this episode, Scott Dempwolf of the University of Maryland gives us a primer on social network analysis and how he's used it. Scott came to academia from economic development, and his focus is on applying these mathematical tools to the innovation process.

In this episode, we explore two key ideas. The first is one of the ideas we're most fond of: the principle of starting small, but starting. Nowhere is that more true than in rural communities, where often a group seeking to make change is largely, if not entirely, made up of volunteers. In this episode, I talk with Rob O'Brian, a consultant whose work in Missouri includes this rural focus. The second idea is something Rob encountered that's also a frequent theme in Strategic Doing: the element of surprise. There's great potential in surprise, but it can also present the risk of stalling or even halting progress completely. In this case, Rob as well as the group he was working with encountered some unexpected twists and turns.

This week, we again feature futurist Rebecca Ryan in a short episode focused on the idea of what we call in Strategic Doing the S-Curve. Sometimes called a sigmoid curve, or a sine wave if you remember back to your pre-calculus class, S-Curves describe much of what we see in the world around us. Rebecca talks about the S-Curve - or as she calls it, the sine wave of entropy - as she discusses an idea called the three horizons. S-Curves overlap. We can see the one we are on, but there also was one preceding that, and there's one ahead of us. In the three horizon model, the horizon behind us is the first horizon, or horizon 1. The one ahead of us is horizon 3. Listen as Rebecca talks about how that idea is playing out right in front of us, and what that means for our future.

We've all spent a lot of time over the last year saying, "Remember when...?" In this episode, we talk to a futurist, someone who is perpetually thinking not about what has come before, but about what things will be like is 10 years, in 30 years. Are we ready to do that yet? Futurist Rebecca Ryan says we'd better be. Rebecca works with organizations, communities, and regions using a tool called Strategic Foresight, to closely study signals in the environment that are clues to what might be coming, and then to align their efforts to a future they want - to take the initiative to shape the future rather then just letting it happen. Rebecca describes Strategic Foresight, as well as how it aligns with Strategic Doing.

In this episode, we explore coaching by talking to someone who uses Strategic Doing in his coaching practice with companies and their leaders. David Ducheyne is the founder of Otolith, a consulting firm based in Belgium that takes a people-oriented approach to its work with firms seeking to make major transformations. David notes that he's often surprised at the extent to which management underestimates the talent in their own companies, and how slow they can be to embrace collaboration. Unblocking that resistance is often key to solving the problems that David's been retained to help them solve. He's developed a novel solution to help them make the most of their greatest resource - their people.

Strategic Doing got its start more than two decades ago in the world of economic development. It's since broadened to almost every domain and kind of organization - anywhere there are people who realize they need to find a way to get things done when there's no one that can truly call all the shots. In this episode, we return to Strategic Doing's roots, through hearing about the journey of one economic development organization,TexAmericas, in Texarkana - right on the border of Texas and Arkansas. It's a place where collaboration is not an option, it's an imperative. Eric Voyles, the Executive Vice President and Chief Economic Development Officer of TexAmericas, chose to use the Strategic Doing approach more than a year ago and we talk about what's happened since then and what's next. 

As an exploratory approach to identifying and deploying potential solutions to problems, Design Thinking has a lot in common with Strategic Doing. Many Strategic Do-ers are interested in learning more about Design Thinking, and people steeped in Design Thinking are attracted by the Strategic Doing approach. In this episode, you'll hear a brief overview of the basics of design thinking, from José Lugo of the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez, and Lab director Ed Morrison's report on conversations with the Darden School of Business about how the groups might collaborate to solve big problems. 

REPAIRED FILE - Wouldn't it have been useful to have a crystal ball at the end of 2019? Is there anything that we can do to get ready for disruptions - maybe not enormous ones like the pandemic, but those that still have the potential for major impact on our companies, institutions, or communities. In this episode, Doug Barrett, the director of the Center for Innovation and Economic Development at the University of North Alabama, shares the discipline of foresight, and how it can help us prepare. 

As we look forward to rebuilding our communities in the coming months and years, we're confronted with renewing, if not rebuilding, entire ecosystems related to small and growing businesses. Those ecosystems can seem amorphous - the borders are fuzzy. Everything seems to have some impact on the whole. That's the very nature of an ecosystem and it's what makes it seem so daunting in trying to effect change. The fact is, ecosystems can't be controlled. They can only be guided. In this episode, Andy Stoll, senior program officer at the Kauffman Foundation talks about what the foundation's learned about entrepreneurial ecosystems, the critical leverage point for guiding ecosystems, and how agile strategy can be a tool for guiding their growth.

A key concept in agile strategy is the idea of tossing out “if only.”  “If only” serves to keep us stuck, because it says that we've become victims of our circumstances. But we don't have to view our situation that way. In fact, one of the lessons of the pandemic, because it's stretched out so much further than we could have imagined last March, is that most of us haven't had the luxury of ‘waiting it out.” We've been forced to think about alternatives, new ways to get to a desired outcome, or even choosing a new outcome to steer toward. In this episode, Lilly Cavanaugh, the executive director of the Ohio Latino Affairs Commission talks about not having "if only" as an option - and what happened after that. 

The growing polarization of our society, manifested last week in the riots in the US Capitol - is truly what some people call a "wicked" problem - a term that refers not to any intent, but to an exceptionally complex nature that resists solutions. Rebuilding our civic and political life will require deep and focused conversations. In this episode the director of the Lab, Ed Morrison, reflects on what's changed in our civic life in the last thirty years. The conversation took place the day before the riots, but his ideas can help us put the events in the context of agile strategy from a societal vantage point. You'll also hear a bit about what it all might mean for an issue like the pandemic. 

For an end-of-year roundup, members of the Agile Strategy Lab team reflect on the best book they read this year. It's a potpourri of genres, including business books, fiction, and history (both US and world). Start your list for 2021. No need to take notes: the full list can be found at https://agilestrategylab.org/blog/.

One of the conversations that has woven through Strategic Doing over the past few years has had to with its use in an entrepreneurial context - both by entrepreneurs, and by people who are focused on building an entrepreneurship ecosystem in their community or region. Even within a single state, however, entrepreneurs' needs can vary tremendously - and the Strategic Doing approach need to be tailored appropriately for different audiences. In this episode, Lauren Goldstein from New Mexico State University talks about her work with a wide range of entrepreneurs in very different kinds of communities - both within and outside the university setting.

"Be Prepared" is the motto for scouting worldwide, but it applies to all of us. In a year in which it seems as though our world was prepared for very little, we focus in one community, and how their civic preparedness is serving them well. Iowa City is no stranger to extreme challenges - floods, catastrophic winds, and the pandemic - and that's just in the past few years. Tom Banta of Iowa City Area Development talks about the investments they're making in a different kind of emergency preparedness.

Among the many kinds of diversity, one of the most critical is largely invisible: cognitive diversity. In a dynamic environment, when you don't know exactly what the right path forward is, you need a team with members that approach the world differently. This episode brings very practical advice to this challenge, as Sebastian Hamers from the Dutch firm Human Insight, discusses cognitive diversity and how to measure and manage it. 

In this episode, we speak with John Morley. The breadth of John's professional experience - across continents, sectors, and business phases - gives him a unique vantage point from which to think about the concepts of trust, vision, and strategy. 

In this episode, we're delving a bit murky, although we see its outworkings it all around us. What is it that's going on when a person chooses to be part of a community? Why do we form communities, and how do they shape our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors? And what happens when very different communities try to talk to one another? In this episode, you'll hear from Will Samson, the Vice President of Strategic Growth and Change for Inzet, a coaching and consulting firm in the Washington, DC area.

Last week's US presidential election seemed like a good opportunity to visit a topic that's at the heart of agile leadership:  creating a space - both literally and figuratively - in which people can have open, deep and focused conversations. If we aim for a nice, friendly, or polite conversation - those goals aren't enough when the people that most need to have conversations with each other have very different, deeply held convictions. But there's an alternative - civility. In this episode, we hear from Ed Morrison, the director of the Agile Strategy Lab at the University of North Alabama. Ed's spent three decades helping people have important but difficult conversations in the service of better futures for their organizations and communities, with civility as the bedrock. 

One of the tenets of agile leadership is that the strongest strategies are built on the assets that already exist - whether in a company, an institution, or a community. So when a group of leaders in Milwaukee considered ways to strengthen their local economy more than a decade ago, they built on that city's heritage of brewing beer…but not in the way you might expect. And here's another surprise: they didn't start with a strategic plan. Dean Amhaus, president and CEO of The Water Council in Milwaukee, explains.

“Lean” is a word that is most familiar in the context of manufacturing and is designed to be applied to technical problems - that is, problems that can be identified and solved by the application of known technical skills. By contrast, the Strategic Doing approach is designed for adaptive challenges in which there may be many answers and a solution will need to be arrived at through an iterative process of learning and doing. Perhaps surprisingly, there are some overlaps between the two. In this episode, Janyce Fadden explores that overlap.

Strategic Doing is designed to help groups form collaborations quickly, focus on measurable outcomes, and start moving immediately, adjusting as the group learns. It's particularly useful for addressing complex challenges where solutions are elusive. Of course, it's not the only tool for addressing challenges. One approach that's getting a lot of attention of late is design thinking. In the agile strategy world, there are some interesting overlaps between the two. In this episode, Michigan Tech's Mary Raber describes the foundational principle of design thinking and explores how they are aligned with Strategic Doing.

Flint, Michigan is a place that's been the subject of a number of high-profile conversations in the last few years - and not in good ways. But there's another conversation - a much quieter one - happening in the city. Community activist Kenyetta Dotson talks about her city and how Strategic Doing has helped community leaders bring change to their neighborhoods.

One of the cornerstones of agile leadership is the idea of helping groups tap their creativity for solutions by using good questions. Janyce Fadden, the director of strategic engagement at the University of North Alabama's College of Business, talks about what makes for a good question and how you can design a question that will help you - or any group you're a part of - identify possible paths to addressing a complex challenge.

Michon Hicks brings her experience as a leader in public organizations, as a college instructor, and as a skilled Strategic Doing workshop leader together in this discussion of how collaborations can include honest conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion - and move forward to co-creating a shared future.

Ed Morrison, the developer of Strategic Doing, describes how to use four questions to guide a conversation that results in an actionable strategy.