This week on The Digital Download, we’re looking to understand a world where traditional hierarchies are giving way to open, loosely connected networks. Ed Morrison, author, Founder of the Strategic Doing Institute and Senior Research Fellow at The Conference Board, joins us to discuss how Strategic Doing empowers organizations to thrive in this new, networked landscape. With Ed’s expertise, we’ll explore the tools and mindsets needed to drive meaningful collaboration and adaptability in complex environments.

Join us as we explore questions like:

* Why can’t conventional planning keep up in today’s networked world?

* How does Strategic Doing differ fundamentally from traditional planning approaches?

* How can leaders use Strategic Doing to drive continuous learning?

* What makes this approach uniquely suited for open networks?

Ed’s extensive experience in developing Strategic Doing offers invaluable insights into building adaptive, impactful strategies. He’ll unpack how leaders and organizations can create fluid, responsive paths to success in an increasingly interconnected world.

We strive to make The Digital Download an interactive experience. Bring your questions. Bring your insights. Audience participation is highly encouraged!

This week we were joined by our Special Guest -

• Ed Morrison, Author of Strategic Doing and Founder of the Strategic Doing Institute, and Senior Research Fellow at The Conference Board

This week's Host was -

• Rob Durant, Founder of Flywheel Results, a proud DLA Ignite partner

Panelists included -

• Adam Gray, Co-founder of a DLA Ignite

• Bertrand Godillot, Managing Partner, Odysseus & Co, a proud DLA Ignite partner, and

• Tracy Borreson, Founder and CEO of TLB Coaching & Events, a proud partner of DLA Ignite

Transcript of The Digital Download 2024-11-15

Rob Durant [00:00:03]:

Good morning, good afternoon, and good day wherever you may be joining us from. Welcome to another edition of the Digital Download, which is the longest running weekly business talk show on LinkedIn Live. Now globally syndicated on TuneIn Radio through IBGR, the world's number one business talk, news, and strategy radio network. Today, we're exploring why strategic doing beats conventional planning. We have a special guest, Ed Morrison, to help us with the discussion. Ed's extensive experience in developing strategic doing offers invaluable insights into building adaptive, impactful strategies. But before we bring Ed on, let's go around the set and introduce everyone. While we're doing that, why don't you in the audience reach out to a friend? Ping them and have them join us.

Rob Durant [00:01:01]:

We strive to make the digital download an interactive experience, and audience participation is highly encouraged. Okay. With that, Tracy, would you kick us off, please?

Tracy Morrison [00:01:13]:

Woah. We're going opposite today. I would love to good morning, everybody. Tracy Boursin from TLB Coaching and Events, a proud partner of DLA Ignite and also a proud student of strategic doing. So I'm really excited about this conversation today.

Rob Durant [00:01:31]:

Excellent. Thank you very much. Bertrand, welcome.

Bertrand Godillot [00:01:36]:

Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Hi, everyone. My name is Bertrand Gudliot. I am, the founder and managing partner of Adisource and Co. We're working with customers to create more conversations. Very proud, partner of DLA Ignite based in France.

Rob Durant [00:01:54]:

Thank you very much. Adam.

Adam Gray [00:01:58]:

Hi, everybody. I've got some props with me, which you'll see in just a moment. I'm Adam. I'm cofounder of DLA Ignite. My business partner, Tim, who can't join us today because he's on holiday, would normally say, hi, everyone. I'm Tim Hughes, cofounder of DLA Ignite. I'm famous for writing the book, Social Selling Techniques to Influence, Buyers, and Changemakers, which he is. I'm famous for writing the book, Brilliant Social Media, published by Pearson.

Adam Gray [00:02:25]:

And together, Tim and I are infamous for writing this together. It's marketing. And I'm really looking forward to today's show.

Rob Durant [00:02:33]:

Excellent. Thank you very much. And myself, I am Rob Durant, founder of Flywheel Results. I'm not famous for writing anything yet. But if we're going to do books, I do have a book, The Social Enablement Blueprint.

Tracy Morrison [00:02:52]:

Also, you know what's fun about the our panel today is everyone's in a different country.

Rob Durant [00:02:57]:

Oh, good. Paul.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:58]:

Indeed. Indeed.

Rob Durant [00:03:00]:

Yes. For the panelists, but not for our guest. And with that, let's bring our guest on. Let's see. Yeah. Where is it? There's that button. I I keep it's a new interface. They've moved the button.

Rob Durant [00:03:15]:

Alright. As I said, this week on the digital download, we'll speak with Ed Morrison, author, founder of the Strategic Doing Institute, and senior research fellow at the conference board, Ed will share with us the tools and mindsets needed to drive meaningful collaboration and adaptability in complex environments.

Tracy Morrison [00:03:38]:

Ed, welcome. Welcome. Thank you.

Ed Morrison [00:03:41]:

Thank you. I'm really excited to be here, Rob. Thank you.

Rob Durant [00:03:45]:

We're really excited to have you as well. And, if you have a copy of your book, apparently, today, we're doing gratuitous shines of our book. I don't. I you know, imagine it. Just that that's

Ed Morrison [00:03:56]:

right here.

Rob Durant [00:03:57]:

That's quite alright. We will certainly make reference to it in the show notes. Ed, let's start by having you tell us a little bit more about you, your background, and what led you to where you are today.

Ed Morrison [00:04:10]:

Well, thank you, for that opportunity. I'm old enough that I can do this in decades, so let's do that. Okay? So the 1st decade I spent out of college was on Capitol Hill, working on complex problems of trade and globalization. I left that job when I realized that, our government was becoming increasingly dysfunctional. So this was night early eighties, early eighties. And I went then to a consulting practice, first with an offshoot of BCG, then second on my own. And I was dealing with these complex challenges of globalization, which have devastated many economies, regional economies. And the question was, how how do we respond to these dramatic shifts? And, of course, strategic planning back then was the way you did this.

Ed Morrison [00:05:00]:

But, turns out that when you're in an open network, when nobody can tell anybody what to do, strategic planning doesn't work very well. So in the early nineties, I started working on a new strategy discipline designed for open networks, trying to take the, implicit knowledge I had accumulated in my head about how these things could do work and, started developing strategic doing. By 2,005, I had a model in my head, and I came to Purdue University. I was invited here. And, they said, we like what you're doing. And I said, okay. I wanna validate this model, and I wanna learn to teach it. These are 2 things that I don't know how to do.

Ed Morrison [00:05:47]:

So, that started a 15 year journey at Purdue, where we validated this through multiple test beds with, clients like, Lockheed and, the whole water cluster up in Milwaukee, NASA. We had a variety of different test beds. And, we slowly pieced this together, validated it. And, and then the last in the last few years, we've moved this to, the Strategic Doing Institute, and I completed a PhD in economics to explain why this works. So it's it's really an area of economics that's pretty under underappreciated, which is the economics of networks. And, or you can think of it as mesoeconomics. You started out learning microeconomics and macroeconomics. And the missing middle of economics really is now coming forward with complexity economics and, even doughnut economics as you make.

Ed Morrison [00:06:50]:

These are all, how do you create value in open networks? And so that's what strategic doing is. It's a protocol or a discipline, set of principles that you can use. You learn it, master it, and then you, you can design conversations that lead to collaborations much more quickly. They lead to measurable outcomes. They lead to a disciplined planning by doing and an adjustment as you go. So you're managing risk on the as as you go. So that's really what strategic doing is. Today, I come from Purdue University, which is sort of the the home base of strategic doing.

Ed Morrison [00:07:30]:

We are currently working on 3 ecosystems through the College of Engineering. And so this is an active area of research practice, here at Purdue, and, Purdue's become kind of the epicenter of this work. How do you design ecosystems using an open source, operating system, which is what strategic doing is. So it's you can think of it as an operating system for building these collaborations. So I hope that gives you an overview of my journey.

Adam Gray [00:08:01]:

I I have I have a question. Sure. So so you you mentioned a couple of times open networks. I I think I know what you mean, but assume I'm an idiot. As every as everyone would agree, I'm that's not too far wide of the truth. Yeah. So so so what do you do you mean when you say an open network?

Ed Morrison [00:08:17]:

Well, open networks are all around us. Right? Living systems are open networks. They they're they they're systems that interact with their environment, so they have porous boundaries. And so the they learn and adapt. This is, again, ecology is the science of open systems. The challenge, of course, is we've moved to a knowledge economy. And, we're we're not all of the value, but increasing amounts of value are created by knowledge, not resources. Resources is what drove neo classical economics, the idea of diminishing returns.

Ed Morrison [00:08:51]:

We're all familiar with that. Stable, points of equilibrium. Open networks are, have a completely different, set of assumptions, which is that the environment is continuously shifting, that we can take create value in those environments if we understand how to design and guide these ecosystems using our conversations. So it's moving from a model of strategic planning, which started, really coming out of World War 2 and then getting into the business schools by 1960 or so. That is a, decide and delegate model. Group of people at the top of the organization, figure out where the strategy is, and then they delegate it to move forward. That doesn't really work in an open network. It doesn't really work in the systems that we're currently, trying to design.

Ed Morrison [00:09:47]:

And so we need a new approach, and that's what strategic doing provides. So I hope that answers your question.

Adam Gray [00:09:54]:

Yeah. Thank you.

Rob Durant [00:09:56]:

I think I get it.

Ed Morrison [00:09:58]:

Okay.

Rob Durant [00:09:59]:

But why doesn't conventional planning work in that open network world?

Ed Morrison [00:10:06]:

Well, the the 2 two reasons. 1 is, it will work in a closed system. In other words, where you have a planning does work, it you don't throw it out. I mean, there are situations where you know what to do and you plan. So, I mean, building a building, you know, is a is a good example of how you can use planning to to organize your resources. But increasingly, when we are operating in, ecosystems interrelated networks, we're confronting, what's been called wicked problems or complex problems, situations where we don't know what to do. And these are wicked in 2 ways. 1 is that the underlying symptom the, the symptom, that we are worried about, say climate change, is the product of underlying entangled systems.

Ed Morrison [00:11:01]:

You can't pull it apart. Second is that in order to generate solutions, you need to collaborate. You need to work with organizations outside your orbit. And so part of the challenge is managing these two dimensions of complexity, and that's really what strategic doing was designed to do. Is how do we, address complex challenges, generate more solutions to these wicked problems, in situations where we can't tell anybody what to do. We cannot delegate. Now, we're caught, we're not reaching our our our sustainability goals, of course. So we're caught very much in an old pattern of thinking, which is a bunch of people can do wonderful work analyzing the problem and what do they do? They produce a report and they're telling other people what to do.

Ed Morrison [00:11:55]:

It's like, okay, here's the problem and here's what you need to do. Well, this is, underlying it is very much of a strategic planning mindset that there's a set of solutions up here and that if all the people just could figure out how to follow where we're going, we'll solve the problem. Well, unfortunately, that doesn't work. And, so what we need to do is move to a model of continuous inquiry, continuous experimentation where we're moving from decide and delegate to design and do. Design, do. Design, do. And building up trust within the network that actually powers this intangible that powers the network. Trust is really, really critical.

Ed Morrison [00:12:42]:

So strategic doing really focuses on how do we build up trust quickly across people who've never worked together before. And this is a this is a challenge that took us a while to figure out, but but we have a we have a protocol to follow.

Rob Durant [00:12:55]:

So a big part of it then would be, command and control or a a lack of a central authority to to have that command and control. Is that correct?

Ed Morrison [00:13:05]:

That's right. And so, again, if you if you were to look at, for a colleague of mine, for example, did all of the did he looked at 40, 45 organizations that are focused on water. And there's a lot of reports being written, but not a lot of doing being done. And we're not generating the solutions. We have to have solutions that are replicable, scalable, and sustainable. And, tell trying to tell people what the problem is and what they should do, what you should do, what you should do, doesn't doesn't work. And so, strategic doing, threw all that out. Basically said, after I tried to figure out how to modify strategic planning model to make it work, doesn't work.

Ed Morrison [00:13:54]:

And so we started out, with a a complete clean sheet of paper and said, okay. How would we do this? And, we followed really the model of open source software development. And it's the reason, the reason why it has a lot of resonance with agile methodologies, because agile methodologies followed the same, followed the same, guidance.

Rob Durant [00:14:24]:

So in that sense, how do you how does anything get done if everybody's doing their own thing?

Ed Morrison [00:14:36]:

Well, no. Not everybody's doing their own thing. So this is this is really the important insight is that, we get things done in networks. We can get things done in networks. And I want you to distinguish between 3 types of networks that we we talk about. 1 is an advocacy network. We're all parts of advocacy networks. These are these are networks where we share an interest, but we don't know necessarily know the people in the network.

Ed Morrison [00:15:03]:

So, for example, all the alumni of your of your school, is an advocacy network, or the the the fans of a sports team, an advocacy network. As we start to learn from each other, we we start to form learning networks or communities of practice. Now these are all over the place. They you know, you have associations, that are, essentially, organizations that help the members learn from each other. Now they know each other, but they're each pursuing their separate, outcomes, and we're helping each other pursue that those outcomes. So we have some level of trust, that we've built. What we really need to have to generate solutions are innovating networks. Innovating networks where we share move toward a shared outcome move toward a shared outcome and have practical pathways that we've designed.

Ed Morrison [00:16:00]:

And the the, in many ways, strategic doing flips strategic planning on its head. It essentially says, look, in the space of 2 or 3 hours, you can generate a strategic action plan to start. 2 to 3 hours. Now it's not perfect, but if you iterate off of that, you're going to essentially keep building these networks and move toward innovating networks. Now let me talk about innovating networks for a minute. Innovating networks have, particular characteristics. They have first a core team. There's a core team.

Ed Morrison [00:16:35]:

2nd, they have porous boundaries. Remember, these are living systems. They have porous boundaries. They're not closed. These are boundaries are not closed. And then 3rd, most, significant perhaps is that they're boundary spanning. They're people who are connecting people to other people. And so the, as the core team starts to generate a protocol that generates value, you start seeing resources being, flowing into this network.

Ed Morrison [00:17:03]:

And this is the first example of this. My first experiment with this actually was quite successful, and that was the transformation of the Oklahoma City economy starting in 1993. I was called, by a colleague who said, can you come here and make a presentation? And I said, fine. I'm a I'm a sole practitioner strategy practitioner. And I said, well, who else is, you know, who else are you talking to? And they said, well, Stanford Research Institute and Pricewater. And I said, well, there's no chance I'm gonna get this. So I'm just gonna pitch my idea, which is the idea which became strategic governance, which is the idea that we start working on implementation day 1 to test hypotheses, test our assumptions, and build relationships. Because if you're in an open network, it's through the relationships that knowledge and resources flow.

Ed Morrison [00:17:59]:

So what is an ecosystem? Well, an ecosystem is a system of advocacy, learning, and innovating networks that speed the flow of resources to promising solutions. Speed the flow of resources to promising solutions. Well, how do those how does that happen? Well, the innovating networks are coming up with new ideas, new ways of thinking about this, and what they're doing is flowing resources through their network, through their relationships, or flowing resources into promising ideas. This is venture capital, of course, but it goes way beyond that. In the room right next door to me at Purdue here, we've got faculty, government officials from the Department of Defense, and, private sector people starting to build the relationships needed to develop an ecosystem. And so, in the space of the 3 hours we have, they will walk out with an action plan. What are we gonna do next? What's the next step? So it's it's focused on the process of growth, the process of moving forward. And, that that differs from the more mechanical view of what strategic planning is.

Ed Morrison [00:19:14]:

So Isn't there a

Adam Gray [00:19:15]:

isn't there a challenge with this though that, when there's strategic planning, you said it's like a a top down instruction and and those those commands delegated people underneath. So we have a very clear objective and a very clear set of roles and responsibilities within that ecosystem. Even though that ecosystem may fail 99% of the time, we've got very clear, you know, Tracy, you're responsible for a, b, and c. Rob, you're responsible for d, e, and f. Right. Trying to do it, you know, and and and it's very, very clear. When we're having a a system which is purely collaborative and and people are part of this network, isn't there the risk that Tracy says, well, I'm gonna do a, b, and f, and the reason I'm gonna do those is because that suits my own personal agenda, which may not be entirely aligned with the wider community agenda. Yep.

Adam Gray [00:20:11]:

Because that's gonna help boost my career or my revenue or, forge additional relationships with Bertrand and Ed in this ecosystem? And and how do we how do we keep people on side, keeping them focused on the big objective rather than their own little empire building?

Ed Morrison [00:20:30]:

Well, there, you know, at some point, as I said, what innovation is and the innovation that emerges out of strategic doing out of these innovating networks is recombinant innovation. It's in other words, it's taking assets we all have and creating shared value. So understanding what motivates Tracy is important for the partnership. For everybody under has to understand that. How you address this, the the the challenge has always been if you move away from this world we know, hierarchical structures, then it becomes chaos. You know, it's gonna be chaotic. And the answer is no. If you follow some simple rules, you will generate complex adaptive systems or collaborations that will achieve the outcomes that you're the shared outcomes that you're looking for.

Ed Morrison [00:21:19]:

So one of the ways to think about this, Adam is, and I'm painting with a broad brush, but there are 2 different situations we're in. We know the answer to the challenge. We know the answer to the problem. Their design I mean, decide and delegate works. I mean, if you know how how to solve a problem, just go solve the problem. Just, you know, yeah. But increasingly, we don't know how to solve these problems. We don't know how to deal with these problems.

Ed Morrison [00:21:49]:

And typically, the answer that comes back is, well, we can't do anything until we define the problem. Well, that's a mindset of a mechanical system. It's not the mindset of a living system. And so part of the opportunity here is to shape these ecosystems. You don't manage these ecosystems. You shape them through your conversations, through the inquiries that you design, the questions that you ask. And you, impose some simple rules on the participants. And if they don't follow those simple rules, then they're by almost by definition, they're distraction.

Ed Morrison [00:22:26]:

They're they're pulling it apart, and so you exclude them from the system. And this is this is how you do this in your personal networks. I mean, you know, in in your personal networks, if you had 6 people going around and each sharing around at the pub, right, and one guy says, well, I don't wanna no. I'm not no. I'm not doing that. Well, chances are they're not gonna invite that guy to the next pub crawl or whatever you're doing. Why? Because they're not following, the mutuality the mutuality that creates the value. This mutual relationship creates value.

Ed Morrison [00:23:02]:

And what we did with strategic doing was look at a very granular level. What are the conversations that lead to these kind of collaborations? How do we design these conversations? How do we make sure that we're moving toward measurable outcomes, not big fuzzy stuff, but measurable outcomes? And how do we create a path that we can constantly adjust as we learn by doing? So how do we create the discipline, the protocols that are different than strategic planning, but give us the same sense of, coherence, direction, and, yes, some measure of control, you know, positive ostracism. You know, if somebody's not following the the, the the the norms of the group. I'll share with you a story on this. My wife is Chinese, and we used to go around to, around Chinese New Year. We'd go to different houses. And I asked her one time why why we weren't going to, this woman's house. And she looked at me and said, I cut.

Ed Morrison [00:24:17]:

And I said, what does that mean? They said, well, I don't talk to her anymore. And I said, why? Well, because she's always going to these other houses, but she's never inviting us to her house. And so she's pulling from the network, but she's not adding back to the network. So I cut. Well, this is the this is the discipline. This is the discipline. If you want innovating networks, innovating networks are powered by trust. Trust emerges from predictable patterns.

Ed Morrison [00:24:46]:

And what strategic doing does is create these patterns where trust can emerge. And if if, if people start violating the norms of the group, the violation of the of the the, safe space, psychological safety, which you're undoubtedly familiar with, is core to this process. So you have to maintain the safe space. And if you have to ostracize somebody, you have to ostracize them because why? The value of the people remaining in the network is more than the than the value of this one person who's disrupting the network. So you have to be tough sometimes.

Bertrand Godillot [00:25:27]:

We have question on

Rob Durant [00:25:28]:

on that. We have some great questions from the audience. Sorry, Bertrand. I wanna make sure that we address

Tracy Morrison [00:25:34]:

So everyone has all the questions.

Rob Durant [00:25:37]:

A comment from, Tolisha Joseph. I love this. It's total my jam and every word is a Ed is saying is super exciting to me. Thank you, Talisha.

Ed Morrison [00:25:47]:

Thank you.

Rob Durant [00:25:49]:

And then we have a question from Deepa Rao. How do you deal with resistance to change to such strategic doing? Not everyone loves change and continuous improvement if they believe things are working as well as is.

Ed Morrison [00:26:07]:

Well, this is a this is an excellent question because we're dealing with existing systems, and these existing systems have routines. They have existing routines. This is how we do things around here. Now about 30 or 40 years ago, Chris Argers at MIT suggested, hey. If you really need a organization to learn and adapt, you need not just, what he calls single loop learning, but you need to question your assumptions, which he called double loop learning. And that's not being done a lot in organizations. So they end up keep doing the routine, the routine, the routine, and we're all familiar with the Kodak story or the Xerox story of how a company just went over the cliff because they couldn't change their routines. Changing routines is threatening.

Ed Morrison [00:26:54]:

There's no question about it. And oftentimes, it's been isolated. You know, we'll create a Skunk Works or something over here and and see if that works. Well, again, it's threatening to people. And the only guidance that I can give you in these complex situations is by creating new value on the edge of these networks of your existing networks. In creating new value, you can pull the organization toward the edge. You can introduce new ways, new approaches to do doing things. So for example, when I was at Purdue in 2005, strategic doing was, you know, not not well recognized that we we didn't know really what it was.

Ed Morrison [00:27:39]:

I wasn't on the faculty, and, so it was easily dismissed. But my my, mentors here provided me, hey. We think this is good a good idea. Let's why don't you protect, why don't you go ahead and practice this? And so I did. And so, fast forward 20 years, now the College of Engineering and others are saying, oh, this really actually does work. And so we need to adopt this, and and we're using it as, again, the invisible operating system, the invisible operating system for developing ecosystems in, industry 4.0, the future of the electric grid, the future of logistics, which is a big all of these are big, hairy challenges. And so you've gotta bring people in, you've gotta bring people in, you've gotta bring people in, challenges. And so you've got to bring people in, you've got to respect their time, you've got to come up with a first version of a strategic action plan with everyone committing to a step, everyone committing to a next step.

Ed Morrison [00:28:38]:

And then, continuing to develop the network as you experiment and learn by doing. That's how new systems change. Now, again, my guidance is, don't don't try to attack the old system. The old system, you know, will is threatened. And there's something that scholars call the immune response that happens to change. And that's true. There is there is those challenges. But you look for opportunities to innovate on the edge.

Ed Morrison [00:29:11]:

And as you do that, you start to see the system start to move, in the direction that creates more value. The driver of all this is that by linking, leveraging, and aligning existing assets, we make them much more productive. So we measured right after the 1st day experiment we had was a $15,000,000 project here on on workforce productivity. And, how do we department of labor in the US said, hey. Try to figure this out. We generated over, 60 different initiatives. We developed, over with over a 100 partners, and we managed them with, commitments, both outcome commitments and progress commitments. And, when there was a problem, we swooped in and said, okay.

Ed Morrison [00:30:09]:

What's the problem? And the obligation was, they had to report back to us. If they're gonna get money, they had to report back to us, and they did didn't if they didn't report back to us, we cut the money. So you create, a new ethic of mutuality and learning that's really critical to this whole process of how do we do work in open networks. And we have to we have to move in that direction rather rapidly. The good news is that now the work that we're doing is spreading globally. They're taking on big challenges. Julio Jose Prado in in Ecuador when he was the minister of production and trade in Ecuador called me up and said, how do we, deploy strategic doing across Ecuador in 20 clusters, everything from bananas to finance. And I said, well, let's figure that out.

Ed Morrison [00:31:02]:

So we did, and, we we launched strategic doing in Ecuador, during the pandemic. And those clusters are continuing to grow. So why is that? Because you create positive feedback loops, you improve the productivity of your existing assets. And as I was saying in our first experiment at Purdue, we exceeded our own targets by 3 x. So I'm not talking about 10% improvement in productivity. I'm talking about, game changer type improvements in productivity. Why? Because you're link linking, leveraging, and aligning your assets differently towards solutions that you need to you need to generate. So companies are starting to move in this direction.

Ed Morrison [00:31:45]:

We're working with Wabash here, which is a large truck trailer company, very, very early adopters strategic joint, and they are working on on how do they build out the company ecosystem, not only the logistics ecosystem, but the company ecosystem. Well, these are these are all challenges. The good news is that, strategic doing take is you don't license the model. You, learn it. My first agreement with, Purdue when I came here in 2005, I said, well, I've got this model, and if it works, what I would like to do is share it. And, and if it doesn't work, nobody's gonna care. So, so, Purdue agreed to that. Purdue said, look.

Ed Morrison [00:32:28]:

We're not gonna own this. We're not gonna try to own it and license it. If it works, we'll help you spread it, and that's really what they've been doing. So Purdue is the kind of the global epicenter of strategic doing, and it's all around the notion that we've got to design new systems to generate new knowledge, actionable knowledge, and we have to do it fast. And we have to speed it up speed this up, and that's that's what strategic doing does. So we have questions. Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:32:58]:

Yeah. So I

Bertrand Godillot [00:32:58]:

had a quick question because, I guess, you know, what you described is is definitely a significant cultural change. And, I was wondering what is the best size companies to, really get this type of initiative going? And and and second question, which is kind of linked, how how do do you have to coexist with a a traditional financial planning and then move to the edge as you discussed, or, is it is it a scratch and replace?

Ed Morrison [00:33:32]:

No. It's not a scratch and replace. In other words, you can take a strategic plan and, use strategic doing to help you implement the plan. So, again, this is not binary thinking. So this is really, really important that you you're so this is why I going to back to Adam's point or question, I say, you know, distinguish between situations where you know what to do from situations where you don't know what to do. And when you don't know what to do, don't apply the linear thinking of of problem solving because it won't work.

Bertrand Godillot [00:34:05]:

Okay.

Ed Morrison [00:34:05]:

Learn a new methodology, new learn a new approach, and see if you can find a way to, build this these networks, these innovating networks that generate new solutions. That's important. That's that's really what

Adam Gray [00:34:19]:

you're trying to do.

Ed Morrison [00:34:20]:

So, it's not it's not within the complex, challenges, you've got, Bertrand. You you say you have a there there there's definitely problems that we already know how to solve. So what I used to say in my, and oftentimes, it's best to just start there, the idea of small wins. I I would tell my clients, we're gonna start tackling this complex challenge by finding the problems equivalent to putting the shower curtain on the inside of the bathtub. We're doing stupid things. Let's you know, the first thing we're gonna do is stop doing stupid things. That'll that'll that'll free up some resources, free up some time, and we'll be able to we'll be able to operate. So, again, this is, this is not a I'm I'm presenting 2 two extremes of a continuum in in many ways.

Ed Morrison [00:35:17]:

So, yeah, the planning mindset, the planning skills, they they're not they're not obsolete. They work, and they work in certain contexts, but they don't work in highly network open networks in situations where you can't, again, you can't tell anybody what to do. You can't delegate.

Tracy Morrison [00:35:37]:

So, Ed, you mentioned earlier on in the conversation that this is like a found there's principles that this is based off of.

Ed Morrison [00:35:46]:

This is

Tracy Morrison [00:35:46]:

a, kind of I interpret as a way of being. So what are can you share with us the foundational principles of strategy?

Ed Morrison [00:35:55]:

Yeah. So with the idea here, goes back 20 years and says, okay, if we want to build a collaboration, let's think of that as a complex system. Think of that as a as a, you know, a, a swarm of birds. Well, how does that operate? And the answer is, these complex systems follow simple rules, simple rules. Now Kathleen Eisenhart at Stanford wrote a a wonderful Harvard Business Review article about 2,000 coming to the same conclusion, which is that if you're in dynamic environments, you develop heuristics, you develop rules of thumb about how to how to operate. So the question that we were trying to address is these are, are there generalized heuristics to designing a conversation that leads to collaboration, leads to innovating networks, leads us to experimentation, design do mindset? And the answer is, yeah, there's there's, we we identified 10 10 of these skills or 10 of these rules. And, and we, use them, we position them in ways that we have a divergent conversation, a convergent conversation, and a recurring conversation. So, the structure, the underlying structure of the conversation shifts through time, through the 2 or 3 hours.

Ed Morrison [00:37:17]:

And you use the rules to, to guide the next step of the conversation. So let me explain one of the rules we're doing right now in in this workshop is we're trying to find collaborations between, there's, an an agency of the federal government, there's companies, and there's faculty. And we're trying to figure out, okay, where are the collaborations that can generate shared value for everyone? Shared value for everyone. And so the first thing that we're doing is framing the challenge. We've got 6 challenges that we're addressing. So these are, this is what we call the framing question in strategic doing. It's not a, it's not a vision statement. It's a very clear challenge that we, convert to an inquiry because we don't know the answer.

Ed Morrison [00:38:05]:

We don't know the answer. So the framing question is rule number 2, as I've already alluded to rule number 1, which is you better have a safe space. You better enforce some rules. Otherwise, Adam's problem is gonna come up, and you're not gonna deal with it and everything will fall apart. So, the idea that, there are rules of behavior to establish these kinds of networks is critical critical. Once you figured out how you're gonna do that, how you're gonna create those rules, these are all context sensitive, and we we understand that, then you start a framing question, then you start revealing the assets that you have, you already have in the networks of the participants in the room. So this is what's tacit knowledge. Most of our knowledge is tacit knowledge.

Ed Morrison [00:38:52]:

We generate it from our experience. We have connections, but we don't tell anybody about them. So this is not explicit knowledge. This is tacit knowledge. So the question to the participants is, what in your bank of tacit knowledge do you have that you're willing to share that could help us generate a solution to this challenge? And so this is taking tacit knowledge and making it explicit. Now, 2 Japanese scholars I'll talk about is non Nonaka and Taguchi. And they developed this whole notion that very strong in knowledge management of how explicit and tacit knowledge work together to generate new knowledge, to generate new knowledge. And so the process in strategic doing initially is very clear.

Ed Morrison [00:39:41]:

This, this, divergent process is very clear generating new knowledge by taking the assets we currently have and recombining them in new and different ways. This is not a new idea. Michelin Chefs do it all the time. You take you combine new existing assets, what's in your, refrigerator, and and come up with something new. Got it. But then we have to figure out, of all of these opportunities, where should we start? So this is where most brainstorming breaks down. So come up with all sorts of ideas. That's great.

Ed Morrison [00:40:20]:

But how do we test them? How do we test them? And so here, strategic doing in this now I'm on, rules, 56. Now you're trying to say, okay. All these opportunities we have, now we gotta narrow. We gotta focus. We don't we can't do all of them. We can't do everything. So what we talk about is the big easy. The idea of what's the big idea that's relatively easy to do? And, of course, this is not subject to, an algorithm.

Ed Morrison [00:40:51]:

This is subject to intuition, the tacit knowledge of the participants. What's gonna attract people? What's the big idea that's gonna attract more resources? And then how do we make progress on this? How do we how do we move on this? How do we get progress moving? And so that's, that's another challenge. And so developing, a experimentation or an inquiry, and a process for, developing these measurable outcomes, pathfinder projects, that's rules 7, 8, 9, 10. So you're now converging. And then you have the recursive part, which is, hey. We don't this is our first guess at this. This is our first hypothesis. It may not work.

Ed Morrison [00:41:39]:

Okay? What's your process for coming back together and sharing what you learned? What's the double loop learning process you're gonna establish? And so that's the commitment. And everybody walks out with an understanding and a commitment, a small step. And and here, with a small step, we use a, piece of research that was really well done in in, a Stanford psychologist, probably in 19 sixties, if my memory serves, called the foot in the door technique, which is the idea that you we start out on these new paths and commitments, not by creating these huge commitments, but by taking small steps. And, the idea of generating small wins when you're dealing with these complex challenges is really important, really an important idea because that's what keeps the momentum building. That's what starts to attract the resources to the process. So it's a discipline. It's a it's a practical, protocol you use to design these conversations. Nobody is equally good at all 10 of these skills, and there's cognitive reasons why.

Ed Morrison [00:42:49]:

But, that's why cognitively diverse teams, something that Scott Page at the University of Michigan has has studied quite extensively. Quad cognitively diverse teams perform better in complex environments. So understanding how you assemble a cognitively diverse team is something we cover in strategic doing with our colleagues, human insight over in, in the Netherlands. So you there there we pieced all of this together. And then at the end of the day, my colleagues at the University of the Sunshine Coast where I where I was adjunct, professor, said you need to write a PhD in this. And I said, you know, I'm I'm why? I'm 68 years old. Why do I tell me what tell me again why I should do that? And they said, well, we think this is promising. We think this is good.

Ed Morrison [00:43:39]:

So so I spent time and, with my colleagues at, USC and, completed a PhD in economics to explain why each one of these ten rules work. And the fascinating aspect of that is that each rule is supported by multiple streams of, scholarly research, but they're not in the same discipline. So this is one of the reasons why scholars have a really tough time understanding the dynamics of collaboration. They don't there's a recent article a couple years ago, it said, hey, we don't even know how to define this. Okay. Well, you need practitioners like myself who are willing to move from what Donald Shone at MIT called the swampy lowlands of real world problems and move that knowledge you're generating to the high, hard ground of the university. And that's what we did. Now I don't recommend this to young scholars because it's hard to do.

Ed Morrison [00:44:41]:

It's it's really hard to do. But that's really what we that's what we need is we need practitioners working with scholars to validate, new approaches. And it took us, you know, close to 15 years here at Purdue to to to get it to that point. But all of the rules of strategic doing are, you can look through multiple streams of research, as I said, everything from behavioral economics to cognitive science to strategic management, of course, and they explain why this rule works.

Rob Durant [00:45:19]:

Ed, this has been fantastic. I know you're double booked. You've got an audience waiting on you elsewhere. Before we let you go, where can people learn more? How can they get in touch with you?

Ed Morrison [00:45:32]:

Sure. Well, the obvious place to get I I'm I'm a LinkedIn guy, so please reach out on LinkedIn to connect with me if you'd like. Strategic doing dot net is the website that we've developed. We're we're still a bootstrap nonprofit. We're, you know, we've always been in the garage, and we've been, you know, proudly so. So we don't have an elegant website, but it's a good enough website. But reach reach me you can reach me at edmorrison@purdue.edu, Or, you can go to our we have a partner in Belgium, and we have, practitioners from all over the world who talk to us about strategic doing, every Friday. And so, those are strategic doing talks.

Ed Morrison [00:46:20]:

We have hubs or concentrations developing now, obviously, in Ecuador, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Belgium, where the Brussels hub is gonna kick off next week. We've got a a concentration or hub developing in in, Ireland. So, yeah, it's a multidisciplinary, multi, culture. I mean, we've done it in Spanish and Portuguese and then Chinese, so so it it we have to make some adjustments, of course, but, it's it's a universal approach to human collaboration, which is kind of exciting. So I'm I'm happy to do whatever you need to to to move on. I'm at the end of my career. I'm trying to move all of this to the next generation of leaders, which is the people on this call. And so if there's, ways I can help you, with this, there is a professional path that we've created through the institute.

Ed Morrison [00:47:22]:

So you can you can start out, you can get some certification, but at the end of the path is a fellow. You can become a fellow of the institute. You take a doctoral level course that teaches you about or you get experience in both the theory and the practice of strategic doing. Why does this work? And, so we have probably 40 fellows now, maybe maybe more. I think we're adding another 20. So, that's that's a professional path for practitioners primarily and scholars, to really understand this in in a deeper way.

Rob Durant [00:47:56]:

Fantastic. Ed, like I said, I know you have to run. Thank you so much for your time.

Ed Morrison [00:48:01]:

Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity, and I just apologize for that for the No.

Rob Durant [00:48:05]:

No worries. Feel free to to step out. Thank you.

Ed Morrison [00:48:11]:

Thank you.

Rob Durant [00:48:11]:

Bye bye. Before we let the audience go, I I wanted to say or visit us at digiadigitaldownload. Liveforward/newsletter. On behalf of the panelists, to our guest Ed and to our audience, thank you all for being active participants in today's show, and we'll see you next time on the digital download. Bye.

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