Strategy-Nets are open networks designed to transform complex systems through innovation.

Unlike an interested community, a learning community or a community of practice, members of a Strategy-Net are committed to close collaboration in order to develop and launch these transformative innovations.

Over at the Purdue Center for Regional Development, we have been learning how to form, manage and measure Strategy-nets.

Typically, members of a Strategy-Net are focused on transforming an important dimension of a complex system, like a regional education or workforce system, a collection of local governments, a business cluster, or an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Within companies, Strategy-Nets are emerging to manage the process of open innovation in specific product or service markets.

To be successful, the members of a Strategy-Net must engage in sustained, complex thinking. That means they need to be practiced in the skills of conducting focused, purposeful conversations. Within these conversations, they make strategic decisions about how to link and leverage their assets toward new opportunities. They quickly develop prototypes to test new ideas. They measure their progress, in order to figure out what works. And they design new ways of learning continuously — quickly and at a low cost in both time and money.

Strategy-Nets operate with porous boundaries and leadership direction. (They are neither "top down" nor "bottom up", since there are not tops or bottoms to networks.)

Strategic Doing is a discipline of thinking and acting strategically within an open network.

Unlike strategic planning — a set of disciplines designed to guide complex, hierarchical organizations in relatively stable environments — Strategic Doing sets forth the disciplines needed for strategic action in open networks, in which no one can tell anyone else what to do. Strategic Doing adjusts quickly to environmental shifts because the discipline is simple, fast and iterative.

As we develop even lower-cost, and more productive ways to replicate, scale and sustain Strategy-Nets, we open the door to transforming the large industrial age administrative organizations — public, private and non-profit — that are struggling all around us. These structures are simply too slow, inflexible, and costly to remain competitive in the emerging world of open networks.

2010 will see us leaving behind the era of reform and entering an era of transformation: designing whole new systems for creating sustainable prosperity in regions.

For the past month, our heads have been down working on the official launch of Strategy-Nets, an elite  and agile community of innovators. Building on the power and ease of use of the Near-Time platform, we are moving to the next level of online collaboration.

With Near-Time, we are developing new approaches to strategy in open networks. Effective strategy in today's world combines simple rules and powerful tools. We designed Strategy-Nets to meet this challenge.

We welcome you as a partner in this journey, and we are looking forward to a happy and prosperous New Year together.

We have put up a new channel on Vimeo that includes videos I have shot around the country on Strategic Doing workshops in the past year.You can access the videos here:

Here's a glimpse of the Strategic Doing workshop we held at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls on June 10, 2009.

Strategic Doing is a disciplined process that enables loosely joined networks to do complex thinking together quickly. As you pick up the conversation in this video, listen to the participants. They are not talking  about "bumper sticker" issues. Instead, they're exploring more complex ideas.

 This complex thinking is critical to civic innovation.

Strategic Doing in South Central Idaho from Ed Morrison on Vimeo.

An interstate region of 17 counties in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin is scheduling a Strategic Doing workshop to guide its education and strategy. This session will orient leaders to the disciplines and tools of Strategic Doing, so they can implement their Range Readiness Initiative more effectively.

The region has made a great deal of progress coming together, but old behaviors take time to fade. We will be spending a good part of our two day session on the basics of building collaborations. With these strategic tools in hand, the leadership will be able to move beyond traditional boundaries to create more innovative and ambitious collaborations.

The major advantage of Strategic Doing comes in its scalability. Once leaders understand the basic disciplines and tools, they can apply these insights quickly to accelerate collaborations which create new value for the region. In the process, regional leaders will be building the new stories of the Northland region.

We will be conducting the two day workshop in mid November. 

The Milwaukee 7 region -- 7 counties in southeastern Wisconsin -- are moving ahead with a manufacturing summit in early 2010. The focus of the summit will be to follow up ona  forum we recently held. In that session, we explored for different scenarios for the future of manufacturing in Southeast Wisconsin. 

 These scenarios shed light on emerging sets of networks that are forming. The most advanced is the Water Councli, which is a cluster of companies and educational institutions focused on freshwater technology. Using the same set of "link and leverage" strategies,  the leaders of M7 will be begin developing new networks. To help guide this process, we are using the following map:

You can see how the Water Council operates through this presentation put together by the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

Every year, the Florida Chamber of Commerce holds an annual summit and a forum on the future of Florida. In October, the Forum convened and focused on challenges of building talent with 21st-century skills. 

In the coming months, the Florida Chamber Foundation and the Workforce Florida will be launching a new statewide Talent Caucus to explore new initiatives to integrate education, economic development and workforce development.  I met a presentation to introduce Strategic Doing to the Forum.

The Talent Caucus will be using Strategic Doing to align its efforts and generate innovations across the education and public workforce systems.   Here are the slides I used to introduce the Strategic Doing framework:

Near-Time, Inc. and Strategy-Nets, LLC. are forming a partnership to deploy new approaches to strategy in open networks. These new models – called Strategic Doing – replace traditional strategic planning.

• Near Time has developed powerful, interactive platform of Web 2.0 tools to support collaboration among loosely joined people and organizations

• Strategy-Nets has pioneered the development of Strategic Doing. The firm is a spin-out from Purdue University’s Center for Regional Development. Near-Time is taking a minority equity position in Strategy-Nets.

• Near-Time and the Strategy-Nets team have been engaged for over 3 years in developing scores of communities.

• Strategy-Nets will focus on the large, untapped market of federal, state and local government agencies and non-profit organizations. These entities are looking to collaborate with public and private sector partners to accelerate education and workforce transformation and stimulate regional economic development and job creation.

Ed Morrison’s work around Strategic Doing for community action and regional development has laid the groundwork for Strategy-Nets. Government and civic leaders understand the growing importance of collaborating with corporate and non-profit organizations at federal, state and local levels. The melding of Near-Time and Strategic Doing is timely, as organizations realize that traditional strategy approaches are too expensive and slow.

The partnership is effective immediately and will go live in December 2009.