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.