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What is your Strategic Big Idea?

Strategy is your answer as a Strategy Innovator to Municipal Success challenges we face in achieving public good ambitions.

StratGen offers tools and space for existing leaders and emerging leaders age 18 and over to develop as Strategy Innovators. Strategy Innovators are better prepared to manage the vast issues of strategy, innovation, and risk in front of us as the future unfolds.

Just one example of the Strategic Innovation 1.0 space is Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is also connect to terms like automation and robotics. Most citizens have no time or bandwidth to approach such issues let alone respond to the implications of inherent AI flaws like lack of empathy and ethics; or read about issues like Superintelligence Strategy. Then there’s the variance between Climate Protection and the Anthro Climate.

Yes, innovation like AI has proven uses. But treating it like the Internet and Digital Age so far means more strategy and risk management from a unlimited growth primacy mindset; in spite of the many risk relationships of AI such as large-scale AI data center deployment and the resulting Antro Climate pollution.

BREAKTHROUGH SLIDES

Strategy Innovators maneuver a transforming world of innovation and risk together with a new strategy formula and forum: SI 2 and the SI 2 Lab.

Here in the United States of America, as a nation we have no reason to not get greatly more imaginative and bold about shared success. Let’s find the way to strategy based in working with resilience for purposes of wellbeing and sustainability. Whether or not the term ‘doom loop’ is familiar to most Americans; it is descriptive of much of the American Strategic Environment at the start of 2025.

StratGen uses visuals to stimulate Strategic Thinking. The idea of staying stuck in any one Doom Loop facing America’s cities, towns, and counties is exactly why to learn to interface with strategy, innovation and risk with a new formula and forum like SI 2 Dynamism.

DOOM LOOP

Life thankfully goes on regardless; but it remains that there’s plenty to work with when it comes to the many combinations of strategy, innovation, and risk in front of us when we approach the future truthfully. Strategy and idea are close in terms of meaning going straight from the dictionary. The best ‘back of napkin’ ideas do go into a the way of delivering on the idea to some degree. But the huge investments into idea generation and innovation management may not have helped anyone develop a common strategy language and process.

Strategy Flywheel

We are getting an abject lesson in the idea that strategy is something best to do in history versus have done to us. As Lincoln recommended, with a new formula and forum we can rise to the occasion and dynamically do better. Lincoln asked America to choose a Way of Being. Today, the vision, purpose, mission, values, and ‘working wisdom’ principles that should form the space that allows Strategic Big Ideas to form more freely in our nation may be seen as really wrong for some. And there are definitely anti-sustainability ways for doing things that are deeply dangerous just spewing out without enough effective counter moves that don’t wear the rest of us out quickly.

Since reality lands where we all live, in Our Municipalities, StratGen advises referring to a combination of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability as new concept: Municipal Success. That sounds obvious that something called Municipal Success would be a Strategic Big Idea. But if a young person interested in public policy were to look for a municipal success guidebook that is more than about urban planning or economic development only, they and the rest of us may be disappointed.

There has been a lot of effort invested into developing the strategic planning and comprehensive planning practices used across the nation that often have Federal and state funding attached. But how to assess the performance and what the Whole of Government picture connected to our local environmental, economic, societal Critical Success Factors is not uncharted territory; but the American Strategic Environment is in urgent need of a new, more distributed and resilient management platform where those at the local level have much greater power through interfacing with strategy, innovation, and risk differently.

With each EESG issue group the Strategy Concept Pyramid components come together to forge an integrated transformation power. A focusing boundary or functionality test for each sub strategy lets everyone know where liklihood of success in head. Yes, metrics of time, money, and Critical Success Factors are plugged into artifacts like strategic plans. First, a new formula and forum for Municipal Success that matches to common national issues is key.

Actual transformation connected to resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability is clearly not simple or easy. Our strategy, innovation, and risk environment is deep and wide. But wandering through the same issues of the 20th Century as the middle of the 21st Century approaches… means it’s time for a new approach. Strategy is The Way.

Most importantly, StratGen is offers a twist on innovation ecosystem theory and practice that departs from the Silicon Valley leadership model that gave us a range of personalities and examples of Intellectual Capital… many of these leadership examples of which are looking more and more dicey.

SI Lab: The First Human Ecosystem

The ‘disruptive’ angle to StratGen SI 2 Dynamic Services is about reworking the concept of innovation ecosystems like Silicon Valley or NASA. This new Human Ecosystem is partly about developing leaders who are determined to work with Sustainable Value Creation elements of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability. StratGen services include the first Human Ecosystem — the SI 2 Lab — where the issues and challenges common to many American municipalities requiring more and better solutions for more desirable outcomes are laid out and we work together on this Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) platform. StratGen and allied service providers are there to add tools and advice. StratGen Solution Design is another example of StratGen SI 2 Dynamic Services.

Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management

Strategy Innovators

America’s Public Good Innovation Ecosystem

A lot of the current American Strategic Environment is about tax breaks for the top five percent of wealthiest Americans. The cuts to the Veterans Administration, National Park Service, and everything else on the chopping block in this ‘fire sale’ real world scenario supposedly somehow compensate for this radical greed agenda. The majority of US citizens of all beliefs pay the price.

It is really important for every Mayor, council member, town and county equivalent leader, and their managers and their staff, to be willing to go over very basic economic truth matters like deficits and debt. Arguments about what is affordable and not affordable as to national strategic targets like Climate Protection as well as affordable healthcare and housing for those at the base of the economic pyramid need to be settled once and for all. It should be when it comes to the Federal, state, or local levels basic numbers and sustainability factors are clear and don’t requiring re-contextualizing one generation after another. That’s a lot of wasted time and energy that can otherwise be invested in our current strategy, innovation, and risk issues.

The national debt dropped to a historical low at the end of the Clinton Administration at the start of the 21st Century. The President Clinton rallied congress to institute more progressive tax policy and there was a historic high budget surplus in terms of an example of taking action of concepts of national deficit and debt. Poverty rates were down while there was healthy employment numbers.

The national deficit and debt rose during the Obama Administration; not because of a desire of President Obama, but because of the Strategic Failure of several ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions requiring billions in Federal bail out funds by 2008. 9/11 and COVID 19 are human directed or partly human influenced disasters that also had major economic impacts in the 21st Century.

It is complete falsehood that the US Government had no influence over economic outcomes in these examples of resilience in the face of disaster. So, degrading FEMA and NOAA in the face of the Anthro Climate are also components of a Whole of Government approach to disaster mitigation. The key now is all levels of governing, especially where voters are located: in Our Municipalities, getting more involved in practices like Strategic Foresight in order to compare past events with current trends and leadership actions and policy. StratGen is available to support strategy where the public happiness

Intellectual Capital is the difference between book and market value in the business world. StratGen works with businesses, but businesses that are sticking to a set of values where Civil Rights and sustainability are part of the Strategic Big Idea. Otherwise, there is no one sector or leadership discipline that is likely exclusive to adding something useful in these times of trial.

The value of the FEMA Strategic Foresight 2050 Initiative (SF2050) is that a practice standard for connecting today’s strategic choices to four future scenarios of varying degrees of disaster are established as the norm of strategy, innovation, and risk management. SF2050 gives all actors a fairly simply formula for developing the best options for Climate Protection while being realistic about the threats of The Anthro Climate.

StratGen provides a forum for Strategy Innovators across the nation to gain exposure and interface with the options a functional US Government can actually provide. The idea of irreparable harm in law is that there is no monetary compensation for the harm involved in the issue at hand. Obfuscating and sabotaging Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management opportunities like SF2050 leaves America’s cities, towns, and counties more defenseless.

Strategic Failure Avoidance

The United States of America is in part powered by an Administrative State based in rules and principles of American Liberal Democracy. Without a scientific method of governing, and also plenty of public science, it’s all chaotic acts of more likely than not an arbitrary and capricious nature.

When someone references ‘The Administrative State’ or ‘The Bureaucracy’ they mean the Environmental Protection Agency;, the US Department of Health and Human Services; the US Department of Justice; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And of course USAID: The US Agency for International Development. Just chopping away at all that supposedly to save money when the Clinton Administration example shows a form of public good management where the result was in part a substantive budget surplus.

With our alternative challenges today, we are left with many strategy prompts to apply to at least a hundred major strategic challenges:

Why is this happening?

How did we get here?

What do we do now?

StratGen allows existing leader and young emerging leaders to cope, coordinate, and maneuver together as Strategy Innovators as we process these multitude strategy, innovation, and risk issues. We don’t know for sure what will happen when we do this Strategic Innovation 2.0 work together as issue teams representing both targeted strategic issues and local constituencies as to America’s many ‘real world’ spaces of cities, towns, and counties… but we may benefit from finding out what it is like.

BREAKTHROUGH SLIDES

Sustainability at the system level is the common Strategic Big Idea as much as how much funding transaction occur. Sustainability and Municipal Success are normal Main Street USA ideas. It’s a new Age of Enlightenment. If the state and Federal levels align poorly with Strategy for Municipal Success; everyone should be able to join a platform about treating that kind of Strategic Failure.

Join the SI 2 Lab

The acronym VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex [and complications add to complexity risks] and Ambiguous) seems to be another modern strategy framing tool that helps establish where America landed at the start of 2025.

Let’s interface with strategy, innovation, and risk differently as we approach the middle of the 21st Century. With a new way of doing this work — being Strategic Innovation 2.0 (SI 2) — our increasingly desirable outcomes as a Union grow on economic, environmental, societal, and governance criteria when we can redesign and reemphasize what really matters with the necessary Strategic Thinking and load the common and often unique work into a distributed Strategic Management system, or Human Ecosystem, right from where we all live: in Our Municipalities.

Americans working with strategy, innovation, and risk in coordinated ways towards value in activities of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability is what StratGen supports. StratGen energizes leaders and their stakeholders in crafting strategy statements and strategy charters concerning the key issues, challenges, solutions, and outcomes of Strategy for Municipal Success. A consultant who helps your local government and other institutions generate another strategy plan or strategic report are possibly generating important insight. However, the art and science of strategy for the 21st Century is a new space that needs illumination and dissemination differently than what seems to be largely available without the SI 2 Lab.

StratGen develops the Strategy Innovators who lead The Way. StratGen refers to developing vision, mission, purpose, values, and principles generating more and more desirable outcomes as an integrative set of choices: or, The Way.

Easily the best strategy statement we have to go on right now that overcomes Strategic Failure factors like incoherence, incongruence, and inconsistency is the Preamble to the US Constitution. The preamble has been referred to as the enacting clause of the US Constitution. And to enact is to set an idea into action mode.

Strategy is The Way.

And the strategy we need right now includes bits of ideas from the domains of business, government, nonprofits, science, and education. Which existing leaders and emerging leaders age 18 and over who are ready to work with strategy, innovation, and risk with a new mix of Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management is the question as much as what practices we can form to administer more desirable outcomes in the course of human events.

So, many of the major consulting firms with Federal contracts are coming out losers too. None of them foresaw the events of 2025 and few said anything as to showing resistance to the core ethical issues at hand. The current National Situation leaves a large leadership and technique black hole in the wake of all these concerning events. SI 2 is for Strategy Innovators to move on this VUCA Space and insert consistency, congruence, and coherence… and plenty of empathetic, ethical genius.

Strategy for Municipal Success is something to do as a nation versus have done to us which is of a Strategic Failure nature. Another billionaire’s moment of personal inspiration isn’t going to be about the best overall American legacy possible.

StratGen invites leaders and their stakeholders to focus on functional governing where resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability are more and more the tangible outcome versus searching for some upside during Strategic Failure events.

We are not arrived at a more desirable, secure future benefiting the majority. At the same time; there’s too much to loose.

Never, ever, ever give up.

Knowing which Critical Success Factors each US municipality is winning at, is at risk of failing at, and which factors are creating active hazard and overwhelming is part of the deep truth about our local weaknesses and threats. Today many of these weaknesses and threats are common nationwide in various forms linked to macro challenges like the Anthro Climate.

We can certainly afford to avoid Strategic Failure first and foremost and then see what new sustainable value creation transpires concurrently.

BREAKTHROUGH

Representative leaders working together in as many municipalities across the nation and sharing their Strategic Big Ideas while we all work at Strategic Failure Avoidance makes a lot of sense these days.

So, what’s your Strategic Big Idea? StratGen is here to help leaders and their stakeholder cope, coordinate, and maneuver as we build a Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) Human Ecosystem. In contrast to what a lot of the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem outcome has turned into; this new Human Ecosystem searches for new value creation with similar management practices such as kaizen (continuous improvement)… but strategic concepts of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability at heart.

END

One way to sort out a Top 250 list of American strategic critical success issues —especially as of noon January 20, 2025 and the second Trump inauguration — is to include the power deferred to the billionaire leading the DOGE initiative on behalf of Project 2025 leader Russell Vought, the current OMB director; and of course the rest of the US Government.

StratGen Statement on Management Consulting for Public Good versus DOGE

The Management Consulting, accounting firms, and other consultive and specialist contractors that have made billions from the US Government over decades have basically been silent since DOGE went to work. The top US universities that educate the people who are the main earners for these multidisciplinary management consulting firms with massive socioeconomic influence are mostly silent.

StratGen is more than willing to help open up this power vacuum and assist those willing to generate new Intellectual Capital to fill this ethical and empathetic genius black hole. The black hole needs to be shut down and the new mix of strategy, innovation, and risk management for public good outcomes replaces whatever initiatives like DOGE and Project 2025 are really about.

Switching gears with a new leadership power StratGen proposes as Strategic Innovation 2.0 includes spelling out why the DOGE initiative is actually what is unjustified versus a functional version of the Administrative State of the US Government (ASUSGOV) and Federal employees who almost always are properly vetted; have a lot invested in them; and have critical missions. Anyone who has worked for the government knows not every day is a high performance day. But the ASUSGOV is a form of Human Ecosystem VASTLY more valuable than the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem and all the corporate strategy and venture capital in the world.

It is not rational or ethical to attack the American system of self-government with the idea that our only system — American Liberal Democracy — is 10, 20, 30, or even 77 percent about just fraud, waste, and abuse. It is not a perfect system. But our adversaries created a massive Information Disorder Machine that should leave everyone in a state where the truth is mostly we are right and they are lying and want to undermine our nation.

One justification for DOGE is that it is an emergency ‘turnaround’. People in various disciplines familiar with merger and acquisition (M&A) turnarounds who care about American Liberal Democracy, and mere issues like the civil rights from the original US Constitution and expanded on and reasserted many times with the American Civil War and other minor events since like World War II, might want to speak up about what sort of M&A turnaround involves our system of self-governing. It’s not about mob rule. And it’s not about the mob telling us that something like DOGE is actually one of the really, really ‘disruptive’ things on the way that may or may not be good for the American people… including many MAGA folks.

ASUSGOV is a continuation of the Age of Enlightenment and Silicon Valley was birthed by ASUSGOV. ASUSGOV and the human Federal personnel that the DOGE leadership wanted to ‘terminate’ are our defenders on a range of public good fronts. National Security being just one lens or defensive front of ASUSGOV. Our adversaries have nothing good in mind. So, another strategy prompt is this:

Why undermine our nation? What is the cost / benefit analysis of that?

The acronym ASUSGOV is VASTLY more valuable than what was attempted with DOGE. A legitimate way of improving the ASUSGOV Human Ecosystem is a great idea. And job one is to set up the firewalls to make sure nothing like the events following January 20, 2025 never happen again.

Right now that means looking at Failure of Imagination and strategy prompts like:

How did this happen?

What do we do now?

Getting to the point where America is working with alliance-oriented idea spaces like community and legitimate bipartisanship more sounds great. And a new kind of leadership practice around mixing strategy, innovation, and risk with an empathetic, ethical genius can help us prioritize the best possible Critical Success Factors for Strategic Failure Avoidance and Municipal Success.

But legitimate authority, or Rational-Legal Authority, in the United States means the consent of the governed; which doesn’t mean heading into the past where ‘bipartisanship’ meant things like accepting slavery. One form of leadership today is definitely working with a version of strategy, innovation, and risk that formulates a combination of whitewashed versions of the worst ideas from human history.

Strategy is about designing and thus choosing a better way. Strategy is The Way. Strategy Innovators are needed.

The kind of strategy, innovation, and risk combinations StratGen allows existing leaders and emerging leaders across the nation interface with is about survival strategy. People who are about Disaster Mitigation Leadership don’t need to promote survivalist strategies like stockpiling food and guns in a bunker. We are doing everything to map the changing terrain with Strategic Foresight and any other practices to get Americans involved in charting a path to the least destructive future possible.

So, a couple of signs of among the least desirable leadership characteristics or those suffering under Pseudo Transformative Leadership are strategy outcomes involving:

DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender

Collective Punishment: Collective punishment is a punishment or sanction imposed on a group, whole community, city, state, or national sub group for acts allegedly perpetrated by one member or more members of that group or area, which could be an ethnic or political group; and anyone viewed as noncompliant in opposition to corrupt, authoritarian, and totalitarian regimes.

Human-Caused Disaster: Terrorism, from internal as well as external, maligned actors, is one of the most established forms of ‘Anthro Disaster’. The Anthro Climate is a hybrid disaster that is formed of human and natural combined dynamic factors. Obviously it doesn’t get better left alone. The Anthro Climate is a cumulative global disaster when left to metastasize unmitigated.

When large numbers of innocents are experiencing irreparable harm, or imminent likely harm, that is when to say, “Hmmm, is this a Strategic Failure Avoidance scenario where emergency response is required in order to mitigate disaster and save lives; including possibly my own life?”

Others may believe the state, Federal, and global levels cannot and should not be referenced at any depth at the local level of self-governing in the United States. StratGen advises local leaders and those emerging as American leaders to not embrace the limiting ideas of the past.

Our elections give us process that says otherwise; and we need to expand what else might be of value with The Administrative State of the US Government. And the municipal level is the base of the pyramid in that Federalism structure. Which is of course in no way the weakest part… unless we make that strategic leadership choice.

For many consulting firms strategy is about strategic plans and lists of organization issues. Therefore many leaders think of strategy the way consulting firms and educators have taught strategy for at least a century. Since we live in transformative times; the Concept of Strategy needs to be in front of existing leaders and emerging leaders for any required modifications to the systems around us.

An array of ideas and expertise make up Strategy for Municipal Success powered and enabled by American Liberal Democracy. The StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform (SI 2) and SI 2 Lab is available to connect and process issues of strategy, innovation, and risk for public good purposes and tangible outcome as a Human Ecosystem; an alternative innovation ecosystem that is a Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) contrivance to what many players in the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem, and other adversarial systems, have become in many cases.

The SI 2 Lab is America’s ideas and strategy for public good marketplace.

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Business and adversaries cannot run our government

There was advice available from a public policy expert, a business strategy expert, and at least one attorney, who probably would have been more than happy to have shown up at congressional hearings about the idea of Elon Musk and his ‘Administrative State’ chainsaw crew somehow doing a ’turnaround’ intervention; as in a ‘crash program’ necessary to prove government can be run like a business; and also to prove some percentage between one and 100 percent of the US Government is not that important.

“If some analogy to business is inevitable, perhaps a more appropriate one would be to call government business’s designated driver. It is surely tempting to partake in the revelry, but government must refrain, for its own good and integrity — and for the good of the private sector, whose creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation are enabled by government’s abstemiousness [or sobriety… we should pray].” — Jon D. Michaels, J.D., UCLA Law

‘The Administrative’ State and Public Good

This supposed ‘administrative state boogeyman’ and American Liberal Democracy are two central aspects of interpreting and realizing public good.

The municipal level is connected to the state and Federal levels. Each level can tap into a more sustainable version of globalization. That’s Federalism; and Federalism needs tools of American Liberal Democracy… such as Rule of Law. Rule of Law is about essentials like due process.

It seems like everyone has a vital way to make surgical cuts or surgical strikes when it comes to our American Way of Life. People like current Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought have very strong opinions about their version of strategy, innovation, and risk. What’s food for thought as to the definite destruction involved in trying to implement Project 2025 is that strategy is often better to do, versus have done to us.

There may be a lot of money to make in responsible use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). But the Big Strategic Idea right now has to do with what America 2.0 is going to be about. StratGen is for American Liberal Democracy with outcomes in the arenas of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability.

Vought’s section of Project 2025 talks about handing a lot of power back to the municipal level. So, how many local leaders want what Elon Musk is doing to the people’s government? An alternative to Project 2025 should have never been required, because that is where we landed with American Liberal Democracy stood on the morning of January 20, 2025.

Russell Vought wrote this in the Project 2025 ‘guidebook’:

“[…] the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding. […]”

But since those who think the First Amendment includes a legitimate assertion of Civil Rights and allowance for science, and we are therefore strongly invited to roll back the ‘common sense management interventions’ of people like Vought and Musk, StratGen is here to prompt all of us with this:

What is your Strategic Big Idea?

By the way, StratGen thinks constitutional law professors are one group of subject matter experts who can lay down the law on where American Liberal Democracy stands. However, as we take a new, imaginative, ethical, and empathic look at what the American people actual need and want, the debate about what ‘The Administrative State’ is or is not going to end up being as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is a central American leadership question. These kinds of Critical Success Factor strategic thinking and strategic management issues ARE NOT for existing leaders and young people seeking to shape the “course of human events” across the nation who are interesting laying down as fools and cowards. We’ve been challenged in a new and different way.

The Disinformation Space Junk element is real. For example the screams of terror about some destructive “ADMINISTRATIVE STATE!!!” might cause folks to look into what it and American Liberal Democracy are actually about. That should in fact be what’s terrifying for supposed American leaders like Vought and Musk. Breaking down the concept of a functional, ethical, and empathic administrative state of affairs to implement Independence achieved through American Liberal Democracy may be demonized by some; but whose strategy is about demonizing American Independence?

Along with developing the theory of Heliocentrism, Galileo is the main developer of the scientific method. The Administrative State is a version of turning democratic aspirations into outcomes with as much of an open scientific method as possible. The Administrative State is the US Government and it’s apparatus may not always be perfect; but getting Americans onboarded and reoriented to its functionality and any issues worthy of improvement is apparently work in need of more leaders interested in this central Strategic Communication matter.

Since there are so few consulting firms with the courage and insight to develop a new Municipal to Municipalities (M2M) Human Ecosystem that allows existing leaders and young people over age 18 developing as the next generation of American leaders, right where we live: in Our Municipalities, to better navigate and gain local value from American Liberal Democracy… StratGen is here.

Strategy, Public Good, and American Liberal Democracy

Before we hit the gas to the floor on ideas like hybrid Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy development; the human side to the strategic leadership value position equation deserves strengthening. Since strategy is about what we are going to do next after we experience the even greater overwhelm load since Election Day 2024; then focusing on which challenges we can knock down as teams located in distributed in as many US municipalities as possible… there are many strategy players and we have the new StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform (SI 2).

The kind of strategy, innovation, and risk combinations StratGen helps leaders and their stakeholders with — right in the cities, towns, and counties across America where we all live; which includes Washington, DC — is about what we do as a nation. And certainly that’s about what we need to course correct and start doing a lot more of as to desirable actions versus undesirable actions.

Many existing leaders and emerging ones can tell us what they think is more desirable and more undesirable. That’s a well known way to break down strategy and where things need to head. It happens that the corporate management consulting world developed a massive range of solutions to enhance performance… to make as munch money as possible.

Instead of unleashing a kind of ‘Musknet’ hard drive wipe approach to transforming the US Government into… some currently unidentified but more likely than not highly risky strategic outcome model… there are all kinds of solution examples as to getting heightened personnel performance from the good will just about all Federal employees and contractors are usually starting their days with. But just leaving it all up to management consulting corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton and McKinsey and Company also leaves us with plenty to search for as to more desirable outcomes.

Most consulting firms cannot imagine inviting those willing to put our local, statewide, national, and even global strategy issues into context with American Liberal Democracy. And each nation needs to be allowed to choose their version of liberal democracy; versus being victims of a twisted new version of American Manifest Destiny.

Next, for the Strategy for Municipal Success approach promoted by StratGen to work well; a version of leadership that is in constant transparency and continuous improvement modes as to doing a Big U-Turn away from what’s called Pseudo-Transformational Leadership (PTL) is part of Critical Success Factors that help us all with Strategic Failure.

A red flag of PTL is transforming followers in a negative way. So, we can look at where ‘polarization’ stands compared to the pretty immutable structure and principles of American Liberal Democracy basics. There is no good outcomes about our Critical Success Factors with PTL is the driver’s seat.

There is no American Liberal Democracy basics like Rule of Law and public good guardrails like the US Government Artificial Intelligence (AI) Risk Management Framework. Getting a grip on AI and Climate Protection are just a couple of existential strategic issues that will end up in Strategic Failure centered in PTL.

So, what’s your Strategic Big Idea? StratGen is here to help leaders and their stakeholder cope, coordinate, and maneuver as we build a Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) Human Ecosystem. In contrast to what a lot of the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem outcome has turned into; this new Human Ecosystem searches for new value creation with similar management practices such as kaizen (continuous improvement) in concepts of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability.

People around us right where we live — in Our Municipalities — will see the truth as to whether a better way to work with strategy, innovation, and risk is resulting in more desirable outcome. The truth about the US Government; Corporate America; private sector medical insurance; and whether or not terms like global warming and climate change are best reframed as the Anthro Climate, will come to light.

Right now the idea that speaking truth to power as leaders, and as citizens in leadership roles, can mean courage is the engine of legitimate power and legitimate transformation. There is a lot of courage required right now; which will be easier to muster with more Strategy Innovators coping, coordinating, and maneuvering… together. The truth is these are super scary times; especially for those compelled to speak the truth.

So, let’s do this together: as Strategy Innovators.

Strategic Failure Avoidance

One alternative to strategy is failure. Assuming America cannot fail is the ultimate example of a central Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management challenge elucidated after 9/11: Failure of Imagination.

We have every right to work with practices like Strategic Foresight and Failure of Imagination right where we live: in Our Municipalities. All sorts of empathetic ethical genius resides right around the corner even if The Way seems rocky and about volatility, uncertainty, complications (complications make complexity much, much more of a challenge arena), and ambiguity (VUCA).

If there were a 1-5 VUCA values scale with five being the heaviest weight, the current White House is at level five. A strategy prompt about the current National Leadership Situation is this: What is the actual emergency ‘Center of Gravity’ all the ‘commotion orbits’ gravitate around?

Elon Musk may be terminated by Britain’s Royal Society for violating their Code of Conduct. The Royal Society is the equivalent of America’s National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

For a list of well documented exponential risk reasons, President Biden listed what we might call ‘Oligarchy America’ as a central risk in his Farewell Address. Next, he identified what we can now refer to as the Anthro Climate versus Anthropogenic Global Warming, climate change, or global warming.

The issues of mitigating the Anthro Climate are anthropological as to political risk as much as technical and economic. Along with introducing the term Anthro Climate, StratGen believes a new approach to local governance that has common principles across the nation. This framework is Environmental, Economic, Society, and Governance (EESG) Comprehensive Strategy. A key to combatting the Anthro Climate is Climate Protection for Sustainability (CP/S).

The Royal Society and NAS developed a set of fairly straightforward concepts about human-caused climate change we can refer to as the Anthro Climate Factors. We can restart climate pollution mitigation strategy with something like a CP/S platform and education around the Anthro Climate Factors and a Anthro Climate Zones strategic foresight tool set.

StratGen and the SI 2 Lab are here to support a new ideas and strategy marketplace developing M2M outcomes based in resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability.

The leadership choices faced by Americans between 18-50 are extraordinary. That younger demographic is the majority now; and apparently many doubt the value of American Liberal Democracy. The strategic landscape is unprecedented in history. One simple Strategic Thinking toolset is High Road / Low Road processing. It is super easy to become emotional in these times of trial. Federal employees doing critical work in the public interest were sent ‘Fork in the Road’ buyout emails in 2025.

The kind of strategic choices all other remaining American leaders who reject the idea Climate Protection, Civil Rights, and Municipal Success can just be deleted due to ‘wokeness’ are monumental. The 2076 Project as to landing the nation on a truly sustainable trajectory with next year’s United States Semiquincentennial (Quarter Millennial) milestone is going to be hard. Very hard. Especially as to the required Big U-Turn away from national and global disaster over the next few years.

Tick tock.

Emerging leaders like students 18 and older — and any current leader — looking to refresh what they imagine leadership to be around issues of strategy, innovation, and risk in this time of trial are welcome to join the SI 2 Lab as process these immense issues such as Climate Protection for Sustainability (CP/S) together… as Strategy Innovators.

There are two basic legs to strategy: Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management. With those capabilities plans, action, and more desirable outcomes are imaginable, realistic, and possible. Instead of just focusing around corporate success, StratGen democratizes this engine of sustainable growth at the local level. The conventional strategic planning model isn’t wrong. But StratGen SI 2 is about opening up the input and output edges of what any strategic plan might look like. 

That means the process for coming up with Strategic Big Ideas for government, business, nonprofits; and mostly likely for science and technology initiatives. The Subject Matter Experts of any public good interest discipline are the leaders, their teams and organizations – and their stakeholders – who interact with StratGen SI 2. The outcomes are new initiatives for this time in history that is so hungry for public good imagination.

America’s major management consulting and financial management consulting firms, many of whom earn billions altogether with Federal, state, and local contracts, all had the opportunity to immediately speak up in the first months of 2025 as Elon Musk and his people took a hatchet to the US Government. Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government promotes a certain amount of ‘Trump 2.0 Critical Thinking’. It wasn’t enough.

Thankfully many attorneys and judges are speaking up; in courts and from law schools. But every leader with Government and Public Sector experience and other forms of government contracting experience was welcome to speak out on whether Musk was leading a lawful, thoughtful, healthy, and ethical ‘turnaround’ or transformation initiative on behalf of the American people.

Rather than sticking with the way things used to be — and big ideas laid out in the Preamble to the US Constitution [National Strategy] and the National Motto of Out of Many, One [E Pluribus Unum] matter at an existential strategic level right now — StratGen SI 2 energizes leaders and their stakeholders as we cope, coordinate, and maneuver.

Next, StratGen SI 2 is a platform for reasserting and amplifying American Liberal Democracy in the form of democratized Management Science.

The key issue of Project 2025, beyond that is was actually implemented, is that it is a false interpretation of modern Management Science. Currently, Management Science is often considered to be about decision science and math.

Right now American Liberal Democracy is in jeopardy due to the false deduction that all business leaders make great American presidents or ‘DOGE Transformation Program’ executives. False Equivilency. Logic Fallacy. As billionaires like Peter Thiel promote cockamamie ideas like Americans are better off skipping the Academe and therefore being (we must pray not) less innovative, empathetic, and ethical as to citizenship and culture as much as business, scientific, or technological skills.

National Security and Climate Protection for Sustainability (CP/S) is now considered synonymous in the free world; and even the People’s Republic of China made major decarbonization efforts. It doesn’t matter how many corporations and financial institutions try to rollback ‘wokeness’ like mindless drones.

StratGen references the Biden Administration Strategic Foresight 2050 initiative generated by FEMA as just one example of turning around strategic innovation with a High Magnitude Truth / High Magnitude Value approach to public good Intellectual Capital application at all levels of the US Government and for Municipal Success.

The Cost/Benefit Analysis of trading in CP/S for AI

“[..] It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security. [..]” – Trump Administration Artificial Intelligence executive order

The likelihood the strategy competency connected to the empathetic ethical genius of Trump, Vought, Musk — and others like Thiel and Karp — adding up to longterm Municipal Success in the United States and abroad is not worth estimating. Developing a version of National Resilience with a fresh review of where American Liberal Democracy needs to land in 2025 as to the ‘operating system’ and rewiring terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ into more strategic leadership modeling like Climate Protection for Sustainability (CP/S) may give the rest of us a bigger, deeper maneuver for interception capability.

Pseudo Transformative Leadership is a route to Strategic Failure. It always has been. Not talking about American scenarios for Strategic Failure is more than dishonest. So, StratGen allows for us coping, coordinating, and maneuvering towards an alternative to modern corporate culture and Strategic Innovation 1.0 dogma.

We were headed towards something like Making America Great… finally… during the Biden Administration. There was truth about the connection between a climate more like the one at the start of the 21st Century than what we are experiencing. The StratGen approach of laying out the SI 2 architecture for American leaders to interact with; and then independently and coordinated as opportunity provides, exploring existential questions like whether Climate Protection for Sustainability (CP/S) is a strategic column for national security… or not.

It turns out there is no valid, truthful alternative evidence that promotes American Liberal Democracy and averts disaster to the degree left to us now.

Since repeatable success is a super elementary outcome from great strategy, StratGen invites Strategy Innovators to cope, coordinate, and maneuver nationwide in a Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) Human Ecosystem called the SI 2 Lab.

It is worth it to hang on to why acronyms like DEI and ESG actually matter. The focus of StratGen is to hang on to a functional Federal government. Just watching one organization like USAID either be ‘deleted’ as the DOGE leader would put it or others have large staff cuts was traumatic. What is the Disaster Mitigation assessment? What will the outcomes be?

If the Management Consulting firms that have made billions from Federal contracts wanted to speak up about the risks of DOGE; they have First Amendment freedoms to do so. Nothing was said of done when DOGE was presented as a kind of ‘turnover’ of “America Inc.” Is DOGE an ethical representation of Management Consulting; a business discipline America designed and certainly set some for of common practice standards?

The truth is those who should know better did nothing to establish what a legitimate Management Consulting solution alternative to DOGE would have looked like. From engagement design and engagement to execution. Of course the American people should have been given options and a transparent public engagement process. There is no modern ethical equivalent for DOGE and any management consultant who knows better should have spoken up Day 1 of the DOGE ‘intervention’.

Now the Management Consulting discipline looks just as shaky as ever with examples like the McKinsey and Company opioids market matter. Advice, insight, and processes for functional, ethical, and empathetic public good systems with resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability outcomes are needed more than ever. What’s required are leaders with the courage and genius to do that.

We are challenged in these times of trial and truth seems like a joke. So, let’s challenge each other to stick with the truth about America’s actual strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Once we get better at that; we can work with strategy, innovation, and risk in more high value public good ways.

Strategy is The Way

Hindsight leads to Insight and Foresight. If American Strategy is the blind leading the blind… we all fall into the pit. We get to redefine American strategy sourced from empathic, ethical genius focused on our central and legitimate justice, equity, democracy innovation, wealth, and wellbeing issues.

If local success is about being scammed over and over again, each time with greater costs and destruction to humans, then we have a terrible way of democratizing strategy, innovation, and risk issues. The Enron example is a lesson learned in why corporations do not run state infrastructure issues like energy. The 2008 Financial Crisis is an example of more billions of dollars and large-scale ‘anthro disaster’ requires empathetic, ethical human beings in Congress providing oversight connected to the vision in the Preamble to the US Constitution.

Tesla Optimus robots cannot be the guardians of freedom; can they? A strategy where everyone agrees to just let the flashing red lights go unattended is usually a indicator of massive national scale fraud and sabotage.

Once the United States of America becomes a nationalized ‘Industrial Scale Scam Center‘ versus an economy managed for public good with social, environmental considerations loaded up front… then it’s game over. There will be no FBI investigations. The last National Leadership Situation when the moment comes will just do a Three Wise Monkeys routine.

There will never be congressional hearings to unearth something more or less like a genuine search for the truth.

The vast majority of local leaders in all sectors — business, medicine, education, emergency services, and government — are not ‘radical criminal lunatics’. Federal workers are screened for competency. Roles like those of the US Armed Forces are not for scam artists. These are our fellow citizens. If we are not about the national motto of Out of Many, One… we have nothing.

Our Municipalities are where we can connect on our actual Critical Success Factors. After establishing redundant and resilient Strategic Communication channels back to state and national leadership based in being clear-cut about the ‘business like’ relationship between High Magnitude Truth and High Magnitude Value… we will have a better shot at the proceeding with the ideals in the Preamble to the US Constitution.

StratGen helps everyone take a stand for Municipal Success and get strategic clarity on our Critical Success Factors with a dynamic set of tools. We have no reason to not rethink strategy, innovation, and risk as a dynamic combination of High Magnitude Truth and High Magnitude Value; versus a race to the bottom of seeing who can gain any sort of irrational power for whatever reasons they choose and declare themselves The Big Boss of America.

It will take a lot of Strategy Innovators working together in a Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) Human Ecosystem.

What is your Strategic Big Idea?

StratGen allows leaders and their stakeholders who are reexamining Municipal Success given these times of trial tools and space to interact with Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management. More of these Strategy Innovators coordination on a platform built on those two central components of entrepreneurship, and especially policy entrepreneurship, means actual outcomes for resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability.

Firstly, the version of leadership and strategic innovation StratGen hopes to enhance for these Strategy Innovators is ideally about a ‘market explosion’ of public trust. Leaders who can maneuver today’s challenges and leave behind a wake of public good trust are those who imagine strategy for municipal success in two essential modes where we maneuver to create, spread, accelerate, and intercept:

High Magnitude Truth

High Magnitude Value

Pseudo Transformative Leaders are identifiable by the destructive, disethical work product and human casualty wakes they leave behind.

As we navigate a currently highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) version of America and global landscape; the wake we leave behind is our legacy. Some of what is left behind our initiatives may just fade away. But there is always just one Opportunity Departure Point and one destination as part of each venture phase; and as we overall build a new trade in resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability with each Human Ecosystem connection.

The empathetic, ethical genius invested into those initiatives and human interfaces need to become more powerful and more precious as each minute goes by. We don’t need more ‘Great Acceleration Phenomenon’ like the new arms race, this one based in Artificial Intelligence (and then the energy hungry supporting data centers), as much as we may require a new Human Ecosystem built from any one Municipality to as many other Municipalities (M2M) as humanly possible for trade in genuine resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability.

9/11 and Galileo

Terrorism is not okay.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, terrorism is “violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.” One of the last things the average US citizen will do is open the Biden Administration’s 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

It may initially seem like an unproductive endeavor to combine terrorism issues with sustainability issues in a Strategic Thinking workshop. Nonetheless, StratGen advice and insight often consists of allowing strategy prompts exactly like the terror / sustainability issues combination. What we surface and then request as public action follows the willingness to maneuver into the X Factor Future.

SI 2 is about a public good oriented version of entrepreneurship over pure profit where the Strategic Innovation can literally change the world where folks like Elon Musk have only one track left: Strategic Failure leading to the dustbin of history. The sooner those who can articulate that failure and impact to the USA… the better it will be for all concerned.

Galileo Galilei is referred to as the developer of modern science and the scientific method. The Catholic Church didn’t burn him at the stake for coming up with the heliocentric solar system idea and “vehement suspicion of heresy”; but he was sentenced to home detention in his final days and had to renounce Heliocentrism. Heliocentrism — defined as our solar system orbiting the sun — is like the earth is round; not flat.

If you are wondering about Federal hurricane and wildfire responses and how to head towards sustainability; we do not have that with the current National Leadership Situation. We have enough information that tells us what many refer to as ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ is an arena that very much is at the heart of American politics for two strategic reasons:

1. Denying the prodigious Federal Intellectual Capital targeting Anthropogenic Global Warming, or what we might as well revise intellectually and as to Strategic Communication as something like the Anthro Climate… which refers to the anthropologic element of overall culture and politics that allowed the Anthro Climate to dominate our lives, as of January 20, 2025 is unjust because:

1. Government agencies and third parties like businesses, states, and local government did in fact receive a lot of private and public funding over the years to develop Climate Protection for Sustainability (CP/S) solutions.

2a. Either that has been a fraudulent effort based on a global deception perpetrated by most parts of the US Government including the Department of Defense down to local government; the majority of related scientists and CleanTech businesses; environmental NGOs; the United Nations; and or:

2b. Something else is wrong with the National Anthro Climate Strategy. What sort of fraud and deception has actually infiltrated this critical aspect of US National Security?

When the USAID website was shut down, the highly valuable taxpayer funded intellectual capital was sabotaged. Of course, interrupting real world USAID operations is something Putin celebrated.

Elon Musk is no Galileo. Elon’s ethics are defective. Elon’s version of science is why the Declaration of Helsinki exists. We are all the human trial subjects for people like that.

The US taxpayers invested in the knowledge and practices of USAID personnel and the awesome examples of Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management USAID is actually about as to furthering American Liberal Democracy; and especially allowing others to develop their versions of liberal democracy globally.

The number of strategic failures the US Government has participated in when it comes to global affairs are multiple. However, just cancelling USAID is a draconian and Anti-American act of skullduggery which will be written into history in similar terms as to the perpetrators.

Of course, issues of First Amendment basic rights as to whether Anthropogenic Global Warming, climate change, and what we can now call The Anthro Climate, are effectively banned by the US Government as to its own conduct. The work of NOAA and other parts of our government as to understanding the Anthro Climate is not something that can be censored. The DOD and the intelligence services have identified the Anthro Climate and a robust response as central to national security. The free world leading on an effective Anthro Climate response as to what we can refer to as Climate Protection for Sustainability (CP/S) means liberal democracies are effective global partners to nations on the brink of selecting illiberal structures and alliances.

Mere CP/S issues like access to food, fresh water, and livable climates are the only existential issues after all. Why would anyone try to obstruct those intellectual basics? How can anyone succeed at ‘rolling back’ the truth about the Anthro Climate after decades of free world CP/S Intellectual Capital development? Is coercion, censorship, followed by use of force for those who do not comply with the required ‘Climate Awareness and Science Atomization’ the way?

What is the strategy of sabotaging America’s Anthro Climate response? What is the leadership ideology of that?

Students, local government officials, and any citizen should be able to view the USAID public facing content. Because there’s a lot more to see than just the food distribution side of USAID older people might connect with USAID.

Cambridge Dictionary defined Intellectual Capital as “the value of all the knowledge and ideas of the people in an organization, a society, etc.” It’s also the basic building blocks of any enterprise as to the integration of Human Capital, Structural Capital, and Social Capital.

No one voted to replace Federal workers such as FBI agents and CIA analysts with AI bots.

We don’t want an army of Tesla Optimus robots running things and being the only option of who we can elect to Congress after ‘Project 2025 Phase 1′, Elon.

If these times we live in are prompting you to review your personal strategy as a leader, or student (over age 18) developing as leader; the strategy of your team or organization; or more importantly how strategy can work with the idea of kaizen (continuous improvement) that ties right into resilience and working with strategy, innovation, and risk as to Municipal Success; StratGen is here.

The number of super tough strategic choices for America right now are many and difficult. For years it has seemed like this and that were all the priority. There are some ways to group our Big Strategic Ideas. DEI and ESG are concerning acronyms for some and they did everything possible to terminate these now conventional management arenas.

That means DEI and ESG are Big Strategic Ideas. Some see those issue processing mechanisms as threats on their SWOT ‘strategic radar’.

Local government comprehensive planning feels like one of the least agile and slow processes for reasserting Federalism from the ground up. At the same time, offering insights to existing local comprehensive plans as to really central power tangibles such as being evidence of the will of the people makes that evidence of local strategy possibly of great value right now.

As detailed with following State of the Nation report example, towns, cities, and counties across the nation have detailed thier agendas in many local strategic planning documents. State governments and the Federal level should be able to align with these concrete examples of the actual will of the people.

Your sustainability oriented business. Your student research, NIH, or NSF funded research project. The local government initiatives you were working on. Your nonprofit or faith mission as of January 20, 2025 still exist even if the Trump Administration cut off funds or otherwise interrupted the work.

USAID and FEMA still matter.

The ‘American Dream’ is specific. Giant corporations, investment funds and most of business consulting just goes with the prevailing winds. American Liberal Democracy means hanging on to minor matters like the First Amendment. We all have to reassert the Intellectual Capital forces that make America what it is… right now.

There is legitimate strategic utility in America’s SWOT

It wasn’t that long ago the Biden Administration got the Inflation Reduction Act through congress. Legitimate strategic utility is in America’s SWOT and there are leaders who do the hard work of strategy for public good. Let’s invite more and more of the focused strategic leadership from Main Street USA and send it up to the state and Federal levels. The urgency of sorting through what leadership for American Liberal Democracy utility looks like and how to get the tangibles in motion again could not be greater today.

Strategy is more than simply being emotional about the waste of cancelling the DOE Climate Pollution Reduction Grant programs before anyone got to see the outcomes. Obviously focusing on the arbitrary and capricious nature of trying to delete already decided public strategy is the issue and challenge as to solution.

A new report by a conglomeration of many of America’s mainstream think tanks called State of the Nation offers a certain amount of High Magnitude Truth about where America’s SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat) analysis stands. The State of the Nation report is useful in that the authors are transparent about many issues they could not agree as being significant but a target for the report.

There is no visual like the following American SWOT in the report. Instead there are worsening, stable, and improving metrics. StratGen offers the workshop tools and online community for local, statewide, and national dynamic ecosystem development.

One way to use Strategic Thinking is to look at the classic SWOT tool differently.

Kaizen means turning weaknesses into opportunity for improvement. A new resulting resilience strength can better tackle identified challenges and urgent threats. That kind of crosscut analysis along with national collaboration of a multidisciplinary nature are part of how StratGen helps leaders develop a new Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management practice. More leaders need to do batter and faster. But instead of hitting the wall of overwhelm right away… we need an unfair competitive advantage.

Because the number of issues competing for clarity around an ethical, empathetic ‘do new’ acceptance of American Liberal Democracy leave us all empty handed as to the mental and emotional overwhelm. Keep Steve Bannon’s notion of ‘Flood the Zone’ in mind and how Russ Vought wants us traumatized. It’s real versus just conspiracy talk at this point.

The conspiracy talk and resulting emotional and mental hijacking of millions of average Americans is just part of the perception management. What substantive issues like being able to vote for people who can sensible spell out nationwide energy conservation programing over gratuitous AI (Artificial Intelligence) data centers are overwhelmed by the next empty facade built of impossible pronouncements?

Pseudo Transformative Leadership connects to legitimate authority. We need trustworthy leaders whose legitimate authority has large-scale buy in. Instead we have been asked to ‘handicap’ sources of illegitimate authority because ‘we just have to get use to it all’.

Americans supposedly got rid of issues like slavery a long time ago. And yet the 14th Amendment came up recently as being open to revision. The number of Americans who voted for such a notion are few. Because that was previously not a national agenda item after the Civil Way. It enslaves us all to stop and do a national review about whether or not US citizenship is theoretically good as is and everyone buy law books about our citizenship so we are ready to go to court against the Bondi DOJ; or whether a Gaza resolution is like a real estate transaction.

Or whether FEMA and USAID have public utility. Think about the lack of logic or ethical basis for insisting American Liberal Democracy just needs some rapid recoding by some under age 30 Ultra Libertarian allies of Elon Musk.

What you are doing is your First Amendment expression. But if more of us coordinate and figure out what a simple idea like Municipal Success that allows for ‘Out of Many, One’ strength and opportunity… we’ll get more people working through each national challenges one after another with greater ‘Management Science’.

This new management science can be referred to as Strategic Innovation 2.0 (SI 2); and the Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform is also about supporting the creation, spread, acceleration, and strategic interception of SI 2 initiatives across the nation.

Open Strategic Management

StratGen sets up Open Strategic Management online environments at modest cost in order to allow leaders and students over age 18 working on research projects internships from different sectors and scholarship disciplines to work in the safe, secure ‘Free Speech Zones’ of SI 2 Lab Synergy Groups work with all the Intellectual Capital that actually makes America what it is in order to counter the vastly destructive leadership practices of the Trump Administration and many state legislatures like the NC General Assembly.

As many towns, cities, and counties across the nation sharing the ‘receipts’ of democracy as to all the work of local comprehensive plans as what America in reality seems focused on may be a real antidote to the ‘piracy’ of folks like Elon Musk that pretty much links to President Biden’s Farewell Address as to American Oligarchy is also real.

Different extremist groups will also want to take over the local comprehensive strategy process. However, adding the credential of evidence of an American Liberal Democracy ‘product’ to all these local comprehensive plan documents and currently developing comprehensive plan documents is potential of great value.

Representatives of several towns, cities, and counties And by no means is waiting for public officials required. They need to see Strategic Big Ideas in front of them that make some sort of sense at this point. Some of the giant management consulting firms like EY (Ernst and Young) are involved in the production of local comprehensive planning. It seems like doing the same thing over and over again when citizens actually invest a lot into the many important themes and sub strategies in these examples of municipal consent of the governed could make a big difference.

Strategic Focus: Birtherism vs. The Anthro Climate

The extraordinary events since ‘birtherism’ came into the American mass consciousness with the maverick campaign of President Barak Obama in 2008. Not all voting age Americans are aware of birtherism and how much time and energy millions of Americans have invested in following this one arena of misinformation / disinformation. We can say as social networking moved into more of a Corporate Social Media sector individual issues like birtherism became gasoline for the first Trump election engine.

The possibility of other issues like the US leaving the newly adopted Paris Agreement was not in the public forum as America processed how to address the mass appeal of birtherism. Donald Trump makes references to the environment and ‘cleanliness’ at times; but he also has done everything he possibly can to avoid substantive action on what we can now refer to as the Anthro Climate.

At the start of 2025, everyone got a massive dose of reality as to what happens when American Liberal Democracy goes from kaizen mode and due process all the way to planned unilateral disintegration mode. Which sounds better to vote for and act on when a transparent, ethical, empathetic perception strategy is available?

Part of what StratGen is about is called Strategic Communication; which merely includes communications tactics. Elon Musk ally and defense / intelligence services contractor Alex Karp in a shareholder statement references “superiority in applying organized violence”. Karp made public statements in support of DOGE piracy activities subverting the US Government.

He is also co-author of a book titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

So, the concepts of leadership and strategy are very much real world for each US town, city, and county in 2025 and for the foreseeable future. Strategy Innovators can join the SI 2 Lab and we can connect individual efforts around comprehensive Environmental, Economic, Social, and Governance (EESG) matters dedicated to American Liberal Democracy.

As we get solid about comprehensive EESG strategy right where we live — in Our Municipalities — we can U-Turn in the face of these multitude national success issues, challenges, solutions, and outcomes and add a fresh combined Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management dynamic. Management Science has been sequestered in a space of mathematics and decision science. In fact doing a hard look review on the best of management concepts and principles in combination with the areas of civilization affected by leadership and Management Science means including practitioners of law, governance, science, education, medicine, the arts, and a range of societal sectors to make the most of cool stuff like the First Amendment.

Use it or lose!

How StratGen supports Municipal Success

The kinds of heroes America needs right now are students, educators, medical staff, faith leaders, business people, nonprofit executives, and local government leaders who make America’s cities, towns, and counties work. In a short strategy development statement The United States Conference of Mayors took initial steps in laying down the law as to how bottom up Federalism works in connection to Municipal Success as the Trump January 2025 government hijack rolled out.

Strategy is a way to win that delivers a more desirable outcome. And a lot of the time it means courage in the face of Business-as-Usual (BAU) and an empathetic genius ethic versus just making millions, billions, even trillions, of BAU dollars. StratGen has a Statement of Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility concerning recent National Leadership events as well as a corresponding editorial.

StratGen supports leaders and their stakeholders in forging resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability components of total Municipal Success… with a vision + action engine called the StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform (SI 2). These leaders and their stakeholders can go on to create, spread, accelerate, and intercept challenges as Strategy Innovators with their own approaches to SI 2.

The StratGen SI 2 Dynamic Services and the resulting SI 2 Dynamism of Strategy Innovators coordinating across America and Free World is an example of the private sector establishing resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability alongside practitioners of American Liberal Democracy; and the interpretation of liberal democracy among established US allies.

Local comprehensive planning is not just urban planning or siloed economic development revised every 2-5 years. So, what is the system wide Sustainable America Engine powered transition to date? If the ‘big picture’ matters today; what is it and how owns it these days?

Words like integration and synergy can sound horribly ‘jargonish’ for some. But what do we have to work with if we strategically fail at self-governing from the local level back up to state, Federal, and global levels?

“[Strategy is] about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It’s the art of creating power.”

– Lawrence Freedman

While strategy is being revitalized in American culture to a certain extent; the context is almost business profitability only. Strategy can also be generated of an extremely risky nature; even if language about innovation is thrown in a lot.

A lot of folks recommend more action versus vision today. But think about vision versus blind spots. What are some major blind spots facing a concept like Municipal Success today? StratGen can discuss your individual, team, and organization issues as well.

Commerce is a segment of sustainability; however StratGen SI 2 is about a new version of economic development: Municipal Success. How you and your interests are represented with a new combination of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability connecting where we live — in Our Municipalities — are issues StratGen welcomes in the SI 2 Lab.

StratGen provides tools and space for leaders in most any sector to cope, coordinate, and maneuver as we establish resilience and then sustainability; where we live: in Our Municipalities. Working with strategy, innovation, and risk with new sight and in new combinations — and with as much of an ethic of empathetic genius as possible — is how to turn the tides of whatever undesirable X Factor Future is headed our way in order to set things right.

The outcome of the 2024 presidential election is here; as well as the long range high magnitude impact when it comes to risk. There is a kind of value attached to those related risk factors; similar to those risks of Bush vs. Gore. All of us landed at a High Magnitude Truth today as to the consequences of the related past choices and actions.

What does ‘moving on’ look like this time... and what are the outcomes… designed and decided by whom?

General Strategy; Community Oriented Design Thinking for urban planning issues; and flooding or wildfire resilience frameworks are different spaces. Only General Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management cross cut into all civil matters and shape high level direction while searching for solutions connected to ultimate civil / sustainability outcomes.

General Strategy sounds a bit like a general being in charge. The history of strategy is about presidents, legislatures, flag officers, and CEOs (maybe nonprofit executives) being in charge of strategy. We need to generate and democratize a new sustainability oriented concept of strategy immediately for each sector of American society.

StratGen democratizes the processes and outcomes of strategy, innovation, and risk for as many leaders and developing leaders [students 18+] as possible as we determine what resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability needs to look like now. The space to do that work is the SI 2 Lab.

And yet Election Day 2024 is in the past. So is the chance to avoid the 1.5 Celsius Anthropogenic Global Warming threshold and consequential Earth System Change outlined in the Paris Agreement. 2023 was the first year this epoch setting breech occurred. This is why Hurricane Helene was so devastating to a deep inland city like Asheville, NC and other parts of Western North Carolina.

It is the X Factor Future we can begin to process with Solution Design starting today. We can begin to maneuver to a new High Magnitude Value position: established factors of resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability combined to define a modern concept of Municipal Success. It most certainly is not too late to reform what most thought sustainability was about add insert a renewing approach to strategy, innovation, and risk into American Liberal Democracy.

And…

The map is not the terrain.

The road map of economics; of politics… and of systems relationships, such as how physical geography (E.g., ’The Climate’) was supposed to work in subservience to economic and political conventional wisdom… or how one social group fits into the worldview of another, are likely maps charted prior to these current times of divergent turns that are often unlisted.

The terrain for coming years may be incompatible for conventions of past strategic planning methods. StratGen supports the development of Strategy Innovators and their power aims of ethical value. Strategy Innovators interface with issues of strategy, Innovation, risk, and Social Synergy with leadership skills suitable for these times.

Strategy is part of The Way. The Way is part of strategy. Cambridge Dictionary has a definition of strategy that simply says strategy in part is a way of doing things.

It’s worth it to stop and review how we are doing Climate Protection. What’s the largest group of action-oriented leaders in the greatest number of municipalities willing to agree Climate Protection is a good term to develop into outcomes?

Redefining strategy away from corporate and military contexts is vital. Issues like Climate Protection have macro and micro contexts. Reworking who needs skills in strategy, innovation, and risk and how to develop minds ready for activities like Climate Protection Strategy is part of how StratGen supports leaders and their stakeholders in coping, coordinating, and maneuvering.

Plans always have a role. And yet a new way of doing things that takes plenty of what still works with Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management into account — and is about coping, coordinating, and especially maneuvering, with new road mapping capabilities at hand… is likely part of the ‘new normal’. This is likely a normalcy where achieving resilience and then sustainability — where we live: in Our Municipalities — is about building new strategy platforms. And where actual transformation is often the daily baseline.

The word strategy is becoming a bit more popular. Of course, popularity and strategy are not always synonymous… and yet strategy and a term like Social Synergy — as to who and how many get behind the best, most ethical strategy available — are not at all mutually exclusive.

Interacting with strategy, innovation, risk, and Social Synergy is both art and science. The arts are familiar to StratGen. The StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform (SI 2) has origins in both the arts and management science; as well as real world events like the historic Hydrogen Road Tour and Hurricane Helene.

Along with a common reference to governing like the Public Policy Cycle, one core Strategy Innovators tool StratGen shares with clients and SI 2 Lab members is the above Strategy Concept Pyramid alongside the SI 2 Power Sphere.

If purpose, mission, vision, values, and social connection seem like missing parts of the Concept of Strategy… The Way component of SI 2 fills that all out.

The SI 2 Lab is the first M2M (Municipality to Municipalities) Human Ecosystem built for Municipal Success Discovery and Action.

If strategy is a ‘jargony’ term few understand or can use to create new and renewing value (I.e., innovation) in these times of trial; then strategy is a source of failure… which is a likely scenario. There is a place for Strategic Management with its planning mode and goals, objectives, sub strategies, and action plans… action plans which need to connect to skilled project management.

Orca, or ‘Killer Whales’, have no way to be as powerful and as potentially dangerous as humans. But they are a metaphor for what is rare and dynamic in nature. If we are searching for High Magnitude Truth leading to High Magnitude Value with something like Artificial Intelligence (AI); that’s sad.

Orca Strategy

Metaphors that drive imagination, dynamism, and action may be harder to come by these days. Whales, polar bears, and other animals being presented as important for ecological ethics and human behavior modification had some effect in the past.

Orcas may seem intimidating; but they are no where near as destructive as humans can be potentially. StratGen refers to the basic strategy practitioner and insight development work that possibly gets generated in a single StratGen and client co-created workshop as Orca Strategy. The product of our interaction will get a name and branding later if for an organization or municipality; and can be your individual personal level strategic innovation roadmap.

But before we begin, we can call it ‘something different about to happen’; similar to the open state of potential behind the Japanese symbol Enso. Or just to be REALLY different, let’s call the X Factor Future strategy that’s needed to fill our so many of our challenges Orca Fusion Strategy.

Orca Strategy is deliberate, dynamic maneuvering designed to achieve a desired outcome or outcomes… with teeth. Corporations and Small to Medium Enterprises may find a new wave of Strategic Thinking to be welcomed. But the idea of reframing strategy as a bit wild and much more alive with the strength of referencing the amazing yet totally fragile and basically totally endangered Orca is not just about corporations and the enhancing what damage has been done by corporate globalization; with some management consulting firms playing a major role in the downside of neoliberalism.

A twist on sustainability that often comes from inside multibillion dollar management consulting corporations is a hallmark of their reputation rehabilitation efforts. Otherwise, StratGen researches the practices of the firms as reverse engineering their outcomes but keeping many of their processes and engaging their talent is useful.

Coming up with something that matters, is about actual change, and is of high magnitude [let’s call it Orca Strategy versus the routine] means developing Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management. Leadership matters, but there’s got to be something else going on about what the word leadership means today. Democratizing the ins and outs of Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management means more and better American leaders.

If Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management are not available and therefore cannot connect to and influence the future; then Climate Protection and therefore resilience and sustainability — where we live: in Our Municipalities — should be expected to stay elusive. What examples of local, state level, Federal, and global leadership reference how to think about and respond to our many challenges?

In the confluence of Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management, artifacts like strategic reports, strategic plans, and business plans are generated. Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management are engines of our Power Spheres: For individuals; for teams; for organizations; for government; and for local comprehensive plans… that one would think are comprehensive as to who and what is going on within the boarders of cities, towns, and counties across the nation.

The StratGen SI 2 shared capabilities are not about one 3-5 year strategic plan that gets filed as yet another PDF.

The Cambridge Dictionary definition of strategy includes that strategy is a way of doing things. That special way of doing things is about skills, values, and organization capabilities. So, there is strategy.

The words idea and strategy have strong similarities; and so idea generation and developing strategy should have similar high-level status at the start of anyone’s strategy concept work.

Co-Creation

Whether it is a strategic issue related to Climate Protection, social or economic equity, the number of challenges common to the majority of US municipalities of most any size is a list that doesn’t seem to grow smaller over time. There is no reason for individual leaders; students developing as leaders; organizations in any sector; and various parts of the US Government [which includes local and state government] to coordinate better.

In the corporate world and as to large universities, the term innovation ecosystem is familiar. NASA is an innovation ecosystem for public good with a long history of spinning off value to many aspects of American life.

Innovation ecosystems, platform innovation; and lesser known terms like Open Innovation and Co-Innovation. StratGen aids in Municipal to Municipalities (M2M) Co-Creation. One of the StratGen SI 2 Dynamic Services is Open Strategic Management. The outcomes most municipalities are looking for have a lot of commonality and there is no point in opening up the national strategic management ‘big picture’ at this point.

In this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) era, generating both pragmatic and original confrontations of strategy, innovation, and risk can start with metaphors and analogy. Issues of Climate Protection and lack thereof are literally unprecedented. So, StratGen has an art element to the SI 2 Dynamism Flywheel.

We can use some of the practices of high level corporate and government Strategic Innovation for public good right where we live: in Our Municipalities.

Ideas and Strategy. Strategy and Ideas. The definition of idea is similar to the definition of strategy. Innovation without strategy can happen; but innovation is weaker because of that incongruence.

Humans are about strategy and ideas as much as anything else we are about.

The SI 2 Lab is an example of StratGen being part of America’s resilience and sustainability ideas marketplace.

SI 2 Dynamism is for Municipal Success

Strategy Innovators working together in the SI 2 Lab — and the Gestalt, or sum experience, of SI 2 interactions and interfaces with tools like Solution Design — is SI 2 Dynamism.

What might the byproducts of Municipal Success Discovery and Action be in the future? Because need a resilience and sustainability edge for certain; and urgently.

If you think you know what Municipal Success is, your Strategy Innovator abilities are needed. If you want to develop as a Strategy Innovator, there is a new association in development for you. The SI 2 Lab is for both knowers and learners as we establish resilience and then sustainability… right where we live: in Our Municipalities.

Think of Apple’s 2000 – 2020 transformation; and/or NASA numerous successes in ratio to its failures when imagining what Strategic Innovation is about. And a new definition of Strategic Innovation is needed for these times in any case; along with not enough demonstrations of Strategic Innovation showing up locally as to establishing resilience and then sustainability.

And or course, we need to go all the way back to FDR’s New Deal and President Johnson’s Great Society to see Strategic Innovation as more than ‘Big Tech’; as transformation often seems to center around currently. A National Bureau of Economic Research study reminds us that for America, the Operation Warp Speed example of Strategic Innovation to deliver COVID 19 vaccines in ‘crisis innovation’ mode is not unfamiliar territory.

We can also lead in moving from Anthropogenic Climate to Climate Protection modes. Our municipalities is where Climate Protection needs to happen and where all the beneficiaries live.

So, we deserve a platform to work out where we want to head next. By no means are just any combination of strategy, innovation, and risk managing practices and outcomes good for us. Agreed it would have been better to sort out what resilience and sustainability looks like at this point as well. So, there is plenty to do with strategy, innovation, and risk.

One way to think about Strategic Innovation is very high value from interacting with strategy, existing innovation, and risk in purposeful ways. Like sending people to the moon and as a result getting solar photovoltaics, fuel cells, and micro computing as byproducts from the NASA platform.

A new Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) platform rates a new way of thinking combined with the right tools and space. That’s SI 2.

It should be that most Americans recognize that a municipality is not just a large urban area. If America’s rural areas are not important for some, that’s a real problem. When we work together on a M2M Human Ecosystem, the SI 2 Lab, we can do more, better, and faster to establish resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability. Even the President of the United States has operational and functional boundaries. However, even small groups of Strategy Innovators across the nation sharing insights between localities means our local boundaries have a larger national context and strategic power when we choose to take action on any given EESG Comprehensive Strategy matter.

Join the Strategy Innovators

A Strategy Innovator can be a university student about to launch a new career as well as a Mayor; other legislators; a city or county manager and their appointed leadership; a business owner; a doctor; a nurse; an educator; a nonprofit executive; you. What we once thought of as leadership over the past few decades may or may not be equating to the version of Municipal Success we might do well to discover and act upon today.

Along with joining the SI 2 Lab, please connect through the StratGen Ideas and Events page; the StratGen newsletter; or the contact form.

SI 2 Dynamism is what happens when we Get Together about the Future

According to MIT, one definition of platform innovation — platform innovation being one form of strategic innovation — is:

“[…] environments, computing or otherwise, that connect different groups and derive benefits from others participating in the platform. The underlying concept covers companies from Google to Facebook […]”

Should a universal concept of Municipal Success be difficult to define?

Why can’t such an important idea be more ‘101’?

What is the management of strategy, innovation, risk, and Social Synergy for purposes of establishing resilience and then sustainability… where we live: in Our Municipalities. Are we getting better at making where we live work for most people? What if ‘most people’ starts with strategic focus on those at the base of the economic pyramid?

However much personal experience we may or may not have in developing municipal comprehensive plans and other strategic plans, we can afford to take a fresh look at how Municipal Success is defined and developed today. For some, a Tourism Development Authority and a Business Improvement District connected to very traditional approaches to Economic Development Strategy, entrepreneurship, and corporate recruitment to help create the basis of Municipal Success.

Strategy, Innovation, and Risk = Sustainable Value Creation

Sustainable Municipalities have a lot of factors feeding into what that sustainability criteria might be about at this point in history. The time, scope / quality, and financial issues about whether there are upside or downside outcomes include most Americans. Rural towns and counties are municipalities too.

It should be conventional wisdom that strategy and innovation integrate. There’s a strategy behind AI deployment and other technology. Our politicians will have an innovative approach to strategy. The domains can be different; but strategy and innovation work with the upsides and downsides of risk… globally.

Strategic Innovation is something many Americans experience on a regular basis through ICT (Information and Communication Technology). The platforms and innovation ecosystems behind NASA, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook

The next 25 years rate a new approach to value creation in contrast to Strategic Innovation 1.0. New approaches, practices, and systems that often simply repurpose and redesign what is already being done that works and is familiar is StratGen Management Consulting for Public Good backed with the SI 2 suite of dynamic services.

So, a group of Strategy Innovators from across the nation in the SI 2 Lab can form an association to change the game in any domain. Strategy Innovators define the 21st Century term of game change:

Game Change, noun

an event, idea, or procedure that effects a significant shift in the current manner of doing or thinking about something.

– Oxford Languages

The SI 2 Lab is the first M2M Human Ecosystem built for Municipal Success Discovery and Action. Please join the SI 2 Lab and contact StratGen about co-created client projects.

Join the SI 2 Lab

Strategy Innovators… together.