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“[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
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 StratGen.org website does not look like it was created by Artificial Intelligence (AI). This website will be improved in several ways in the future. But most importantly, StratGen is not just about standard strategic planning.
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 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.
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.
The existing major management consulting firms like McKinsey and Company influence outcomes partly with a Learning and Development approach. Their consultants publish books and the McKinsey website is filled with free articles and reports. McKinsey has leadership programs. StratGen believes there are many faults with these legacy consulting firms. Many debate about the value of the consulting sector. Independent advice, ecosystem building, and an Intellectual Capital platform approach are ideas StratGen has in common with current management consulting trends.
McKinsey is one of these consulting firms with a larger role in energy and Climate Protection issues; as mentioned further down. It is unlikely the legacy of leadership as to what brought us to Anthropogenic Climate — or the human altered climate — is the entire source of new Climate Protection mission. These consulting firms have wide agendas; hence StratGen is about a new way of looking at these challenges in the form of the StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform.
Thinking of what is not resilience and not sustainable can be psychologically hard. That’s why StratGen is mainly about bringing together Strategy Innovators so we can cope, coordinate, and maneuver to establish resilience and then sustainability… where we live: in Our Municipalities.
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’?
If we see more good further into the future than others, it is only due to the development of common perspicacity from shared Intellectual Capital.
It is fine to paraphrase from ‘the shoulders of giants’ concept of the past as we create Municipal Success in a transforming world. There is Intellectual Capital to build upon for comprehensive development establishing resilience and then sustainability from the networked municipal level. The Latin term ‘muni’ has had a lot of uses. One is the word munificence; or notable generosity. So, rethinking uses of ‘muni’ conceptual applications might be part of accelerating resilience and then sustainability.
We deserve to think and act generously as we visualize each community succeeding over the next 25 years. Doing so as a large, distributed team of Strategy Innovators across the nation is comparatively inexpensive and worthy of experimentation.
The SI 2 Lab is the first M2M Human Ecosystem built for Municipal Success Discovery and Action.
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 Concept of Strategy.
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.
Henry Ford helped us produced and distribute automobiles. With Thomas Edison it was the light bulb and the required electrical grid. They were both friends; and major pioneers of corporate strategy and innovation; and part of 150 years of what we might call Strategic Innovation 1.0. We got it on building and selling vehicles. That challenge is done; even though replacing current transportation infrastructure to the degree possible with zero emission technology is just beginning.
But can we get better at keeping microplastics out of human bodies?
The definition of the word idea is a lot like the definition of strategy. One thesaurus says an antonym of strategy is improvisation. Being a strategist and innovation at once, or a Strategy Innovator, by no means eliminates the possibility of improvisation. In fact, to be in possession of a working Concept of Strategy for personal, organization, or community requirement means responding to risk with a high improvisation / pragmatism balance for High Magnitude Value outcomes.
Without a Concept of Strategy, writing out a ‘back of napkin’ strategy statement for an idea is less likely. Many, many thoughts happen in humanity daily. An idea leading to doing something spectacular that works requires a Strategic Innovation Mind. And doing that work together as Strategy Innovators in the SI 2 Lab is better than trying to generate public good ideas siloed.
Externalization means cutting the environmental and human downsides of our increasingly wealthy economy out of the ‘big picture’ strategy. Obviously, there are some efforts at reconfiguring our cities, towns, and counties for resilience and then sustainability. Which is a great thing.
The above Concept of Strategy may look very familiar. Actually, there are few models that simplify understanding of strategy. Young people today going through university and preparing to work in issues of municipal resilience and sustainability deserve a more direct route to working with strategy, innovation, and risk.
Humanity produces all sorts of stuff. Now the supposed next big thing is AI; which apparently ends with Artificial General Intelligence — or the near equivalent of human intelligence — requiring massive numbers of energy intensive data centers.
Possibly we haven’t tapped into General Human Intelligence to the degree possible. If we were to do so; to what new truly innovative and strategic purpose? Municipal Success Discovery and Action seems like one of the new purposes for these times. Hope you agree.
What is the management of strategy, innovation, and risk 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.
SI 2 Tech
Any given business, nonprofit, or government unit mission alone has limitations as to ideas. The largely untapped arena of municipal strategy, innovation, and risk has limitations in terms of lack of a sophisticated common platform. What many refer to as climate change or global warming alone generates long lists of issues for a great many American cities, towns, and counties.
Accessible technology like MindManager, Podio, and Mighty Networks are combined to form SI 2 Tech. The kinds of expensive strategic management software used by many local governments is good to know more about. In the meantime Strategy Innovators from across the nation can synthesize data and insight in with SI 2 Tech. Since we are barely maximizing software like the existing off-the-shelf solutions forming SI 2 Tech, it’s more efficient, more customizable, and cost effective to let StratGen clients and SI 2 Lab members interface with perfectly useful tools that don’t have the price tag of a lot of strategic and innovation management alternatives.
In a way StratGen relates to the Code for America initiative. Code for America attempted to democratize software development and actual software applications at the base of the economic pyramid.
The kinds of ‘digital transformation’ that probably makes things more expensive and complex for us in at least as many ways as we are more and more ‘productive’ is about Strategic Innovation 1.0. Strategic Innovation 2.0 means turning around and making society more productive about becoming highly resilient in the face of tremendous new local challenges; and then actually arriving at a point where many of us can say, “This is sustainability… right where we live: in Our Municipalities.”
SI 2 Lab and DIKUW
One of the dynamics of Intellectual Capital should be the flow and creation of Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom (DIKUW). Today, many consultants with municipal outcomes as part of their focus and practice repertoire believe saying, “I don’t know”, is a worthy place to end up. That is actually reasonable to allow community members to declare the number of strategic choices and outcomes in front of us lends to a place of not knowing what’s next; let alone what to do next.
However, we can speed up the ‘continuous improvement’ friction to action experience of DIKUW fueling the Intellectual Capital experience of developing and achieving Municipal Success.
In the European Union, the concept of ‘City Science’ is moving forward with context to the Wellbeing Economy and Circular Economy. In the United States we are still working on what sustainability means and whether climate change and global warming have been effective strategic communication terms. Since many US municipalities are struggling with resilience and sustainability fundamentals — let alone being set to grasp the strategy, innovation, and risk evolutionary nature of this work — StratGen developed the Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform (SI 2).
Essentially, instead of corporations and the state, and more so, Federal levels of government setting the stage for strategy, innovation, and risk output and outcomes with Strategic Innovation 1.0; SI 2 connects a coalition of the willing across the US and free world who are willing to share and synthesize resilience and sustainability findings in a virtuous cycle. One can view a recent report from the Amsterdam City Science Office and see a universe of Municipal Success possibilities for US cities, towns, and counties.
It is important to note StratGen definitely considers rural municipalities partners. There is something really wrong if there is thinking that one part of America is superior to another; and some parts are less valuable, or worse, less trustworthy.
This is challenging content. It is not the routine or ‘Business-as-Usual’. So, a fundamental SI 2 practice is about identifying challenges in context. We can now join the first Human Ecosystem (versus ‘innovation ecosystem’), with Municipal Success as one focus, in the SI 2 Lab.
Please join the SI 2 Lab where we can go into greater length as to ideas from the Amsterdam report like ‘ESG Hubs’ and how the SI 2 Lab diffuses the best of the free world’s resilience and sustainability ideas.
One SI 2 Lab topic area is the transition from a human transformed climate to Climate Protection. Energy and Climate Protection are complex arenas that have yet to become especially simplified as to the transition to decarbonization. Whatever problems the multibillion dollar management consulting firms of the past may have created, a recent McKinsey and Company report on the issues of energy infrastructure decarbonization is an example of the kinds of strategy analysis produced daily here in America. There are many reasons to look at what else the conventions of American management can offer… and what is the Strategic Innovation 2.0 management consulting model for the rest of the
In seven and half minutes, on the NPR Marketplace radio program, David Brancaccio manages to relay the basics that according to McKinsey we are “10% of the way there” as to decarbonization by 2050. The super hard choices about how energy efficient humanity decides to be over the rest of the 21st Century is at least 90 percent of the rapid decarbonization by 2030… which is a short time period.
There is not a 25 year time range to reverse greenhouse gas emissions. That McKinsey report is a good example of how strategic reports are an influence tool. The likelihood is good this McKinsey report has big gaps in where a range of tough efficiency and energy use cuts can appear along with a CleanTech manufacturing and deployment menu of options; and with a similar high production value reporting structure.
The economic impacts of energy use cuts makes it really hard to find leaders who are willing to promote the actual remaining Climate Protection options. The journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports that a menu of options of decarbonization best practices needs greater understanding. The heavier the investment in functional Climate Protection, the bigger the sustainability value. Strategy Innovators are brave enough to tell the truth.
We can discuss the choice aspect of Strategic Innovation 2.0 in the SI 2 Lab as there are many hard choices and brave value propositions to define and achieve Municipal Success. One new trend in Climate Protection is ‘climate optimism’ balanced with solid information. There isn’t one way to win; but the last mile of decarbonization won’t be easy whatever mix of strategy, innovation, and risk we use.
Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management
We can afford to dive into a Municipal Success Discovery and Action platform and see what’s new across the nation and the rest of the free world and do some fresh ‘agenda setting’.
There is no universal Concept of Municipal Success because ideas like resilience and sustainability have yet to be integrated into past ideas like ‘quality of life’, Gross Domestic Product, crime levels, and unemployment statistics. But like the following Concept of Strategy, once the Concept of Municipal Success is developed… we will know it when we see it. Thereafter, it will be a source of threshold knowledge for future generations to use and refine in an ongoing continuous improvement loop.
Municipalities are markets; so for those who think of valuation as data, surely understanding Municipal Success and what the strategy is means great investment opportunities. But more obviously municipalities are about defining the benefits of liberal democracy as much as commercial activity
The TBD Civilization Health Index is an example of a client co-created StratGen tool that may help US municipalities frame and redefine Municipal Success… beyond past criteria like GDP and unemployment numbers. The past of Urban Planning and Economic Development Strategy is part of our hindsight.
So, what’s next in Municipal Success? First, we can start by capitalizing the term Municipal Success as a TBD framework alongside Gross Domestic Product, unemployment statistics, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Interpretation, Insight, and Response
Surely working with insight and foresight is part of the rest of the ‘success discovery’ formula when it comes to a high value Municipal Success framework. The possibilities are extensive once we decide we have yet to establish the ‘concreteness’ of Municipal Success given our nearly endless supply of exponential challenge growth today. It is almost certainly that we have more data sources, productivity tools, and rapid communications options to do that Municipal Success Discovery work.
The SI 2 Lab is the first Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) Human Ecosystem built for Municipal Success Discovery and Action. The SI 2 Lab is for and about the strategists and innovators (Strategy Innovators) from a range of domains in government, nonprofits, universities, healthcare, other science, and business who are already doing Municipal Success Discovery and Action. Changing focus on managing strategy, innovation, and risk from mainly a corporate context and a frame of management science in business schools and entrepreneurship about mere business advantage… to a larger multidomain capability most of us can relate to… where we live… in Our Municipalities… is part of the insight support work of StratGen.
Insight in strategy is almost always about consumer insight. Being a Strategy Innovator means knowing and acting as if it is better to do strategy for public good; versus have strategy done to us for suspect reasons. It is time to upgrade what leaders in the public good space think the management of strategy, innovation, and risk is about. Because Strategic Innovation 1.0 has been about the few managing the lives and the world the rest of us need to live with. The Strategic Innovation 1.0 results are evident.
Whether a rural municipality or our largest cities, establishing resilience and then sustainability were we live, in Our Municipalities, is the main deliverable of a new mix of managing strategy, innovation, and risk StratGen calls Strategic Innovation 2.0.
The Concept of Strategy
Managing strategy, innovation, and risk skills are among the core leadership skills for today. Strategic Thinking is indeed about working with creativity and therefore innovation and risk. Entrepreneurship, whether in business, nonprofits, or ‘policy entrepreneurship’, has Strategic Thinking as a founder capability.
Strangely, the above Concept of Strategy model derives from the rigorous work of a Chinese PhD versus an American with a PhD from a US Ivy League university. At the same time Dr. Yu simply worked with the nature of research, science, and strategy. Insight like the Concept of Strategy converges with use of the following version of the Hindsight – Insight – Foresight model from Finnish researcher Dr. Jari Kaivo-oja; developed way back in 2006.
How can we still be defining the Concept of Municipal Success? Surely there are milestones and breadcrumbs… and yet it is still some sort of ‘Gestalt X’ derived from multiple domains. What we can say it includes a model of establishing resilience and then sustainability in the 21st Century. One would hope in the 2030-2050 range.
StratGen and Strategic Innovation 2.0
StratGen energizes leaders and their stakeholders as we work with strategy, innovation, and risk for Sustainable Value Creation. Generating ideas, communicating the vision, and then executing is still about human leadership. There cannot be a data center or group of robots to hand off critical design and decision matters about strategy, innovation, and risk. There cannot be a special, small group of humans who run things in our municipalities either. Our politicians and other public officials are barely keeping up with everything strategic.
The array of issues coming at us, where we live: in Our Municipalities, grows daily.
Here are a few Strategy Innovator prompts as we rethink the value of these places we live, work, learn, and experience nature in… where that means eating something from nature from a grocery store or a restaurant… or finding some natural beauty hopefully even in the most dense urban areas:
1) Is today’s version of engagement and municipal strategy enough?
2) How do we create / access new strategic achievement (value) as a transformed version of the Gestalt of the diverse people and parts of our municipalities?
3) What if eventually, with more development, we call this total municipal experience municosystems? What happens when we coordinate these municosystems for better self-governing and sustainable economics of scope and scale nationwide? Such a brash approach actually conforms to Federalism. The White House, Congress, state governments, and the judiciary are hardly out of the loop.
4) How can we cope, coordinate, and maneuver differently given urgent modern challenges coming from so many different directions and scales?
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 Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are worth trillions of dollars; including the value of the end users or customers. Then there’s the value rendered using Apple and Google products and services. NASA is a public version of a strategic innovation platform; or organization with multiple sites and initiatives.
Focusing strategy around annual retreats and other workshopping that may include themes of innovation, creativity, happiness, mindfulness, sustainability, and someone’s general approach to what leadership might mean may or may not produce the right goals, objectives, and action plans. Being awesome at Strategic Thinking and continuously improving on what we think Strategic Management means can allow for being faster at getting to any given How to Win value.
But what are we winning at this point in the 21st Century? And where are we headed? Past notions of Strategy Thinking and Strategic Management got us to where we are.
The number of existing leadership organizations, often similar to innovation ecosystems with ‘beyond tech only’ mandates compared to conventional innovation ecosystems, are many. One example ‘leadership innovation ecosystem’ connected to our municipalities is the US Conference of Mayors. The options and talent combinations are there. And we certainly have no lack of sustainability challenges, solutions, and outcomes flying around to examine more closely.
So, what is doing new?
Metrics and lists of mitigation techniques and technologies form the modern, evolving ‘Sustainability Body of Knowledge’ (SBOK). Along with a general practice of working with strategy, innovation, and risk; getting to the upside outcomes involves Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management at the high levels of Sustainable Value Creation. The StratGen SI 2 Sustainable Value Creation Model is there to help generate the possibilities of SI 2 Dynamism while refining and tapping into the vastness of spaces like SBOK.
SI 2 Dynamism can include the above component SI 2 Dynamic Services interacting with new relationships and Intellectual Capital in the SI 2 Lab. Those SI 2 components are options rather than a mandatory ‘process heavy’ path to success. The starting point can be a Strategy Statement describing why we want to move from the current state of affairs to a new set of outcomes. Many consulting reports about municipal issues are generated every day. There are processes like surveys, panel events, and workshops behind those reports. So, delivering a consultive Strategy Innovator practice to more American leaders is likely at least as useful as another consultant report that is still always ‘proprietary’ in terms of how it came to be.
SI 2 is a platform that drives originality in a world begging for genius direction that is ethical and empathetic. Reports of any sort are just one byproduct. A genuine transformative outcome described by a decent looking report is the point of SI 2 Dynamism and a suite of options with more than one process starting point.
The idea of municipal comprehensive development, strategic planning, and sustainability being conventions at this point in history is not fresh news. However, establishing a next level of integrated economic, environmental, societal, and governance (EESG) success criteria and action from the municipal level back up the ‘chain of command’ as to establishing resilience and then sustainability… where we all live: in Our Municipalities… means a new concept of managing strategy, innovation, and risk.
Where we live is most valuable starting place for a new kind of management consulting: Management Consulting for Public Good with StratGen SI 2. Our cities, towns, and counties are where actual people live and where very tangible forms of sustainable market value are needed; urgently.
SI 2 and the SI 2 Lab are the unsiloed multidomain forum and part of the formula to establish resilience and then sustainability nationwide. The people using SI 2 tools and working as a nationwide Human Ecosystem versus worrying about the next massive innovation wave, i.e. Artificial Intelligence, and what ‘tech only’ Innovation ecosystems deliver are Strategy Innovators. The Intellectual Capital ‘collisions’ of these Strategy Innovators interfacing together with the more ideal SI 2 tools and space versus what leaders do together in our municipalities as is SI 2 Dynamism.
What could Strategy Innovators do with SI 2 Dynamism? Let’s get together in the SI 2 Lab and discover that future.
SI 2 transforms Leaders and the people they serve from Initiative Founders into Strategy Innovators.
Sustainability is significantly about municipal success; including metrics, techniques; and external partnerships and programs. With SI 2 Dynamism we can Do New; more often, better, and faster.
Strategy Innovators work together across the nation in the SI 2 Lab.
We have a Municipality to Municipalities (M2M) success platform with SI 2 for new Sustainable Value Creation possibilities.
SI 2 and the SI 2 Lab is how and where we cope, coordinate, and maneuver differently.
The corporate world is constantly developing very sophisticated approaches to what value means. That ‘value creation’ world could be referred to as Strategic Innovation 1.0. Psychologists, social scientists, and ‘data scientists’ help the corporate world know everything we might imagine value to be about; and then the world of marketing and product development produce amazing offers for us through massive global supply chains. The vastly influential Business-as-Usual management consulting sector is now doubling down on injecting AI to ramp up the next ‘Schumpeter’s Wave’ of innovative value offerings for all of us to rapidly consume… until each of those ‘waves’ tap out our interest; or more likely we get more internally exhausted by all the supposed ‘value messaging’ and consumption.
Innovation doesn’t scale without the direction of strategy. And without repurposing both strategy and innovation practices for sustainable ends, we are in a System Dynamic where the key levers of the system become less and less democratized. Developing a new strategy, innovation, and risk dynamic between now and 2050 that redirects America away from a growing list of powerful downside future risks — as well as increasing daily hazards today — means injecting a set of factors we can refer to as Sustainable Value Creation.
The next 25 years rate a new approach to value creation in contrast to Sustainability 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
And be Strategy Innovators… together.