About StratGen
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StratGen is a for-profit, for-purpose, Management Consulting for Public Good organization.
SI 2 is about creating the tools and space for leaders in the places where we live — Our Municipalities — to cope and coordinate as we establish resilience and then sustainability. Intellectual Capital is important to generate all the new value around big ideas like resilience and sustainability. Indeed, we need to redefine both the terms resilience and sustainability and the interface of the two in relevant, working ways for our municipalities. And a SI 2 Lab project is about developing a related manual for municipal leaders.
The above image of a warship may be alarming for some; however that is the ship I served on. That ship is an example of a platform out of the usual context of a website like Amazon.com; which is a platform business model. And it’s also an image about switching gears mentally: it’s a warship; but amphibious ships like that are excellent emergency solutions in crises where the mission is purely humanitarian.
I found it immensely disturbing to be the person to ask NC Department of Health and Human Services to generate city level demographics and geolocation data on Illegally Manufactured Fentanyl (IMF) deaths. There is some demographic data at the county level, but getting the last known adresses and death site locations is different. Understanding who is dying and where the hot spots are at a granular level would seem like a basic thing from anyone’s perspective who actually wants to see the IMF and other High Magnitude Casualty – Organized Crime Narcotics (HMC-OCN) endgame.
SI 2 Dynamism is…
Sustainable Value Platforms
StratGen is…
Sustainable Value Creation
SI 2 for Public Good transfers thinking and doing (do new) practices similar to Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Google (Alpha), and NASA down to municipal level… with agency.
Notice: StratGen is not about ‘tinkering away’ issues like anti-poverty basics like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), public education, public health, environmental protections, DEI or CRT, the IRS, and basics of Liberal Democracy with junk strategy and ‘innovation trash’. Quite the opposite.
The city I live in has not modern greenhouse gas visualization tool detailing local issues.
Our economic development strategy may be high performance with a modern twist; or not so much.
Being willing and sufficiently able to set the challenge table for higher municipal performance is part of choosing to develop co-created projects with StratGen and join the SI 2 Lab. Along with management consulting basics like insightful advice and a genuine system for transformation; we need to participate in consultive practices suitable to establishing resilience and then sustainability. Management consulting is ripe as a professional services sector concerning its own transformations. Just adding layers of activity like an AI twist to what management consulting and nonprofits and government agencies with consultive offerings isn’t enough.
Moving from simple profitability, growth, and other past performance conventions is a step: but to where? SI 2 is the platform and SI 2 practices like the Transformation Readiness Levels provide steps to new roadmaps.
Co-created SI 2 Dynamism roadmaps launched from human ecosystems like the SI 2 Lab get input from a range of subject matter expert members and then connect to the dynamic range of issues inherent to life in our cities, towns, and counties. A strategic plan is different from strategic management; and both are different than planning and managing without a preexisting platform and ecosystem building capability like SI 2.
The Box and Blocks
Thinking outside the box might be a useful metaphor for how to cope, coordinate, and lead today. But whether it’s about thinking outside a box, or creating a different strategy and innovation ‘box’ (e.g. platform), being willing and able to formulate and execute those measures in times of crisis may not be functional. And that lack of maneuverability may drive the crisis into higher magnitudes. Next, how did we get here? Can we prevent new crises on purpose?
Columbia Business School professor Sheena S. Iyengar shares an excellent ‘Choice Map’ example of Solution Design in a recent Harvard Business School article (I use lots of references, not just HBR).
Iyengar and many others like the word ‘problem’ when it comes to innovation and supporting entrepreneurial activities for any domain. StratGen covers challenges, solutions, outcomes, leadership, maneuvering, and platform(s) in the StratGen Center of Gravity model.
Risk management with risk factors and challenges are all around us. Risks may or may not be something individuals and organizations have the existing capabilities to deal with. However, we can coordinate interests and communicate about risks to our municipalities differently. In the SI 2 Center of Gravity framework there’s a larger space for connecting many leaders and platforms (i.e. government units, nonprofits, businesses, etc.). If a product or a new initiative emerges, ancillary tools like the Choice Map and the SWOT framework are always there to design and answer specifics in the StatGen Strategy Statement Development model as to How Might We? and truly doing new.
When combined the Center ofGravity and Strategy Statement Development models create the foundation for the report deliverable stage of a StratGen-client co-created initiative. The rest of SI 2 is there to go further and actually deliver future transformations on demand with more likely than not repeatable success.
In our municipalities, how are we thinking outside the box of America’s historical downside mainframes? All the heartbreaking and hopeful civilization phenomenon we see in the new happens in someone’s city, town, or county. Understanding American municipalities and seeking means and ways to do new now is high stakes. We aren’t externalizing social and environmental challenges when we establish resilience and then sustainability. Whether there’s other ESG practices involved or not, StratGen Solution Design surfaces Justice, Equity, Democracy Innovation, Wealth, and Wellness (JEDI-WW) with SI 2 Lab members and in co-created projects with clients and their stakeholders.
As we Maneuver, there can be blocks. With SI 2 we see the challenges, solutions, and outcomes more often and earlier than even more laborious ‘trial and error’ practices. The first European settlement in what is now the USA goes back to 1565. And municipalities got back further than that. It seems like Municipal Strategic Management would have some common perform standards by now.
Some may not like it when a group of leaders start talking about Maneuvering around our great challenges, solution, and outcomes. There may be interia — and a gravitational force field — that blocks attempts and maneuvering in new directions.
However, with SI 2 Dynamism we can collaboratively add new value in the face of our common challenges, solutions, and outcomes. We can escape the randomness of errors and poor strategy that works against the public good.
Vision:
StratGen dynamic advisory insight is based on a client transferable system affecting individuals, organizations, and municipalities for transmitting to resilience and then sustainability. The Intellectual Capital process of defining, achieving, and growing resilience and sustainability is central as much of the work is First-of-Kind. A mix of High Magnitude Value strategy and innovation practices and options is necessary. Along the lines of the Strategic Innovation process that continues to build the Apple ‘Think Different’ experience platform and supporting Human Ecosystem, StraGen SI 2 is an example of tools and space for General Managed Transformation and New Management Consulting.
A core reason for the StratGen existence is past participation in the Federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities during the Obama Administration. Why such an example of a Human Ecosystem would conclude is less important than making sure everything possible is being done to redesign and maintain as good a version of a Municipal-Municipal Partnership for Sustainable Communities as our individual and collective empathy, ethic, and genius allows.
Mission:
Make America Great… finally. StratGen moves Strategic Innovation into public good purpose versus pure profit. High Magnitude Truth = High Magnitude Value.
StratGen SI 2 = Sustainable Value Creation for a transforming world.
Values:
StratGen involves Multi Domain Leaders in becoming JEDI-WW (Justice, Equity, Democracy Innovation, Wealth, and Wellbeing) Leaders; in part by centering on empathy, an ethic, and as much individual and collective genius as possible.
StratGen is a for-profit and for-purpose consultancy; hence the .org in StratGen.org. A national impact 501c3 nonprofit is in development that parallels the StratGen mission to help leaders and the people they serve in shaping the future.
“If you want to be a great leader, be mindful and project the future.” – Steve Jobs
”Doing something spectacular that works requires a Strategic Innovation Mind.” – Grant Millin
Strategic Management + SI 2
Strategy is the art and science of formulating, achieving, and maintaining aims.
Innovation is the creation of new and renewing value.
Intellectual Capital is a term that seems to be coming back after a high point around the turn of the century (2000). Social Capital is a bit less popular, but that’s a shame as we need lots of social capital to get a majority heading close to the same direction on issues like the Anthropogenic Climate to Climate Protection Transition. Intellectual Capital is about relational, structural, and human factors. And Social Capital needs big ideas that work towards establishing resilience and then sustainability. Some Dutch thinkers wrote about this relationship several years ago.
In an excellent 2020 Harvard Business Review article the authors detail how ‘squircles’ make iPhones special. The corners are rounded; but also with clear ‘squarish’ angles. I used an HTC smartphone and a Palm pilot before getting an iPhone. It’s the mobile platform of a small computer and phone that forms the utility of a smartphone. If you own a Mac desktop computer you want a compatible smartphone.
The HBR article How Apple is Organized for Innovation might be one analogy to a manual on Municipal Strategic Innovation. Given all the challenges, solutions, and outcomes facing us where we live — here in Our Municipalities — one would think there’s more roadmapping as to deal with all better and upgrade how Strategic Management works for municipal self-governing. I for one don’t need to think of running our municipalities exactly like a business. However, great innovation and strategy can come from adjacent analogies and unique combinations. So, the business world happens to be where Strategic Innovation took form… along with government examples like NASA and WW II.
Apple’s squircles are about details and qualities of any given initiative. Why bother adding just any new initiative unless it’s going to be excellent with knowing improvements and value to stakeholders over what was done similarly in the past?
In spite of, and more likely because of, all the Intellectual Capital behind American corporate strategy and innovation there is limited effort to define strategy and innovation when it comes to our municipalities. There’s a lot riding on the future of the places that are most valuable to us; where we live. So, why do municipalities from Asheville, NC to San Francisco and Los Angeles; to Chicago and New York City, all struggle to move from the current state of managing challenges, solutions, and outcomes to something we might call Municipal Performance.
There’s all kinds of data views, Top Ten lists, and attempts at ethical performance management like the Sustainable Development Goals and old world measures like life expectancy and GDP. But if US municipalities do poorly at a relatively ancient practice called strategic management, it’s hard to say where we’ll end up with the risk magnitude we are all incurring these days.
If you think there’s a good example of a practice standard that we all might agree about municipal performance that helps us all establish resilience and then sustainability, we need to create a platform to move on that. Waiting for our municipal leaders, let alone state and Federal leaders, to create that platform may take awhile.
The global, multibillion dollar management consulting firm McKinsey & Company has a history that predates the Great Depression. I have spent most of my life in the South and have had few opportunities to work for major corporations and management consulting firms. However, there’s a lot of information on strategy and innovation and few municipal leaders have access to platformed solutions that mix those two basics of civilization as Strategic Innovation.
McKinsey is a mixed bag as to the good, the bad, and the ugly of past American economic development options. One very good resource is McKinsey’s public information resources and frameworks like the Eight Essentials of Innovation. There’s no reason to restart the movement to run government like corporations and the relationship between management consulting and government needs reform. However, having a backwards view of municipal strategic management gives a Management Consulting for Public Good firm like StratGen many opportunities.
The SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — framework is familiar to many who have worked with past concepts of strategic planning. If we list all the SWOT possibilities for most US municipalities, we will see some common threads that need to be shared nationwide. The next step is a twist on something more current for Strategic Innovation purposes like the Eight Essentials of Innovation but that simplifies, combines, and identifies action: The StratGen Solution Design framework which features a Create, Spread, Accelerate, and Intercept (CSAI) phase after or in lieu of starting with SWOT.
StratGen involves Multi Domain Leaders and their stakeholders in shaping our future with empathy, an ethic, and genius. The tools and space of the StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform (SI 2) allow leaders to cope, coordinate, and maneuver as we all navigate to resilience — and then sustainably — within the High Magnitude Value places we all work, govern, and live in: our municipalities. StratGen is more than an initiative facilitation, strategic reports, or pure profit consulting firm. StratGen is Management Consulting for Public Good.
Solution Providers
About StratGen’s Strategy Innovator and CEO
Grant Millin is a Strategy Innovator and StratGen CEO. StratGen is Solution Design Consulting and Strategic Innovation Services.
Grant has masters’ degrees in project management and entrepreneurship, and completed several MBA courses. Grant has developed Solution Design, a Front End of Innovation practice as one component of the StratGen Strategic Innovation practice His research areas include developing existing technology suitable for team knowledge management, project management, innovation, and strategy (i.e. Solution Design and Strategic Innovation Platforms).
He has a BA Interdisciplinary Studies, Independent Degree in Sustainability and Security Studies. Grant’s approach to climate change comes from deep learning in strategy, innovation, and communications issues behind Anthropogenic Climate and the opposing force of coordinated climate protection.
Grant has a Charrette System Certificate from the National Charrette Institute and has personally participated in dozens of workshops and trainings. Grant has several FEMA Continuity of Operations certificates and developed a municipal agency Continuity of Operations plan. Continuity of Operations relates to resiliency from human and natural negative events, i.e. what to do in the face of Anthropogenic Climate.
Grant was the North Carolina project manager for the historic Hydrogen Road Tour which involved the DOE, EPA, and DOT as well as many of the world’s auto manufacturers. He produced and was on the panel of the Smart Grid and Hydrogen Economies symposium at Duke University. Grant initiated the Swannanoa Superfund Community Advisory Group. Grant is a GroWNC consortium member. GroWNC was the Western North Carolina program for the Federal Sustainable Communities Initiative that included HUD and the EPA.
Grant also has an extensive multimedia background including publishing 100+ commentaries and letters to the editor, motion picture production experience, and has appeared in the news as a subject in many cases. Earth Lab 2 and Center of Progress are just two programs of several within a national impact nonprofit Grant is developing.
Grant’s Education
Master of Entrepreneurship
Master of Entrepreneurship
Master of Project Management
Multiple MBA courses including:
Leadership and Strategy, Organizational Behavior, Information Technology, and Managing R&D Activities
Contact Grant to schedule a StratGen event and your Strategic Innovation roadmap: grant@stratgen.org.
Connect with my LinkedIn profile.
“This is it. There’s no working group coming to the rescue. There’s no one else hidden on some other floor. There is just us.”
– CIA executive in the film Zero Dark Thirty