Sustainable America Engine

This flow of news — good, bad, and ugly; everyone’s ideas about what to do about how these many issues shape our national challenge agenda; the resulting solutions… or no action… the ability to track all of it… it isn’t for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to monitor and respond to.

Humans are still in charge of the future. So, instead of another innovation ecosystem; StratGen offers a Human Ecosystem.

With that, StratGen allies will notice a lot of visuals. Recently a team of researchers generated a good study on ‘visual strategy’. Models act as heuristics to convey more complex ideas that might require significant time and prose narrative otherwise. When it comes to strategy, innovation, and risk dynamics, StratGen is about ‘art and science’ combinations. Combinations is a very basic way of innovating; but the strategy and risk components drive efficiency and arrival at desired outcomes sooner rather than later via routes like mere serendipity and accident.

The sustainability oriented visual of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals is fairly well known; and those are hardly irrelevant goals. But a ‘game change’ dynamism is needed to link up and process sustainability targets; where we live: in Our Municipalities. We can cover the University of Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook model as well where human behavior is emphasized.

The Sustainable America Engine is needed to augment and often times mostly replace what we think our municipal engines of growth are. For example, tourism is an economic engine ready for remodel. Transnational Organized Crime needs to be replaced.

At this point the Sustainable America Engine is about the vision aspect of strategy at present in some ways. In others, we have substantive Sustainable America Engine components and numbers of advocates in place. StratGen refers to these leaders as Strategy Innovators. The essential StratGen work is to make the relationship between sustainability and then strategy, innovation, and risk more accessible to more Americans; starting with the leaders in a range of domains who deal with our major issues and challenges.

The need for a written Sustainable America Agenda is there. But there are a lot of sustainability oriented agendas. The reports, news items, academic studies, and new ventures in various domains from business to nonprofits, government, public health, education, and others concerning sustainability at this point in history are often valuable. Coordinating around; coping with; and maneuvering to the next level of performance in context to the wealth and risks involving sustainability inputs, processes, and outputs is the SI 2 domain.

Thermodynamics is about inputs, processes, and outputs like an energy source, an engine, and a work or performance Delta (change) factor.

The symbol Delta is about change in macroscopic, or visible large-scale, issues. Our sustainability issues have observable outputs; but a lot of the human factors can be less than transparent… or easily altered.

The 2024 change to ‘Chevron deference’ by the Supreme Court of the United States is one with a large-scale, or high magnitude, impact. The resulting issues, challenges, and outcomes are difficult to qualify and quantify for most Americans… even those in leadership roles.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) provides an interesting example of rethinking ‘municipal engines’. The BCG Cities of Choice reports are good examples of in-depth municipal performance analysis; and Wallet Hub does a variety of municipal performance rankings. The municipal strategy game is high stakes and a Sustainable America Engine is worth persuing . The StratGen home page is partly the start of a report on this TBD subject matter; however StratGen is open for business and so is the SI 2 Lab.

An adversely altered climate that doesn’t just switch back to ‘Normal’ mode like pressing a button on some human crafted technology. A governing system that doesn’t have an ‘Auto Sustainability Mode’ where we all agree on what sustainability is. Those are a couple of challenges about the current state of affairs. And in spite of more municipal governments using strategic management software, there is no ’State of the Art Strategic Management Mode’ where predicable, High Magnitude Value — the goes beyond mere returns to shareholders and conventional GDP metrics — on the other end of the inputs, processes, and outputs of a needed Sustainable America Engine. Some people are averse to ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) strategy as is.

Issues encompass: 1) Topics 2) Dialogue, plans, and reports about the topics. 3) Outcomes after: a. taking any action; b. the wrong / ineffectual action; or, c. no action, connected to any given sustainability topic.

Municipal Success Strategy: Drilling Down while Zooming Out

The issue of urban density and growth was recently analyzed in a Lancet study that concludes: “green low density cities [have] significantly lower mortality rates when compared with all other urban configuration types.” We may develop more densely; but will there be a way to develop sustainably? Conversely, a recent Pew survey shows the ‘Green America’ movement is losing some steam as well.

The challenge to any given issue is the StratGen difference to the eternal entrepreneurial prompt or ‘challenge’ of “What problem are you solving for what market?” A challenge relates to what an individual, team, or group can do well — or who can be called in with any given specialization and/or resource if not — to address one or many issues. Then solutions are more available with a centered, ‘zen’ mindset and process platform… instead of too much crisis at once; or just embracing trends like AI with no limits.

A couple of articles by consultants for one of the major management consulting firms, Bain, covers their ‘Engine 2’ approach to Strategic Innovation in the original Bain article from 2020 and a more recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article. With some modification the HBR has some universal Strategic Innovation concepts useful for more public good purposes such as Municipal Strategic Management. So, the new ‘engine of growth’ idea is not new and is something leaders end up heading towards or noticing through events at the time throughout history.

The above macro global historical events in the Bain Turbulence Index are noteworthy. What our municipalities need today is a more relevant to daily events index; and then gives a past-future context and impacts big picture. This ‘read out’ on what’s effecting our municipalities is not especially available as of yet. Of course each local government is already doing a lot with strategic management and connected approaches like comprehensive development.

The Disruption Nexus is a recent article from Roman Krznaricis, a social philosopher and author of History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. You’ll see an interesting model in his article that is worthwhile. However, the SI 2 Lab supports America’s sustainability ideas marketplace and SI 2 is the engine his ideas and those of others need as to a platform for public good. When it comes to serendipity and accident I came across Roman’s work within a day of creating the above Sustainable America Engine model.

Good news: There are a number of leaders looking for something like a Sustainable America Engine. It is up to those American leaders; at least as to whatever being responsible Americans means these days. Many times the tools and techniques that can be applied to strategy design for our municipalities are trapped in a ‘corporate only’ context; and need an injection of sustainability oriented Strategic Innovation.

To simplify the initial state of any issue or set of issues rating deeper treatment, the Sphere of Influence Model aids in adjusting to the new approach to Strategic Thinking and Strategic Management for municipal success: The StratGen Strategic Innovation 2.0 Platform (SI 2).