Strategic Thinking, Strategic Management, and Co-Creation

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 with the 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 […]”

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