Open Source Economic Development: 6

by Ed Morrison.
Last Updated by Ed Morrison.

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Building an open civic process: Strategic doing

Most of us are familiar with an electoral process, in which citizens turn to the ballot box to make decisions. Some of us can understand an administrative process, as when a homeowner seeks to get a building permit to add a new addition on to her house. And we learn about a legislative process when we visit our city council as it deliberates a new ordinance. Finally, most of us have gotten a brief introduction to the judicial process when we have to pay a speeding ticket.
A civic process is something different. It is far more open and flexible. In fact, there are generally no rules to civic process, unless we impose them on ourselves. In many communities, it's hard to find any effective civic process. There are no places where people come together routinely to discuss issues of common concern, like building a new community center or improving our schools.

As we move our communities and regions to the Second Curve economy, we will need more vibrant, flexible and focused civic processes. We will need new ways of coming together to explore complex issues. We will need new places where we can routinely convene to explore new opportunities. We will rely on trusted conveners to help us.

Equally important, we will need to turn away from bad habits of civic behavior. We will need to instill a new sense of civility in our discussions. We need to define and reinforce new patterns of interacting among citizens.

Our speed in moving our communities and regions to the Second Curve economy will be determined by new civic conversations that can generate practical collaborations. Moving any economy forward will require hundreds of new collaborations, as we connect First Curve assets to Second Curve opportunities.

We will need new networks, yet building these networks should not be haphazard. It involves teaching and learning new disciplines of authentic civic engagement. We need to build habits of exploring each other's strengths, identifying opportunities, focusing on practical outcomes, aligning our resources, and measuring our results. We need then to start the cycle over again informed with our new learning about what works.

In short, we need to move from concepts of strategic planning to strategic doing. Strategic planning is a practice mastered by successful First Curve organizations. It works well in situations in which changes relatively slow and predictable. We know we are standing at point A, and we know we want to get to point B. We develop a strategic plan to draw logical links between A and B. Typically, a small number of people drafted the plan for others to follow.

But what if A is moving and B is moving? What if there is a fog that obscures our view we try to find point B? This is a situation we most commonly find in organizations on the Second Curve. The disciplined process of strategic planning becomes less valuable in an environment that is continuously shifting. Strategic plans rapidly become obsolete.

Formal strategic planning in the civic space faces other difficulties. A strategic plan presumes a command-and-control organization in which plans, once decided, can be quickly executed. But economic development and building our prosperous communities happens in the civic space, and there are no effective command-and-control mechanisms in the civic space. The mayor cannot tell the school board what to do. The school board cannot tell the chamber president what to do. And the chamber president cannot tell the superintendent what to do.

So, we need new approaches to generate strategic insights and consensus. We need these insights to focus our resources and make choices. We cannot do everything. Strategic doing emphasizes the importance of generating the strategic insights and translating these ideas into action quickly.

All of this happens through meaningful conversation. In the command-and-control world of the First Curve, conversation is regarded largely as a distraction. It undercuts productivity and takes people away from the work that they should be doing. First Curve leaders often think of conversation as “just talk.”

On the Second Curve, conversation plays a much more central role. Through conversation, we make sense of what is happening. The complexity of the change defies easy understanding. We need different perspectives on complex problems, and we need to assemble these perspectives into a understandable whole as quickly as we can. We need to test our assumptions and make adjustments. We have no way to ask the world to slow down or stop while we engage in a deliberate and lengthy strategic planning process.

Instead, we need to adapt to a far more flexible approach to making strategic decisions. We call this new approach “strategic doing.”

Strategic doing starts with an exploration of potential strengths and opportunities to collaborate. We generate ideas. We brainstorm.

Quickly, though, we need to move onto the next step, which involves focusing on a small number of practical but truly transformative initiatives. These are the strategic initiatives that can generate significantly more prosperity for our region. As a practical matter, we need to focus on one or two initiatives on which we can work together. We need to dive deeply into the details of these ideas, so that we can get a clear understanding of what a potential collaboration could look like. We need to agree on an answer to the question, “What does success look like?”

Once we have defined an initiative with sufficient clarity to excite people, we need to move toward execution. This step involves aligning the resources we need, setting some milestones, and drafting an action plan of “Who does what by when?” Once we begin implementation, we need to stay in constant communication with each other as we move forward.

We need to evaluate what is working and where we are getting off course.

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