Episode 31: Complex Problems and the Clarity that Solves Them

A conversation with Ed Morrison, Director of the Agile Strategy Lab at the University of North Alabama and author of Strategic Doing

This article was originally published on voltagecontrol.com

“Developing a model around strategic conversation, which answers two critical questions of strategy, where are we going? And how will we get there? And constantly focusing on those two questions and understanding that. Within about 10 years, I learned that there was an underlying structure to these conversations. That there’s an underlying predictable structure to the conversations. They’re first divergent, then they’re convergent, and then they’re recurrent. They’re iterative. And so, if you understand that there’s an underlying structure to it, as a leader, if you understand that, then you can design and guide these conversations by asking questions.”

Ed Morrison is the Director of the Agile Strategy Lab at North Alabama University and the author of Strategic Doing. His years of experience with international and domestic problem-solving at the intersection of rapidly shifting technological landscapes, endow him with a sharp mind and a dynamic worldview.

In this episode of Control the Room, I speak with Ed about team-based communication models, Strategic Doing, and transformative thinking for hopeless, uncertain futures. Listen in to hear Ed guide us through the questions, processes, and frameworks that will help in making the most of complex environments.

Show Highlights

[1:25] Ed’s Career

[4:53] How Strategic Conversation Revitalizes Ecosystems

[13:40] The Process of Strategic Doing

[17:31] Collaborative Assets

[24:36] Facilitator vs. Guide

Links | Resources

Ed’s LinkedIn

Strategic Doing

About the Guest

Ed Morrison, Director of the Agile Strategy Lab at the University of North Alabama, joins us on the show today. Ed’s time spent tackling complex problems across a multitude of fields in the past 40 years have accumulated into a flexible, forward thinking mind that courageously lays the groundwork for innovative new systems in otherwise uncharted markets.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web

Contact Voltage Control

Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out. All in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Ed Morrison, director of the Agile Strategy Lab at the University of North Alabama. Over the past two decades of research and practice, he has developed an open source model for strategy, specifically designed for networks and complex collaborations. He is the co-author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership. Welcome to the show, Ed.

Ed Morrison:

Oh, thank you very much. I’m really happy to be here. I appreciate the invitation.

Douglas:

I’m thrilled to have you because it’s not been that long since I heard about Strategic Doing, I’m not even sure how I missed it, but my friend, Greg Satell, turned me on to you. And when we were working on some cascades workshops and… Greg was like, “How do you not know Ed’s work?” Based on this stuff I’ve been doing and how I think about the world. And so, once I looked into it, I was like, “Oh man, I got to get Ed on the show and talk about this stuff.” So, before we get into Strategic Doing, let’s start off with a little bit about how you got your start in this work, how you found passion in it.

Ed Morrison:

Yeah. So, I initially thought I would be a professional on Capitol Hill, that’s how I started out my career in the seventies, working on really complex challenges like the first oil embargo and trying to move us away from oil and into renewables. And globalization was also a big factor back then. So, I was really focused on those kinds of issues. I went to graduate school with the intent of going back to Washington. Early eighties, I did that, but I left, primarily because what was happening was really a breakdown of governance. So, there were a lot of… People weren’t focused on problem solving much, they were really focused on partisanship and electioneering and that kind of thing. So, I went off and did some work in a corporate strategy consulting firm, an offshoot of the Boston Consulting Group, focused on really globalization issues, how the company is globalized, worked with General Electric and Ford and Volvo.

Ed Morrison:

Primarily, this was a boutique firm. And what we were leaving behind was, we were moving a lot of manufacturing out of the U.S. This was again, the early 1980s, early to mid 1980s. And nobody was really telling people, “Hey, this isn’t a business cycle, folks. This is a big shift. We’re moving stuff out and leaving communities behind.” And nobody was really addressing this. So, I decided that with the premise that I could apply strategic planning models to the problems of communities and regions, that I would start working there. And I did that for about 10 years, but then I gave up on the idea of strategic planning, because it really doesn’t work, especially in these really complex environments where nobody can tell anybody what to do. 1993, I’m in Singapore, working with an early internet startup company, the chief technology officer was a physicist.

Ed Morrison:

We had lunch, and I’ve explained my frustration with strategic planning, and he said, “Look, you ought to study open source software development.” And I didn’t know anything about that. And I said, “Well, why do you say that?” And he said, “Well, they do complex work in open networks when nobody can tell anybody what to do. So, if you can figure out how open source software works, maybe that might be a path forward.” And the other thing he said to me was… This is a year before Netscape released its browser, he said, “The Internet is coming, and it’s going to change everything. We don’t know how, but it’s going to change everything.” And I said, “But why do you say that?” And he said, “Because it’s our first interactive mass medium. We don’t really know what that means. What you’re going to see first is you’re going to start to see movies on the internet.”

Ed Morrison:

And I said, “Well, why do you say that?” And he said, “Well, because every time there’s a bang and a big shift in communications technology, the first thing that they do is they take the content from the old technology and they move it on to the new technology. So, they moved Vaudeville onto radio, they moved radio shows on to television, right?” And so, he said, “You’re going to start to see… But don’t get lulled into that. Recognize that this is changing the way in which we do work. So, in 1993, I started out with a clean sheet of paper. I said, “I’m going to try to come up with a complex strategy within open networks, and understand how to do that using the principles of open source software development.” So, we started out, Oklahoma City, at the time, had suffered from an oil collapse, a banking collapse.

Ed Morrison:

There was one downtown hotel in Oklahoma City, this is a capital of Oklahoma. And I often was the only person in the one downtown hotel. I mean, it was pretty bleak. But fast forward through the bombing, seven years later, Oklahoma City starts showing real signs of life. And if you go to Oklahoma City Now, it’s just a vibrant ecosystem. And so, how did we do that? How did that happen? Well, it turns out that when you start doing strategy in open networks, and where you can’t… Again, you can’t tell anybody what to do. There’s no… And you’re dealing with really complex problems. What you have to focus on is the conversation, how you design and guide that conversation becomes critical to moving ideas into action. And so, developing a model around strategic conversation, which answers two critical questions of strategy, where are we going? And how will we get there? And constantly focusing on those two questions and understanding that.

Ed Morrison:

Within about 10 years, I learned that there was an underlying structure to these conversations. That there’s an underlying predictable structure to the conversations. They’re first divergent, then they’re convergent, and then they’re recurrent. They’re iterative. And so, if you understand that there’s an underlying structure to it, as a leader, if you understand that, then you can design and guide these conversations by asking questions. So, about 2001… Well, 1996, there was a really good article written in the California Management Review. This article, in 1996, in the California Management Review, really focused on Jean Litkey, who’s now at The Darden School, and she focused on the idea of strategic conversations. Then you had another stream of research that was coming out of… Really coming out of Stanford, Kathleen Eisenhardt, who is really looking at how companies address really turbulent environments, complex, turbulent environments, and the whole notion of dynamic capabilities. The idea that you really have to have these dynamic capabilities, and the question of what are those dynamic capabilities.

Ed Morrison:

She decided that… She started to look at dynamic capabilities as a capability to develop these heuristics or simple rules to manage this complexity. Then there’s a third really important line of research that came out from Harvard, Amy Edmondson, around psychological safety. So, these three things, these three big streams of research, plus the reflective practice that I was doing, led me to a model. I went to Purdue in 2005 and spent about 15 years there, running test bets, trying to figure out, “Okay, is this model going to work? Does it work in all sorts of different environments? How do we teach the model?” All of those questions are not trivial. They’re hard to answer, but by 2019, we pretty much answered all these questions. And then we decided to write the book. So, we didn’t want to write the book until we were pretty clear that we could actually, well, that this model was, in a sense, robust, or could work across a lot of different dimensions. Everything from paneling the Flint water crisis to managing life sciences collaborations in NASA. You have to have the same model, you can’t really adjust it too much. You have to have a structure that’s stable, right? And so, we found out that, that’s the case, and we found the 10 rules that drive that model, and now we teach that, and we teach it all over the world. And over the last three or four years, we’ve learned that the model is cross-cultural, we teach in a Dutch now, and we teach it in Spanish. And so, it’s been a great journey. And as I was saying earlier, in the setup to the show, I mean, I just finished a PhD dissertation on it. So, it’s my gift to the next generation, of saying, “Okay, well, here’s what I learned over the last 25 years, now build off of that.”

Douglas:

Yeah. Congrats on completing that.

Ed Morrison:

Yeah, it was a colleague of mine in Australia, convinced me to do it. It took me a couple of beers and an Indian meal. But yeah, it was good. It was an excellent experience, it really was, because it caused me to reflect on everything I’ve learned over the last 25 years.

Douglas:

So, I have a few questions based on what I heard there. I want to start off with the experiments you were doing at Purdue. Do you remember a time or a story when you had a model or a version of a model, and you were like, “Oh, this is it.” And then when you tested it, it just… It didn’t work? And maybe, what was something that you learned from that experience?

Ed Morrison:

Yeah. That’s a really good quote. When do you know that you have enough, right? So, when do you know that you’ve learned enough? Actually, Kathleen Eisenhardt has a really great sense about this, around… You’re constantly moving up into these horizons, right? And at some point, you’ve got to say, “Okay, I’ve learned enough and I can move on from here.” And I think one of the challenges you have is, constantly iterating off of the… You can’t own any of it. You have to constantly iterate and you could say, “Oh, that didn’t work.” That language didn’t work, or that con that drawing didn’t work, and you have to ask yourself why. So, this is all part of the discipline of reflective practice, of figuring out why didn’t that work? What could I do the next time? How do I learn from this experience?

Ed Morrison:

And so, that’s a continuous process that’s embedded in Strategic Doing, the model is not done. I mean, it’s never going to be done. It’s going to… It’s just good enough now that we can share it more widely and we can teach people, with some level of assurance that this thing works, but it’s not done. It’s going to continuously evolve, and we continuously evolve on how we teach it. In our Strategic Doing network, we revise the curriculum, we’re… So, you can’t own any of it, in a sense. I mean, you’ve got to be willing to listen to criticism and say, “Okay, well, I thought that was my beautiful idea, but okay. Maybe it’s not such a great idea after all.” And so, owning it enough to push it forward, but not owning it enough that you’re grasping onto it when it’s going out the window, so you don’t go out the window with it. But I think there’s another experience, and maybe you’ve had it, which is even cooler, which is, sort of, when you know you’ve solved the problem.

Douglas:

You have your eureka moment.

Ed Morrison:

Yeah. You just like, “Oh my gosh.” And so, one of the eureka moments that we had, and I tell people about it at a lot of times, is that same week I was talking to a woman in Flint, who’s a leader in the neighborhoods, the black neighborhoods of North Flint, ravaged by a lot of things, but youth violence is what she was focused on, teenage homicides. And we were talking about her strategy, and then a day later, I’m talking to a defense systems architect at a large defense contractor about condition-based maintenance across the GS destroyer fleet. How do we deploy that? How do we develop a roadmap around that? So, very complex problems, right? And we’re talking about the same model. We’re talking about pathfinder projects, we’re talking about 30–30s, we’re talking about linking and leveraging assets. It’s the same methodology applied across two really, really complex problems. So, when I reflected on those two conversations, I said, “Okay, now it’s time to write the book, because this will work.” Yeah. We’ve been able to teach it to people.

Douglas:

So, you mention the need to guide the conversation by asking questions. And so, I think many of our listeners are fascinated by questions, and we often talk about questions being in the Swiss army knife of facilitators. And so, I’m curious, what are some questions that align well with Strategic Doing, or maybe just some that are just some of your favorites to use when you’re doing this work?

Ed Morrison:

Yeah. So, Strategic Doing, again, presumes that we’ve got a group of people who want to do something together, right? And so, the first question that we focus on is, what’s the framing question? What’s bringing us together? What’s the nature of the watering hole? So, it’s not… We don’t announce in our workshops. We don’t announce, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to do. We need your input.” What we do is pose a question, pose a framing question, and this is as much art as science. And if your listeners are familiar with appreciative inquiry, it’s very close to the idea of appreciative inquiry. I spent two years at Case Western Reserve University, at the business school, with David Cooperrider. And so, there’s a… Strategic Doing is a close cousin, I would say, of appreciative inquiry. But that’s the first question, sort of framing… Getting a question that starts to get people to imagine, in their own mind, a design for a future that they can’t quite see yet.

Ed Morrison:

And what that does, psychologists call this prospection, but what that does is, it starts people imagining a future, and the whole conversation, the way in which to engage people into action is through that process of visualization. So, it’s not really writing a vision statement, that’s not going to do it. What’s going to do it is asking a question that prompts people to start to visualize a future that they would like to see, because what you’re doing in the Strategic Doing conversation is, you’re getting them to articulate that in more clarity. It’s an implicit piece of knowledge. It’s something that they see in their head, but they’ve probably never expressed it, or maybe they have, but they’ve only expressed it in terms of a bumper sticker. And that’s not enough clarity for us to work with.

Ed Morrison:

We really have to say, “Okay, what are people going to see, feel and do? How’s life going to be different?” For your kids, your grandkids, or whoever, tell us more about this, and get into a deeper conversation. And I would say that the… One of the surprising factors of Strategic Doing versus the work I used to do in strategic planning is the shift in presumption. The shift in presumption, by that, I mean that in strategic planning, we think that if we broaden out the conversation, if we get high enough level of abstraction, we’ll get a vision that everybody can buy into, and then we can align ourselves toward that vision and we’ll be fine. So, this is the process of vision statements, right? Getting higher and higher levels of abstraction really. And what we learned in Strategic Doing is, no, no, that’s the wrong way to do this. What you need to do is drive the conversation into deeper levels of detail.

Ed Morrison:

And what you find is the commonality in the deeper level of conversation. And so, this is why, when you say questions are the Swiss army knife, absolutely they are. When we train our table guides in Strategic Doing, we train them around these questions. And there are four basic questions that guide a conversation in Strategic Doing. Remember, we’re trying to answer these two questions, where are we going? How will we get there? The first two questions of Strategic Doing is, “Okay, well, what could we do? What could we do?” And here, we’re inviting people to answer with specific assets, knowledge, that they have, that could help us answer this framing question. So, in Flint, what would it look like if every child could walk home from school, free from the fear of violence? What would that look like? What would our churches be doing? What would our schools be doing? What’s the… That’s the future we want to design. So, what would that look like? Tell us how that works.

Ed Morrison:

And we start with, what could we do, and we start thinking about what are the assets that we have, we already have, right in our hands, and what could we do with those assets? Well, most people, when they sit around a table, they don’t know beans about the person next to them. They don’t know what their assets are, who they know, what their experiences are, any of that stuff. So, you start revealing some assets that might be helpful, that they’re willing to share. That these are assets they’re willing to share. And then we start in a process called recombinant innovation, or you can call it… It’s a same kind of thing as improvisational thinking, right? So, you’re taking something and you’re putting it together. And so, we tell people in these conversations, bring a brick, don’t bring a cathedral.

Ed Morrison:

In other words, bring your asset, don’t tell us what the solution is. We’re going to design our own solution here. So, bring a brick, don’t bring a cathedral. And we ask them, “Okay, well, if we combine this asset with this asset, what do we get?” So, here’s an example, up in Maine, one time, when I was doing one of these workshops, we had the head of a public library system and we had the head of the workforce system, and they’d never met. And the workforce system had a lot of online training, and the library system had, well, libraries, all over the State. So, if you’ve just put those two assets together, all of a sudden, you’ve got a whole new distribution channel for workforce training, right? So, you can start to see how you can combine assets in new and different ways, to create new opportunities.

Ed Morrison:

Then you have to ask yourself, what should we do? Of all the things we could do, what should we do? Well, I mean, we have to make a choice, we can’t do everything. And what we focus on is what we call the big easy, which is, well, let’s focus on doing the big idea. That’s relatively easy to do, and this goes back to my consulting career when I used to tell people, “The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to stick the shower curtain on the inside of the bathtub, because we’re doing a lot of stupid stuff, and one of the things we’re going to do is stop doing stupid stuff.” And so, the idea of the big easy is the idea that there are big ideas, in other words, they could have big impacts, that are going to be relatively easy to do. So, what are those? Well, when we answer those two questions, what could we do? What should we do? We have an outcome, where are we going to go? What’s the outcome.

Ed Morrison:

Then we have to ask ourselves, “Well, how are we going to get there?” So, we ask ourselves, “What will we do? What will we do?” And this involves developing what we call a pathfinder project. A project, not big, 60, 90, 120 days, something to go forward on, that we can start to experiment. The pathfinder will help us figure out some of the assumptions we’ve made, whether those assumptions are right or… But the more important part of, what will we do is, coming down and even shrinking the timeframe from, say 90 days or 60 days, to the next 30 days. And we ask ourselves, “Okay, everybody around the table, what’s one thing you could do over the next 30 days to move the pathfinder forward?” And everybody’s busy, and everybody comes into these… Well, not everybody, but a lot of people come into these workshops. “I’m going to give you my thinking, but hey, somebody else is going to do this. I’m not going to do this.” So, that’s a bad dynamic.

Ed Morrison:

So, especially in a network, it doesn’t work. So, what you end up doing is taking a small step, and you think, “Oh, well, that’s kind of trivial.” But some really good research, both here in the U.S. and over in the Netherlands, in my own experience with transforming economies and companies and things, involves the fact that all big transformations are just a series of small wins. They’re just small wins. And you link and leverage these things, you align these small wins. And as you do that, the transformation happens over time. And so, when you think of any huge strategy, whatever big strategy you have, it’s really a series of small projects. So, you got to just keep on… Focus on, “Okay, what are we going to do over the next 30 days? What’s our next 30 days?” And getting everybody engaged, and making public transparent commitments, because you have to build trust across the network.

Ed Morrison:

So, everybody has to be engaged. And to do that, you line up your words with your deeds. I mean, we know this, right? So, this is a very important part of Strategic Doing. And then the last question is, what’s our 30–30? Now, this is a question that came out of our work in Oklahoma City, where six of us started this process of transforming the business side of Oklahoma City, the business led strategies of Oklahoma City. And we had a 30–30 meeting, and every 30… It was seven o’clock in the morning, and every 30 days, we would review, what did we learn the last 30 days? What are we going to do the next 30 days? And it’s that rigor that enables you to continuously adapt your strategies, figure out what’s working, what’s not working, throw away the stuff that’s not.

Ed Morrison:

And so, it turns out that Strategic Doing is a far better way to manage risk in a complex environment, because essentially what you’re doing is, you’re making 30-day time buckets, and you’re… Now we have groups that do 90–90s, 60–60s, 120–120s. When you’re facing a really turbulent environment, or you got to get stuff going, 7–7s, every seven days you meet. But it’s a rigorous meeting where it’s not a reporting on everything you did, because that’s up on the web and you can read it, or it’s in a document in our strategic action plan, you can read it. But what are we really learning? What are we really learning over the last 30 days? And based on what we’ve learned, what are we going to do next?

Ed Morrison:

So, it’s really embedding this concept of double-loop learning, which you may have heard about, but Chris Argyris came up with this. And one of the problems of designing learning organizations, I’m convinced is, it’s really hard for organizations and managers to embed this really simple, but not easy discipline of double-loop learning. And that’s really what the 30–30 is all about. And so, those are the four questions. The first two questions give us an outcome, the second two questions give us a pathway. So, in a period of about three hours, you can develop a pretty sophisticated strategic action plan.

Douglas:

Yeah. This resonates deeply. I’m curious how you facilitate the 30–30. What are some of the key ways to ensure that, that doesn’t just turn into a status report, and we’re actually diving deeply, like you say?

Ed Morrison:

Yeah. So, as we designed Strategic Doing, we actually moved away from the term, facilitation. And I want to encourage the listeners, or people who think of themselves as facilitators, to listen to this carefully, because I think it does mean that you have more gifts to give than you probably are giving, under the work that you’re doing. And let me explain this. So, facilitation as a profession, as I understand it, I’m not a trained facilitator, so I don’t know, but from my research, really, kind of, came out popular in the sixties, started in the sixties when multi-divisional corporations were addressing the challenges, how do I get these two organizations that I’m managing to talk to one another? And so, the role of the facilitator was to structure that conversation, but the facilitators themselves were neutral in the conversation.

Ed Morrison:

No content involved in the conversation. Just to make sure that the elements of the conversation are well-designed and well executed, very important. But we rejected that idea, and the reason we rejected it is, we said, “Look, we’re actually dealing with really complex challenges that nobody’s ever dealt with before.” And so, the metaphor of the guide is probably a better metaphor than a facilitator. And actually, that legitimizes the person at the table, which we call the table guide, instead of a facilitator, we call them a table. And we say, “You have a lot of expertise, that if you would share it with people, you could probably help the conversation along.”

Ed Morrison:

And so, the metaphor is really more of a river guide or a mountain guide. And the notion that you’re in the raft with people, and yes, sometimes you have to lead from behind, sometimes you have to lead from the front. But you have a legitimate role to play, you are in. You are in the raft with everybody, or you’re on the trail with everybody. And so, if you look at the origin of term “guide”, it really goes back to the grand tours of Europe in the 18th and 17th century, where the grand tours were done for these men coming out of… It was part of the part of their education. They would take these grand tours of Europe. But the whole notion was that the guide is actually transformed on the tour as well. So, this whole notion of a guide is, you’re in a complex environment. Nobody really knows where we’re going, nobody really knows what we’re doing.

Ed Morrison:

And so, while facilitation works on a technical problem, where can’t… You’ve got to get marketing and finance to talk to one another over a problem that clearly has an answer to it, and they’re just not talking, facilitation works in that environment. But in the environment in which we’re talking about complex adaptive problems that we’ve never addressed before, like how do we deploy condition-based maintenance across the GS destroyer fleet? Well, nobody has ever done that. Nobody knows how to do that. So, okay, we got to climb this mountain. And the value of the facilitator/table guide there is, “Okay, nobody has climbed this mountain, but the table guide has climbed a lot of mountains. And so, if you’re going to guide that conversation, why don’t you rely on a trained table guide?” So, the distinction I would make is, if you’re dealing with technical problems, adaptive problems, lean issues, where you’ve got root cause, you’ve got a clear… But people aren’t communicating? Yeah, you need to facilitate communication across those boundaries, right?

Ed Morrison:

But if we’re in a boat and we’re going down a river that nobody’s gone down a river before, you need a guide, and the guide has to have enough trust and legitimacy in the group to say… Step up and say, “If we go that way, we’re going to flip the raft. That’s not going to work. You got to go this way. You should go this way.” And too often, I’ve seen people in the group say, “Well, wait a second, you’re just a facilitator, you don’t have any… You shouldn’t be putting yourself into the conversation like that.” Well, in complex environments, yes, you should, because you’ve been witnessing a lot of complex environments and a lot of complex… And you have a lot of insight into people and how they… Some people are expressive and some people aren’t, and some people try to dominate and some people don’t, all of that. And so, we try to legitimize a more active role by calling it a table guide.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’ve found that it depends on the discipline in the, I would say the framework, that folks are using. And I would agree more conversational facilitation, definitely. You hit the nail on the head there. When I think about the liberating structures community, that’s highly complexity informed, or even the art of gathering types of facilitation. So yeah, I think the sentiment resonates deeply because when I coach our facilitators, I tell them, “Look, we have to walk the tightrope between coaching and consulting. And so, there’s some things that… If you were to read some methodologies of facilitation, it says you should absolutely not intervene, and there’s some things we need to intervene on. Especially when we’re facilitating a process, we need to make sure that people understand, we’ve seen a mountain before, and we’re on a mountain.” You’re thinking about this in a way that I just want you to flip your thinking. So, that’s me injecting my expertise, but I don’t want to tell them what to do, because if I told them what to do, then I’m, kind of, getting in a bad territory.

Ed Morrison:

Exactly right. And that’s why the guide in a Strategic Doing process, they… We have a set of exercises to go through. I told you about the structure of the conversation. You have to go through these exercises. And the guide is really making clear what the sentiment of the group is moving forward, what the consensus is moving forward. If the guide comes in with a… As I said, bringing a cathedral instead of a brick, that’s no good. That will disrupt the process. And so, we have to train our folks to do that. But again, we chose, in Strategic Doing, to think about guiding a river or a raft down a river or a boat. And so, the metaphor of Strategic Doing is really, we’re on a journey together. We talk about pathfinder projects, and we have a trail map that helps people understand what the nature of the conversation they’re going through is. But make no mistake, the experiences, the skills of trained facilitators is critical to Strategic Doing. We just want them to be right as part of the conversation, we want them to be really fully engaged.

Douglas:

Makes sense. And so, we’re going to… Starting to round our time quickly, because I’m super fascinated about this stuff and I know we could just dig in deeper and deeper, but I want to start to wrap things up. Shift to more of a kind of… Thinking about today. And you were telling me, in the pre-show chat, how things have just really exploded during the pandemic. Lots of folks are realizing that there’s a lot of complexity and they’re not sure where to turn, and they’re finding Strategic Doing to be valuable or they’re thinking it could be. And so, as you’re noticing these things and these patterns that are emerging, what are you realizing? What do you think might be helpful for people to know, that they might not be seeing?

Ed Morrison:

Well, I think that our model of leadership is changing. By that, I mean, I think we’re moving more toward collective and shared leadership, and away from, kind of, hierarchical, heroic leadership. And what we’re finding in Strategic Doing is by identifying that actually the way in which leaders design and guide conversations is really critical to these organizations, because that’s how we generate and distribute knowledge. I mean, it’s just… So, the conversation is actually a fundamental tool that leaders have, but leadership is not positional as much, it can come from anywhere. And so, we’re starting to see 30-somethings, 40-something, people in the middle of the organization reaching out to us and saying, “Hey, the old way we’re doing this doesn’t work very well. Let’s… Is there a way we could start to experiment with something new?”

Ed Morrison:

And so, we’re starting to see that. We’re starting to see a lot of people reaching out. We’re starting to see a lot of people reaching out internationally, by the way in which we did this by, kind of, putting the book at the end and doing the documentation of the research in the back end, that we’ve reversed everything, right? So, if you’re an academic, you first do your PhD, then you’d write a popular book, then you go out on speaking tours. Now, what we want to do is train people. So, what we’ve been able to do is figure out, in the pandemic, how to move all this stuff online. We have tremendous support from the University of North Alabama in the college of business, who is a very, very fast, agile organization. So, when the pandemic hit, we got all of our content online in a matter of weeks.

Ed Morrison:

And we’re seeing, from that experience, that people can learn these skills online. And we do a simulation game. We do the simulation online. So, what we’re seeing right now is, kind of, a melting of old structures, and the formation of new structures. And these new structures are much more horizontal. They’re much more network. They’re much more loosely connected. But the important point is, they’re not chaotic. They have open participation and leadership guidance. And if you’re in a hierarchical thinking mode, those two things don’t go together. Leadership direction does not allow for open participation much. I mean, it’s… Yeah. But in network-based, you think about a core team and a porous boundary and you… Yeah. You can put these two things together pretty quickly. So, this new way of managing and focusing on conversations is really starting to take off. So, we’re excited about that.

Douglas:

Incredible. Well, to wrap up, maybe you could leave our listeners with a final thought.

Ed Morrison:

Yeah. The final thought, I would say is, if you’re interested in Strategic Doing, go on… We have an institute, it’s an open source, nonprofit Institute, Strategic Doing Institute, strategicdoing.net. Learn more about what we do, that we’ve got practitioners all over the world, and we’d love to connect with you and connect those practitioners, because again, we don’t know all the answers. We just have a promising path that we’ve been walking down, over the last 20 plus years. And we’d want you to join us on that journey because part of the challenge is, we don’t have enough ingenuity yet, to embrace these complex problems.

Ed Morrison:

And the way in which we’re going to generate more ingenuity is through collaboration, through experimentation, through continuous learning, that double-loop learning I was talking about. And as more and more practitioners become involved, they start to learn from each other. And essentially, that’s the process that we’ve built over the last 20 years, and we just want it to grow and expand. And so, the place to start is really going to strategicdoing.net. And of course, click on contact us. And if you’ve got an issue that you want to connect with us about, well, we’ll be happy to respond.

Douglas:

Fantastic. And I just want to say congratulations on finishing the PhD. And I would also say best of luck on the growth that you’re experiencing. And I know it’s exciting. And I think that’s a… To me, those are some of the most exciting and fun times.

Ed Morrison:

Yeah, it is exciting. And again, I encourage people to join our network. We’ve got a wonderful group of people who really are focused, not so much on fixing old problems, but designing what’s next.

Douglas:

Well, thanks for being on the show, Ed, and enjoy your day.

Ed Morrison:

Thank you.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Controlled The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.