Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership

This book is excellent! Strategic doing is great for large projects and small - great to speed through meetings while still making progress on the project! The program is wonderful and works, but if you can’t do that get this book!

A tool for strategic thinking and implementation. A worthwhile book for those who take strategy very seriously.

Whether you work with people in the public or private sector, if you need to accomplish things within diverse groups and competing interests, this book is for you. I’ve used Strategic Doing™ in numerous group settings and seen the powerful – and happy - responses from those who learn and put into practice these ten key skills. Strategic Doing™ is a discipline that builds trust within groups and quickly guides people toward productive, successful collaborations.This book is a long time in the making – a result of two decades of fieldwork and practice that is backed up by research and theory. In a complex world where loosely connected networks are the new norm for working together, Strategic Doing™ helps groups, both large and small, successfully answer the core questions of strategy: “Where are we going?" "How will we get there?”The book is a very enjoyable read whether you have just encountered the idea or you have used Strategic Doing™ principles previously. Each chapter has a wealth of clear information about a skill and a corresponding case study to illustrate its applicability. The authors guide you through the concepts with lots of examples to clarify important points.Strategic Doing, Ten Skills for Agile Leadership will introduce you to a new way of thinking, doing and creating collective leadership. The ten skills are best mastered over time and can be scaled for use in complex initiatives. At any scale, you will enjoy seeing how well this approach resonates with others when you start using these skills in developing and leading your projects.

I have a bad habit of ordering leadership or other "work" books with grand intentions of reading and learning from them, but I rarely finish them. Not the case with Strategic Doing. My job is to convene people around tough issues in our region in order to make impactful, meaningful change. I am beginning work on a large new project that will involve convening a large and disparate group of people into a network to make a specific change concerning talent development in our region. I really had no clue how I was going to do this and what I was going to do with the "network" to engage them, keep them engaged and make change. This book was like a lightbulb for me. It's an easy read and is well-laid out. It provides concrete skills to think about and master in a sequential fashion in order to bring people together around very complex ideas. I read and absorbed this book in less than two days and am using the concepts I've learned to help me structure my network. I can also see how it could be applied in my personal life as well. It's wonderful and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to make changes, create habits, build trust and have transformational conversations.

I learned a long time ago from the godmother of improvisational theater (Viola Spolin) that everything is in the physical. Positions and ideas are fine but do not get anything done. I am one of the volunteers touched by Strategic Doing here in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. I spent several days a few years back, with Ed Morrison and Bob Brown (and too many more to list here) and I learned for myself first hand, that when people are able to look at a same question and work toward its answer using only those tools and gifts they personally bring to the table, then all is well. We come to the task when we offer what we already have complete control over (and do not need permission from anyone to bring) in order to see our portion that answers the group question by getting things accomplished/answered and moving ahead in an orderly manner.The reason we have all our divisions in this country is that we drive past the exact people we should be connecting with, our neighbors, instead of going to a place to meet other like-minded individuals (who you have no idea where they live). If the power ever goes out, especially if it's taken out violently, we are going to DEPEND on our neighbor.If people learn the power of drawing ideas as in The Napkin Academy by Dan Roam, and join their local neighborhood website at Nextdoor.com and work with the community-building ideas that Peter Block brings in his book, COMMUNITY: the Structure of Belonging, along with John McKnight's work with Mr. Block to create The Abundant Community (book and website) AND THEN introduce the idea bringing all of this knowledge together to create a Time Bank in your neighborhood focused through the lens of Strategic Doing in that you are only doing what you are comfortable with, that's within your reach and as you meet every 30 (or so) days with everyone else to list off what you got done in the last month and set your sights again on the month to come and leave each months' meeting knowing what's expected of you is progress.Strategic Doing asks questions that bring you together in ways that encourage you to network. Not "network" in the ways of business and maybe a world away from the reality most of us know; which is not very 'businessy'. No time for that. But building networks that MATTER. Networks with people in physical proximity to you and with whom you can seek immediate answers from. Strategic Doing using all the methods I listed above are the Mission I've chosen for myself to pursue.I am a veteran and knowing I have Strategic Doing to implement the other aspects of this plan for this Mission gives me confidence. When I call upon my brother and sister veterans to stand up with me and enlist every civilian near them to get out and set religion and politics aside for a time and work to rebuild our communities, I know I will be well-equipped because Strategic Doing shows me the physical steps to move everyone into action with and as we know, everything is in the physical.We will never have successful economies without successful neighborhood communities. In the neighborhood I don't care who you voted for, I'll help you out of that snow bank you just backed into. In the neighborhood you get to be who you are and we stop future bad guys and girls from coming to be because we lived in safe and secure interconnected communities where all neighbors at least knew of one another and there were methods in place to help one another and out of THAT do come small businesses that may grow into larger ones.You want to corral community? It's like corralling cats. But Strategic Doing physically gives form to the formless.

If nothing else, read this book for the four questions it offers. There are few books that talk about the importance of conversations, and this is one of them. Second, it does a great job of creating a guide for navigating complex problems. Worth the read.

In the book “strategic doing – ten skills for agile leadership” the five authors, work you through just that. 10 skills. They admit that they doubt you can take on more than two, but I think even if you do that you are a better self then you were before you read this book.Each chapter also has a case study which will allow you to see the practical application of the skill.

In the highly volatile and uncertain world we live in – change is rapid and unpredictable in its nature and extent. The present is unclear and the future is uncertain. There is Chaos and it is Complex – many different, interconnected factors come into play. Today’s organisations and teams, within or outside, need to understand how effective collaboration looks like and how it lends itself to accelerated innovation.Strategic doing presents a practical guide to navigating this new world. A gem of a book and a must read for anyone interested in Agile Leadership, Collaboration, Strategy Execution, Innovation to learn this new discipline of leadership strategy designed especially for open, loosely