Emergent Strategy for Organizational Change
The System that will evolve most rapidly must fall between, or more precisely on the edge of chaos - possessing order but with the parts connected loosely enough to be easily altered.
- E.O. Wilson, Pioneering biologist
Emergent strategy leverages the fluid nature of the learning ecosystem to create organizational direction and tactical adaptability. Executive teams, governing boards and new initiative stakeholders need to engage with the emerging future, align trends with mission, values and core competence, and provide organic guidance so their organization can orient and navigate through complexity and create learning pathways for working adults.
Using Emergent Strategy for Organizational Change, Learning Ecosystem Mapping and Learning Identity tools, TSG enables senior leaders at the beginning of strategic planning cycles, accreditation review prep, social initiative formation as well as board and team retreats, to create emergent strategy as a foundation for organizational execution and stakeholder mobilization toward creating learning pathways.
Together these tools help to visualize and map how a college or university or training provider might deliver on the promise of that pathway. The tools center learning and learner agency at the core of organizational capabilities, partner relationships and broader ecosystemic trends to guide a living strategy conversation that creates guideposts for orienting and navigating so that the organization can development new products, services, empower stakeholders and engage in community building to shape ecosystem evolution.
The process provides a safe space for mapping the competitive environment. Individuals, organization and stakeholders can be mapped with curiosity and experimentation rather than be concerned with existential threats. It simplifies wayfinding thus creating bravery, amidst the chaos of uncertainty, to set out on a creative and iterative change journey.
Deliverables include:
o Proto-strategy for a learning pathway
o Stakeholder resource mapping to support learning pathway
o Guiding Principles for adaptive execution to build a pathway
See Visual Snapshot of tool Below.
Stories to Action
Leadership is accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty.
- Marshall Ganz,
Harvard Professor/Community Organizer
Ecosystems produce learning pathways through stakeholder relationships amidst complexity and uncertainty. Any individual, organization or stakeholder willing to orient and navigate into complexity and uncertainty can create the context – leadership - for ecosystemic action. Ecosystem leadership is the ability to weave stories that inspire purpose and mobilize stakeholders – inclusive of students, families, employees, customers, policymakers, and partners - toward shared value creation. In order to inspire and mobilize stakeholders, Wayfinding uses Stories to Action process that: Frames A Vision of the Future; Engages Influentials; and Builds Communities for Action.
Through this three-step process, Stories to Action uses data and an empathy-driven narrative to surface goals, needed resources, ideas, practices and advocates that shape the learning ecosystem and call it into existence. Importantly, Wayfinding seeks to both mobilize stakeholders to create a given learning pathway and also maintain overall ecosystem health by being mindful to engage in ways that foster community, inspire purpose, build knowledge and enable action.
Deliverables include:
o Stakeholder Asset Maps
o Stakeholder mobilization strategy
o Bespoke thought leadership stories and content (white papers, issue briefs, infographics)
o Curated stakeholder engagement events
Catalytic Learning
All that you touch, your change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.
-Octavia Butler, Author
Sometimes the ideas and action needed for the learning ecosystem to adapt require individuals, stakeholders and organizations to develop or evolve new ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving and acting. Emergent Strategy and Stories to Action both require and necessitate an ability to process experience and data in a near real time operational tempo. Catalytic Learning develops experiential learning mindsets, in leadership teams and stakeholder groups, in order to shorten innovation and product development cycles. TSG provides assessment tools, technical assistance and coaching to enhance organizational reaction times to identify and capitalize on changing market and ecosystem dynamics.
With Emerging Strategy unfolding and Stakeholders in motion, the ecosystem begins to move in unexpected ways. Catalytic learning enables individuals, stakeholders and organizations transform the learning ecosystem or to transform with it as its emergent properties manifest something new.
Deliverables include:
o Individual, team and organization experiential learning profiles
o Team-based innovation training
o Coaching on how to optimize learning from experience and apply new knowledge