Diffusion of Strategic Doing

How do you diffuse a new set of strategy skills across an organization, community, or ecosystem? We are encountering more people asking us this question.

The concept of innovation diffusion has a long history, but the most practical insights come from Everett Rogers and his book, DIffusion of Innovations. Rogers, writing in the early 1960’s, demonstrated that the diffusion of innovation takes place in predictable stages. (For more on Rogers, check out this Wikipedia post.)

We’ve adopted this idea to explain how we diffuse Strategic Doing through an organization, community, or ecosystem. We use the drawing below to explain.

In a nutshell, think of diffusion in terms of three different types of teams:

1. Core Team. — The Core Team designs the diffusion process. Members of the Core Team have deep experience with Strategic Doing. The team can include Fellows from the Strategic Doing Institute.
2. Practitioner Team. — Members of the Practitioner Team have been through a 2.5-day training or its online equivalent. They know how to design and guide Strategic Doing workshops.
3. Project Teams. — Project teams develop solutions to the organization’s complex challenges by using the Strategic Doing discipline. Each project team includes at least one member of the Practitioner Team.

Learn more about what we’ve been up to in our Lab here: bit.ly/EdatASL