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Introduction to Strategic Doing: An Agile Approach to Strategy

Learn about 'strategic doing', a new way of creating strategies for open network businesses and organisations.

4,638 enrolled on this course

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  • Duration

    3 weeks
  • Weekly study

    2 hours

Explore a new way of thinking about strategy

Today’s complexities demand agility and collaboration to do strategic work. This course introduces a strategy discipline called ‘strategic doing’.

The course will help you sharpen your ability to think horizontally in networks and you’ll gain insights on building trust at scale even among people who have never worked together before. You’ll understand what strategic conversations are and how they can be guided. You’ll also learn how strategies can be designed, tested, and adjusted rather than just sit on the page of a strategic plan gathering dust.

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Skip to 0 minutes and 0 seconds <v Speaker 1>Hello my name is Scott Hutcheson and I’m from <v Speaker 1>Purdue University in West Lafayette Indiana. And I want to tell you about our new FutureLearn

Skip to 0 minutes and 23 seconds course: Introduction to Strategic Doing. Now my guess is that word doing is a big reason why you are interested in this course. If you’ve ever experienced a strategy effort that didn’t result in any action you are not alone. A recent study by McKinsey and Company found that over 70 percent of strategic plans never get executed. Now why is that? At Purdue that’s a question we began asking over a decade ago and what we realized is this most of our approaches to strategy were designed in the industrial age an age dominated by command and control hierarchies and there in is the rub. Fewer and fewer of us are part of these old hierarchies.

Skip to 1 minute and 23 seconds Instead we find ourselves as part of open loosely connected networks and that’s what we design strategic doing for. To help people like you do strategic, often complex work, in environments in which, well, nobody can tell anybody else what to do. So what specifically will you learn this course? Well first we will explore this movement from hierarchy’s to networks and how this shift transforms strategy. We will also see how strategic trust gets created in these networks and how strategic conversations can be guided toward shared value and strategic opportunities. And we will examine how strategies get designed and tested and adjusted as we learn what’s working and what isn’t. We’ve taught strategic doing workshops in 46 different states and nine different countries.

Skip to 2 minutes and 41 seconds We could not be more excited about this partnership with FutureLearn to reach more people, people like you, so you better strap on your goggles and get ready for the ride.

What topics will you cover?

  • Today, both market value and social value are being created in open, loosely-joined networks, rather than the command-and-control hierarchies of yesterday.
  • Traditional strategy tools, like strategic planning, don’t work in this new environment
  • Doing complex work in networks requires approaches to strategy that are more agile and a style of leadership that is collaborative
  • Purdue University has developed a new approach to strategy called Strategic Doing
  • This course provided an introduction to Strategic Doing​

Learning on this course

On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

  • Identify examples from your own experiences that illustrate this shift from hierarchies to networks
  • Demonstrate an understanding of how strategy is different in networks than it is in hierarchies
  • Recognize characteristics of network-based thinking
  • Apply network-thinking to address a problem or opportunity that is important in your community or organization
  • Recognize ways for building trust at scale
  • Consider how to build trust in a network you are a part of
  • Understand the four basic questions a strategy needs to answer
  • Practice using these four questions to design a basic strategy
  • Understand how strategy can be agile and iterative
  • Translate strategic opportunities into a strategic outcomes

Who is the course for?

This course is for individuals who are interested in helping lead strategic transformations in their organizations or communities

Who will you learn with?

When I'm not teaching a class or workshop, I'm soccer dad to two teenage boys or with my lovely wife working on our seemingly endless list of things that need addressed at our 1932 Tudor Revival home.

Who developed the course?

Purdue University

One of the four best public universities in the US, Purdue delivers an engaging learning experience and a world-class degree.

Learning on FutureLearn

Your learning, your rules

  • Courses are split into weeks, activities, and steps to help you keep track of your learning
  • Learn through a mix of bite-sized videos, long- and short-form articles, audio, and practical activities
  • Stay motivated by using the Progress page to keep track of your step completion and assessment scores

Join a global classroom

  • Experience the power of social learning, and get inspired by an international network of learners
  • Share ideas with your peers and course educators on every step of the course
  • Join the conversation by reading, @ing, liking, bookmarking, and replying to comments from others

Map your progress

  • As you work through the course, use notifications and the Progress page to guide your learning
  • Whenever you’re ready, mark each step as complete, you’re in control
  • Complete 90% of course steps and all of the assessments to earn your certificate

Want to know more about learning on FutureLearn? Using FutureLearn

Get a taste of this course

Find out what this course is like by previewing some of the course steps before you join:

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