Strategic Doing - A Conversation with Liz Nilsen and Ed Morrison

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Complex systems emerge out of people, agents, following simple rules. And you can think about this in terms of a flock of birds or a swarm of bees. So the question is, what are the simple rules that we need to follow to guide a complex collaboration that leads to a strategy? And that's what strategic design provides.

Hi everybody, welcome back. This week I'm bringing you a great conversation that I had with Liz Nilsson and Ed Morrison, the creators of Strategic Doing and part of the Agile Strategy Lab at the University of North Alabama. Liz is the Associate Director of the lab and leads the expansion of the lab's programming, manages the Strategic Doing Institute, including partnerships with other universities interested in deploying Strategic Doing. Liz was Previously, a Senior Program Officer at VentureWell, where she provided leadership to the Pathways Program for the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation. Prior to that, she led STEM initiatives at the Penn State Center in Pittsburgh and served as the Director of Outreach and New Economy Program Development at the Institute of Advanced Learning and Research at Virginia Tech. Ed Morrison is the Director of the Agile Strategy Lab and was the founder of the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab prior to that. His work won the first Arthur D. Little Award for Excellence in Economic Development, presented by the American Economic Development Council. Previous to this, Ed worked for Telesis, a corporate strategy consulting firm with clients such as Ford, Volvo, and General Electric. Alongside Scott Hutchison, Janice Fadden, and Nancy Franklin, Ed and Liz co-authored the book Strategic Doing: 10 Skills for Agile Leadership, which was published in 2019.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello. Hello.

How are you?

Very well.

Thank you.

Hi, Tim.

How are you?

I'm good. How are you?

Perfect.

Okay, brilliant. So I'd love to just start with setting the scene a little bit for the Strategic Doing framework. This is definitely an interesting area for me, but I know that this is the context we are working in, in terms of a shift from hierarchies to networks in general. And I know this is a big thing that underpins the Strategic Doing Framework. So perhaps Liz, could I invite you to start just to give us a bit of a context for the overall social, historical, economic context in which, you know, you've developed this framework?

Sure. So, you know, most of us have been part of organizations somewhere in our professional life that operate very much as a hierarchy, at least for some things, right? That there's someone at the top of the hierarchy that gives direction, tells everyone what to do, and everyone responds to that and carries out the marching orders, which is great for some kinds of work. But increasingly the work that we do, and particularly when we're really looking at complex challenges, the work that we do doesn't really happen that way. That's not where solutions come from. Solutions come from working in a network. Sometimes that's a network within one organization, you know, different units of an organization coming together to kind of attack a particular problem. Often it's different organizations coming together and there, there really truly is no one who can tell everybody else what to do. And most of our management skills that we have from our professional life are geared towards managing within a hierarchy. So when we find ourselves in a network situation, often we're not really sure how to go about that. And the tools that we have aren't particularly effective. So that's kind of the context for that. You know, if you look at the last maybe 150 years, success economically and industrially has come from hierarchies, not from networks. So this really is a big shift for organizations and individuals to develop the skills to both see when that's what's required and then to carry that out.

Yeah, and I've heard in some of your work about this idea of the grandfather's economy and then the grandchildren's as we shift towards this network. And I think for me, that's a big thing, obviously working with young people in terms of their learning, trying to enable them and prepare them to, to understand and be able to work with those networks is a really important part of it. And hopefully that's something that we can get into a bit more as we go through thinking about the implications for education.

Yeah, I think the good news is that is that young people, they see the world in networks. They don't see the world in hierarchies. So they are much, in some ways, much better equipped to pick up these skills. It's us who started our professional lives in different kinds of organizations that have a harder time, I think. But I think younger people, they just see things this way. And so it's just a matter of giving them the tools because they don't have to switch their mindset about it. They just need the tools.

Yeah, very good. And then I suppose kind of leading on from that, there was some perhaps practical observations that you saw in your work in leadership development and management consultancy seeing where there was a need for these kinds of new frameworks to support complex change management processes. Could you give just some practical examples of how and where your kind of insights came that there was a need for this kind of framework like Strategic Doing?

Well, yeah, the emergence of Strategic Doing really surfaces around the challenges of globalization that we had in the United States. It started to take hold in the 1980s, but it really is in the 1990s, it's when the awareness of networks started to really come to the forefront. And part of that was the emergence of the internet as a force. This work really started with me working in communities that were really structuring around, restructuring their economies around globalization. In other words, factories were moving out. How do we maintain jobs? How do we improve our employment base? How do we teach people or educate people for what's coming? These are all complex challenges. And these complex challenges actually within a community or a region don't have any hierarchies. There are no hierarchies. So, for example, the mayor can't tell the school what to do. The school can't tell the city council what to do. Nobody can tell anybody what to do, but they all are suffering under a really complex challenge. And so the traditional approaches to strategy, which is strategic planning, presumes that there's a hierarchy in place, that there is some structure in place that enables you to align and execute. Well, if you take that assumption away, then you still have this challenge of strategy. How do we, how do we have an impact with the resources we have? But you don't have the hierarchy in place. And so, beginning in the 1990s, I started working with a clean sheet of paper and said, "All right, well, how do we do strategy in a situation when nobody can tell anybody what to do?" And over a period of about 10 years in Oklahoma City, where we transformed the economy, and then in many of that 22 counties in Kentucky, a relatively poor state, that was facing globalization pressures, addressing the challenge of how do they come up with a strategy quickly? You know, you can't spend a year doing this, you can't invest $100,000 doing this. You got to bring people together, you've got them for about 3 or 4 hours, and how do you get them moving in an aligned direction? And so, by 2005, I was pretty clear that we had a model, and so I came to Purdue to run testbeds to figure out, you know, how do we teach this and how do we replicate it? To scale it. And so that's really the background of the context, is really dealing with complex challenges of globalization.

Yeah, an interesting— and perhaps we'll get on to it a bit later— but interesting that it's arisen out of a context where there was no hierarchy, but actually now we're looking at the implications of Strategic Doing for making transformations and transitions away from hierarchies into a more networked type of organization. So for people that aren't familiar, I mean, this may be the first time they've heard of Strategic Doing. I would love to give you both an opportunity just to talk through the process a little bit. You've mentioned, obviously, the difference with strategic planning already, but just thinking about what practically does the Strategic Doing process look like? And I know you use this term agile leadership as a part of that. Perhaps you could mention that and just, yeah, just talk us through the process a little bit. That would be great.

Sure. So Strategic Doing is designed for this kind of setting, what we call an open, loosely connected network, where there's some sense of voluntariness to the participation of people and that those networks tend to change over time. You know, people are part of it for a while maybe, and then step out. There's other people that come in. So that's sort of the context in which it's particularly useful. And we start from a common understanding of what is strategy, that strategy is answering two questions really: where are we going and how are we going to get there? That if you can answer those two questions, you have a strategy. But for many organizations, if you look at their strategy or their strategic plan or, you know, some other document, they kind of fail on one of those two things. Either they have lots of, you know, Gantt charts and all that kind of thing without any sort of overarching why, or, you know, why are we doing this, where are we going? Or they're full of lots of really fluffy language and beautiful pictures, but without any sense of, well, how are we actually going to implement this wonderful vision that we've come up with? So we start there. That's our definition of strategy, is being able to answer those two questions. So the first question, where are we going? We can answer by answering two questions. The first one is, what could we do? And obviously in the world there are, you know, a billion things we could do. In this part of the conversation, we limit ourselves to what can we do with the resources we already have at hand? And we get rid of the, well, if only we had this you know, major government grad. If only we had 20 more people, if only. So we get rid of that question. What could we do with just what we have with the people sitting around the table? And then, because even just with that, there are always far more things than we actually could do. So then the question is, well, what should we do? How do we come up with a way of judging the things that we could do? And for us, the place to start with what should we do is What's what we call the big easy? What's something that is both going to have a lot of impact, but is also doable? Many of us have been part of groups that had a great plan and then everybody walked out of the room and it actually wasn't very doable. So it sounded good, but— so that's the should. What could we do? What should we do? And that really focuses on the where are we going? The how do we get there? There's two other questions to that. The third question is what will we do? We've decided what we should do. What will we do? What are the commitments we're each going to make to one another, starting to walk that out? And that's really kind of where the rubber hits the road for a lot of groups, that people have to make a personal commitment to doing this work together. We're not coming up with something for someone else to do. We're coming up with something that we ourselves are going to implement, maybe with help, but we're taking responsibility for that. And then the final question, and this is really kind of closing a learning loop on this, is when are we going to get back together and talk about what happened when we did what we committed to, talk about whether or not that has changed our view of what the challenge is or how we should be going about it, make those adjustments if we need to, and then plan for the next things that we each need to do. So we kind of go back to that, what will we do question again. So it's very iterative. We don't try to come up with the perfect strategy at the very beginning. We say, this is a complex challenge. We're going to learn our way through it together. Let's come up with kind of a first cut at a strategy and start walking that out. And we will learn as we go and we will adjust when we need to. You know, many of us have worked on strategic plans that end up being, you know, these lovely, wonderful, thick books that sit on our shelves. And strategic doing is not that. It's a work in progress all the time. You know, every time you get back together, which is usually for us every 30 days, the strategy probably changes slightly because you're learning more about the challenge as you go.

That's brilliant. And one of the things I really enjoy about it is partly the language that you use is so kind of straightforward and jargon-free. And because I do a lot of work in the Agile community, and that, you know, there is quite a lot of technical or jargonistic language in those frameworks. But the other thing is that clarity around thinkers and doers. David Marquet has done read some interesting work by him on that, but that idea of encouraging everybody to be both thinkers and doers, right? Could you say a little bit more about that?

So the underlying premise is that everybody who comes to the conversation has a piece of the solution. And we phrase that by saying everybody that comes has an asset to contribute to the solution. That might be a particular skill that they have. It might be a particular domain of knowledge that they have. It might be connections with some potential partners. Sometimes it's actually even funding, which is a wonderful thing. But everybody has a piece of that. So, everybody is able to both think about the solution and make decisions about that collectively. And everyone, no exceptions, is going to take action together to make it happen.

Yeah, yeah, very good. And this is one thing I'm just curious about. How explicit were you about the connection with Agile when you used the term Agile leadership? Because you talk about rules for Agile leadership, right?

Well, recall that Strategic Doing started in the 1990s, about 1993 is when we started working on this. And the model really that was the focal point was open-source software development. You know, a physicist that I had a conversation with pointed me to say, think about open-source software development and think about whether that model can be ported somehow into the strategy universe. And so Strategic Doing evolved on a parallel track to Agile software methodology.

Interesting.

So it's— we didn't make an explicit, and we haven't made an explicit sense of, okay, you need to understand Agile software before you understand strategic doing. But they're both methodologies to enable you to adapt and learn continuously when you're dealing with really complex challenges. And that's really the focal point, which is you can't sit there and analyze the problem, which is the premise of strategic planning. You conduct an analysis, you come up with an optimal strategy, and then you execute it. It's a very linear idea. Here, it's a very— as Liz has explained, it's a very iterative process. It's a process of continuous adaptation and continuous learning. And so, strategy now is really much more like software development. I mean, our strategies have versions to them, you know, version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and we're continuously updating them. And we're using transparency across this new network to get people aligned, to build trust, and to really, again, share learning and attract more resources to the network. So, the mistake people make, I think, when they think about Strategic Doing, and they have in the past, is they think about, well, this is a bottom-up approach. And we talk about this and say, well, you're really thinking in hierarchical terms here. It's not really top-down or bottom-up. Because it's not a hierarchy, it's a network. And in this network, we have open participation and leadership guidance. Now, in a hierarchy, you can't really do that. You're either top-down or bottom-up. But in a network, you can have open participation and leadership guidance. You can have a core team guiding a network, and you can have porous boundaries to enable people to come in at any point.

Very interesting. And, um, there were two other words that have jumped out at me in my reading and listening to you in the past, that conversation is one of them. This idea of sense-making through conversation is beginning to come up in education much more through these kinds of strategic or accreditation-type processes, which is good, and discipline being another. But perhaps could you say a bit more about those two ideas?

Well, I'll point you to an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1993, which was done by a guy named Alan Weber. It was one of the founders of Fast Company magazine, and he made the point that in a knowledge economy, conversations are critical because it's through conversations that we both distribute the knowledge we currently have and we create new knowledge, we generate new knowledge about what works, what's going to happen. And so, our conversations become critical. The challenge, of course, for researchers or academicians is that trying to understand conversations from from afar, not as a participant, but as an observer, is extremely complex. And so, you have a difficult challenge for academics to really understand this in practical terms. And so, you do have literature around this, but I would argue it's not very practical. Strategic Doing grew out of reflective practice, a desire to understand. And what we learned in that 10 years of kind of experimentation was that Collaborations emerge out of conversations with a predictable underlying structure to them. They have a structure to them. First, they're divergent, and then they're convergent, and then they're iterative. And so, if you understand the structure as a leader, you can design and manage them simply by asking questions. And that's what Strategic Planning teaches you how to do. Now, it turns out that coming up with that and learning how to teach it, and your earlier point, coming up with The language, both the visual language and the language we use in Strategic Drawing, was actually very difficult to do because we needed to come up with jargon-free language that anybody could understand. And that turns out to be a real challenge. So simplicity is actually very hard. But that said, what we learned is that if you have a discipline to address this complexity, then you can replicate, you can do this over and over and over again. And it comes back to really an insight about complex systems. Complex systems emerge out of people, agents, following simple rules. And you can think about this in terms of a flock of birds or a swarm of bees. You know, these are complex systems. Each one of the individual participants in the system is just simply following some simple rules. So, the question is, what are the simple rules that we need to follow to guide a complex collaboration that leads to a strategy? And that's what strategic planning provides for, is the simple rules that enable you to do that.

Yeah, brilliant.

Yeah, very nice. I laugh at the reference to the birds because anybody who knows me knows that I reference the birds quite a bit. So that's— now it's a beautiful metaphor, but it's also a very real one, right, for complex systems.

And that's what strategy is going to look like, Tim. I mean, it's, you know, forget the idea of a mechanical system. It's an organic process and it will shift. And the good news is that while we can't particularly control the swarm, we can guide it. And that's truly what the job of leadership is.

Brilliant.

So then thinking, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of what the implications are of strategic doing in educational context. And you are both working in universities, and I understand that you've worked with a lot of universities already in the US. With the framework. So perhaps we could explore a little bit more some practical examples of how that's worked in educational organizations, and then perhaps, you know, just thinking ahead, how might it work? You know, what could we do in terms of future possibilities for educational organizations? Can I come back to you, Liz, on that one?

Sure. So I think higher education in particular, I think, is a really unique kind of structure. So one of the things that is, I think, apparent to anybody within an institution of higher education is that while it appears to be a hierarchy in many ways, you know, you could go on almost any university's website and you can find the org chart for the institution, and there is someone at the top of that org chart, and that person maybe thinks that they could tell everybody what to do, but almost no one else in the organization thinks that that is actually the case. And it is not the way they operate, right, for lots of different reasons. But, you know, people in higher education have a lot of autonomy, and the president can't tell, you know, their faculty, we're going to have this innovation and make it work. The provost can't do that, you know, not even the board of trustees or whatever the governing board is. So it really has to look differently, and it really does have to happen in a network that people are freely joining. So I think that's why strategic doing is particularly well suited for higher education because it might appear to be a hierarchy, but it's really not, that the work is going to happen in a network. So I've worked a lot in higher education in my career, either directly in an institution of higher education or in a kind of convening organization. Many times that is part of its sort of reason for being is to bring higher education institutions together to collaborate, which is even harder, right? Because you have each of these organizations that itself is very network-based. And then if you're talking about bringing them together, oh my goodness, you know, that is a recipe for standing in cement for 10 years, right? So, but to look at it first from sort of within an institution. So when you think about innovation or change, if you put that on the table with a group of people in higher education, you immediately get the, oh, we can't change that. That would have to go to the faculty senate. Or, well, we could do that, but that would take 10 years because, you know, we don't work in the summer. We don't work during December, whatever it is. Change tends to happen very slowly, particularly compared to like a corporate environment. But this way of having a conversation together really can move the needle forward. So the project that I came to Strategic Doing with was with a project that was funded by the National Science Foundation in the US that was geared towards engineering education. And in particular, helping institutions make experiences for undergraduate engineering students to acquire skills in innovation and entrepreneurship. For some schools, you know, that's about wanting to have startups. You know, if you're a school in Silicon Valley, for example, that's clearly part of what you want to have happen. But for many schools, it's really about we want our engineering students to have more of a mindset of entrepreneurship, of, you know, seeing opportunities, knowing how to take advantage of those opportunities, knowing how to come up with some kind of innovation in response to that opportunity and carry that out. And that, I think, is probably relevant to almost any higher education institution, that those are the kind of skills they want their students to have, and not just engineering students, right? So that was kind of the, the mission of the project I was working on. And we worked with small teams, you know, maybe 4 or 5 people at each of 50 institutions. And we taught them the strategic doing process, and then we let them sort of start working with some coaching on the side to keep them on track, help them solve problems, that kind of thing. And part of what is an amazing thing about strategic doing is that you always start with something very small. You don't start saying, we're going to create a new certificate program for engineering students in entrepreneurship. That's not where you start. That is the, okay, it has to go to the faculty senate and it's going to take us 10 years. You start with something really small. But what we saw happen in those schools, many of them, was that they started with something small, but it started to take off. Very quickly, and it really did transform the way their undergraduate engineering students experienced their education over 4 or 5 years. So I'll give an example. One of the interventions that many of the schools decided to carry out was to create some kind of space at the university where students could come together to collaborate, you know, big tables, lots of Post-it notes, lots of whiteboards, markers, sometimes 3D printers to do some prototyping, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

So many of the schools we worked with, that's kind of where they started. And some of them started very like, let's find a closet and stick a 3D printer in there. I mean, very, very small, but that was enough to get the ball rolling. And one of the institutions we worked with, that's where they started. They started, they said, we're going to have what we call a collision space in the school. And it was a very small room there. I don't think they had any 3D printers. It really was just, you know, tables and whiteboards and markers. But over the course of 2 and a half years, which is their kind of time in the program that I was working with them on. So if you think of that as sort of a project, they launched 37 projects, which in education is kind of an amazing thing.

Yes, it is.

And we didn't give them any money. The only money we gave them was money to travel, to come together to learn this process. That's it. But by starting really small, they had kind of an experience of success that they could then talk about with other people. And if you have a proof point and you have a clear idea of where you're going, that attracts resources. And in almost every instance, resources, financial and otherwise, kind of came out of the woodwork. And I think you would say, oh, actually I have some discretionary money I could put towards that. Or your alum would say, you know, oh, that's great. I would like to figure out how to support that. So that school, so that project ended in 2017, I think. School this year announced, I think, a $12 million gift for a center for entrepreneurship.

Wow.

That never ever would have happened, I don't think, if they hadn't started with, let's set up a collision space.

Brilliant. Oh, very cool, cool story. So, okay, so let's, let's move it into this this other slightly more rigid and hierarchical space of K-12 education, right? Because yeah, I find it really interesting to hear you talk about the higher education institutions as more of a loosely connected network, whereas K-12 schools really are not that, right? They are still quite rigid, calcified hierarchies, right? So in that kind of a context, and you know, I mentioned this at the beginning, rather than starting from a point of no hierarchy and you needing a process to work with that, How could Strategic Doing support a shift, chipping away at the hierarchy, let's say, or just supporting some positive project-based work that actually shows, demonstrates improvement in those kinds of much more hierarchical organizations?

So, I think this is where, when we're talking to people, we often make a small sort of pivot from talking about this whole process of Strategic Doing, where a team sits down around a table and goes through these 4 questions and comes up with a project. To thinking about agile leadership. And that agile leadership is really a set of skills to help collaborations move forward. But those skills are ones that absolutely fit into a rigid and calcified kind of structure and can help those kinds of organizations see that there's a different way to do business. So for example, one of the skills we teach that has personally been very transformative is the idea of that when you're having a conversation, you want to frame that conversation around an appreciative question. So a question that isn't looking at, you know, why do we have this problem? But it's a question in which we sort of paint a picture of, imagine this future, let's talk about what that would look like. That's a skill that you can use in almost any context, and you certainly can use it in a K-12 setting because I think there very much is a propensity to see the problem in K-12, right? You know, why are our students, you know, not hitting this benchmark or, There's all kind— right now schools are very much in a situation where they're looking at problems, you know, how do we get schools to get back open? How do we make sure, you know, we don't have COVID infections, whatever? But using that skill of an appreciative question is something you can use in any setting. So I think there are a number of those skills that people can use and they can find places to do that. And over time, I think that does start to break down that calcified nature because people start to see, oh, we're actually getting something done. We're not just having meetings to meet and meetings where we all walk out completely frustrated. And that then I think does start to kind of soften up that hierarchy in a way that says, well, let's, maybe we could take this further.

Yeah.

There's also a chance, Tim, I think some places will have a strategic plan, but they have a difficulty implementing. So this is not an either/or world. If you have a strategic plan, you can use strategic doing to help you implement the plan and to build networks around the plan because Execution of any kind of strategy involves alignment, linking, leveraging, and aligning resources that you have. And that's one reason why strategic planning, it falls down on execution. It just doesn't work very well. So, you know, in some circumstances you might have a strategic plan and you can use strategic planning to help you implement.

Yeah, interesting. But I think the other thing you mentioned earlier about that idea of leveraging the assets or Liz perhaps was saying about the assets that people bring to the table, right? And that, that's one of the things that for me marks it out, you know, much more richly and interesting than strategic planning, because actually you've got a large number of people who know the organization, they know the work, they know the pain points, and they know what needs to shift, and they've got skills and assets to bring to the table to actually support that. Whereas often a strategic planning process is done by a few more highly paid brains in a room with the door closed, and they don't necessarily know exactly what's going on on the ground of the organization.

This goes back to the whole challenge, which is that organizations, if they're going to adapt and move and become more productive, they have to deploy and take advantage of the knowledge they currently have. And the problem is that this knowledge is hidden. It's not readily available. And so the only way to really uncover it is through conversation. And these conversations need to be focused on, again, what could we do, what should we do, what will we do. And the idea of uncovering the hidden assets of the organization is going to come through deeper conversations, deeper focused conversations, and that's what strategic planning provides.

Yeah, very nice. And, um, so then thinking forward, if people are listening to this and it's piqued their interest in terms of digging in a bit deeper and learning more, where would you direct them? Obviously there's the book that you've all written together, which is a great place to start, but what other options are there available that they could actually find out more?

So there are lots of ways to get involved. You know, we wrote the book to be kind of a front door for people who are interested in the ideas to learn them. But over the last year, you know, something we talked about for a while, but hadn't executed on was online learning opportunities for people. But in the last year, we have done a lot of that. We, just like everyone else, had to pivot our learning system to more of an online kind of thing. So, we're at a university that's been very supportive and generous. And so, we have access to a really good learning management system. And we've created a set of courses that people can take no matter where they are. And the ones I think in particular that I'd point people to is one is called The 10 Skills of Agile Leadership. And that is very much based on the book. I think particularly for people who are in pretty rigid and hierarchical places, that might be a good place to start. We, before the pandemic, and we hope after the pandemic, we did 2.5-day in-person trainings, and we've taken that learning content and created an online sort of equivalent of that. And that certainly includes the agile leadership skills, but then we go further and say, well, how do we take those skills, combine them into a group process, How can we help you do that? You know, how do you plan that? How do you carry that out? What do you do after you have that meeting so you still have momentum? And then we help people start thinking about actually starting to do that. You know, we try to be very sort of action-oriented in our trainings. We have plenty of theory in the bibliography of the book that people can read if they're interested. But in our training, we try to be very, you know, what can you do with this next week?

Brilliant. Yeah, great. And you have a kind of a network of people who have engaged with the training. And, but, you know, quite a lot of your people, you guys are based in the US. Do you have more around the world? I mean, in Europe and beyond?

Yeah, we do. We have about 1,300 people that have taken the 2.5-day training or the online equivalent. But yeah, I mean, there's, there's certainly a majority in the US just because that's where we got our start. But there are practitioners, you know, all over and there's a growing number in Europe for sure.

Good. One of the delightful aspects of growing the Strategic Doing Network internationally has been the fact that it works in a variety of different cultural contexts. So, you know, we have practitioners in Belgium and Holland, and we have practitioners in Germany, and, and we teach in Spanish in Puerto Rico. So you realize that this is actually a cross-cultural model. Although we didn't set out to make it a cross-cultural model, it does work cross-culturally, which is really exciting.

Yeah, very nice. No, and as I said, before, it's definitely the clarity of it is something that appeals to me. You know, it's no nonsense, it just cuts to the heart of the things that are important. And as Liz said, you get going. You don't want to spend too much time in meetings talking about theory, right? You want to be on the ground actually making things improve and change next week.

So if people are interested in learning more, the best place to start very practically is on our website, which is strategicdoing.net, and, you know, take a look around. But you can also just send us a note and say, hey, I'm trying to figure out what the right way is to plug in. The other opportunity that's available is once a month we do a 1-hour kind of gathering of the community. Topics on that vary. That's, we call it Third Thursday. It's on the third Thursday of the month. And that's an easy way for people to kind of ease in and just sort of listen in on the conversation.

Brilliant. Well, I'm very pleased to be able to, you know, hopefully spread the message a bit more widely. And so I thank you very much for your time. It's really great to talk to you both about this.

Thank you for the opportunity, Tim Logan. It's been wonderful.

Thank you. Yes, absolutely. It's been a good conversation. Thanks for inviting us.

Fantastic.

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