The Strategic Doing movement in Texarkana has grown steadily over the past few years, and a recent news article showed off how far it’s come. Certified Workshop Leader RuthEllen Whitt, who leads Leadership Texarkana, is the brains behind the Strategic Doing movement there. She estimates that about 100 groups in the area now use Strategic Doing in some way.
It’s an approach that’s particularly well-suited to Texarkana, which is (literally) on the border between Texas and Arkansas – the main street downtown is the divider, and the courthouse is at one end of that street (as you can see in the photo); it has chambers for both states’ cases.
Case Study: the Texarkana Courthouse Square
One local project in particular – improvements to the area surrounding the courthouse – was featured by the newspaper. Assistant City Manager David Orr is the official “nudger” for his action team and reflected in the news article:
Orr credits an SD team with bringing the Courthouse Square project to fruition. The $950,000-plus project will beautify the grounds of the downtown federal courthouse and post office, as well as improving safety for drivers and pedestrians.
“Strategic Doing was the force that helped this project cross the goal line. We’ve been planning and working on this project for over five years now. The website, design changes, landscape plan and coordination with the Federal Courthouse judges were all Strategic Doing group deliverables.
“We have an awesome SD team made up engineers, landscape architects, marketing experts, real estate gurus, a physician, business people and city staff members from both sides of the line,” Orr said in an email. “They were instrumental in making this project a reality and it could not have been done without them.”
Like many other efforts over the past few months, the Strategic Doing core team in Texarkana took a bit of a breather as COVID-19 made its presence known. But as the article shows, the habit of doing can power a project through, even in the most uncertain of times.
Photo credit: City of Texarkana
