Wise Economy Workshop

09/01/2026

When local economies collapse, where do communities turn? For many forgotten post-industrial towns, tourism can feel like an answer to prayer—but is it a sustainable long-term solution? 🏙️💼

09/01/2026

Whether it’s getting featured in a magazine as a "hidden gem" or catching spillover from a neighboring city, towns are finding new ways to draw people in. But what happens when you have to manufacture an economy from scratch? Let's talk about the reality of post-industrial towns. 📉

09/01/2026

Tourism isn't the problem—the extractive model is. It's time to shift away from squeezing value out of communities and start building a tourism model that values residents and supports local resilience. 🏙️✨

09/01/2026

We’ve spent the last century designing local systems for efficiency instead of resilience.

And efficiency, carried too far, is just another word for fragility.

When an economic development strategy relies entirely on one massive corporate employer, it looks efficient on paper. When a town relies on a single utility pipeline or a single mega-retailer, the logistics look clean.

Until the storm hits. Until the plant closes. Until the supply chain snaps.

Then the crack ripples through everything.

After decades of working with local economies, I’ve seen this pattern repeat continuously: fragile systems fall apart because they cannot adapt to a single unexpected knock. They were built on the assumption that conditions would stay steady.

Resilient communities don't eliminate shock; they eliminate single points of failure.

They build local economic webs instead of monocultures. They invest in flexible, multi-use assets. They recognize that civic trust and hyper-local communication networks are just as vital as physical infrastructure when crisis hits.

Anti-fragility isn't a utopian theory. It is a sequence of practical, everyday choices about where you place your dependencies.

What is one area in your community's strategy that is overly dependent on a single assumption?

If you're trying to identify where your local systems are most vulnerable, this is the strategic work I help leaders navigate: https://tr.ee/rFwFPctlZZ

08/29/2026

A beautiful strategy document won't save a community from a changing environment.

Especially if the people who have to implement it weren't part of creating it.

One of the ideas running through several pieces I've been reading lately is the importance of implementation—and of trusting the institutions and relationships that already exist locally.

That's worth paying attention to.

We sometimes imagine that the answer to a complicated community problem is a better plan.

But sometimes the real problem is that we've separated planning from doing.

The people designing the strategy may not be the people seeing the problem every day.

The people with the most useful local knowledge may not be in the room.

And the organizations expected to implement the plan may have had little influence over it.

So before your next strategy process, try a simple question:

Who actually understands this system from the inside—and have we given them a meaningful role in shaping the response?

That question may improve your strategy more than another 20 pages of analysis.

08/28/2026

Tourism shouldn’t mean treating a community like a resource to be squeezed dry.

When development prioritizes extraction over local well-being, the very qualities that make a place special are sacrificed in the process. We need a model that values people first and strengthens local resilience.

In my latest book, I break down how we can shift from exploitative development to building sustainable, thriving communities—without sacrificing what makes them worth living in.

💡 Learn more about building resilient local economies at wiseeconomy.com

08/28/2026

08/27/2026

Here's a distinction I think more community leaders need to make:

Are you managing a project—or are you managing a system?

Projects have beginnings, milestones, budgets, deliverables, and an endpoint.

Systems don't.

A local economy doesn't “finish.”

A community doesn't reach a final version.

An ecosystem doesn't stay still long enough for you to manage it with a five-step project plan.

That's why approaches that work beautifully for projects can become frustrating when applied to economic and community systems.

If you're managing a system, you need to pay attention to:

• Relationships
• Feedback
• Changing conditions
• Multiple perspectives
• Unexpected consequences
• Local knowledge
• The ability to adapt

The goal isn't to control every variable.

It's to build the capacity to respond intelligently as the system changes.

That requires a very different kind of leadership.

Which part of your work are you currently treating like a project even though it's really a system?

08/25/2026

One of the hardest things about planning for the future is admitting that we don't actually know what the future will look like.

That sounds obvious.

Yet we build strategies around forecasts as if they're facts.

Economic forecasts. Population projections. Technology predictions. Environmental scenarios.

Then something changes—and suddenly the plan doesn't fit anymore.

The problem isn't that forecasting is useless.

The problem is treating one prediction as the future.

Complex systems don't behave like spreadsheets. They're constantly adapting to what people, organizations, markets, governments, and other systems are doing.

So instead of asking:

“What will happen?”

A better planning question may be:

“What are several plausible things that could happen, and how would we respond?”

That shift matters.

It turns strategy from a prediction exercise into a capacity for adaptation.

When was the last time your organization seriously planned for more than one version of the future?

08/24/2026

We have some strange metaphors for community development.

Sometimes we treat a community like a machine:

Put the right inputs in.

Pull the right levers.

Produce the desired outcome.

Sometimes we treat it like a plant:

Give it resources, sunlight, attention, and hopefully it grows.

But communities are more complicated than either metaphor suggests.

They're living systems made up of people, institutions, businesses, relationships, incentives, histories, technologies, and countless decisions happening at the same time.

You can't simply set the conditions and walk away.

And you certainly can't control every outcome.

The work is more like tending an ecosystem.

Pay attention.

Learn.

Adjust.

Notice what's changing.

Strengthen the relationships that matter.

Create conditions for healthy growth.

And be willing to change course when the system tells you that your assumptions were wrong.

That may be a less tidy way to think about economic development.

But I suspect it's a much more honest one.

What metaphor best describes the way your community or organization actually works?