Red-Team Your Economic Development Strategy

EDO AI PLAYBOOK · 13 OF 15 · VERSION 1.0

By Andy Greiner

A strategic plan can accumulate goals faster than an organization can execute them. The useful review asks whether the evidence, resources and decision rights still support the work. This workflow connects priorities to measurable outcomes and makes tradeoffs explicit.

Current strategy; adoption date; progress reports; budget and staffing; baseline data; governance and decision rights; partner commitments; material changes since adoption.

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Act as an independent reviewer of an economic-development strategy. Extract each objective, initiative, intended outcome, owner, resource commitment, deadline and measure. Preserve source references and mark absent fields as missing. Do not assume an organization named in the plan has committed staff or funding.

Identify the causal assumption behind each initiative: what activity is expected to change what outcome, for whom and over what period. Assess whether supplied evidence supports that link. Distinguish outputs such as meetings from outcomes such as retained operations, while acknowledging attribution limits.

Test the plan for stale baselines, unsupported target sectors, contradictory priorities, dependency risks, uncosted initiatives, missing owners and metrics that can improve without meaningful progress. Compare the workload to documented staffing and budget; request missing capacity information rather than inventing it.

Create an initiative register with evidence strength, current progress, resource demand, dependencies, decision owner and the consequence of delay. Propose Keep / Modify / Pause / Investigate classifications with reasons. These are recommendations for governance review, not decisions.

Identify tradeoffs. If two priorities compete for the same resources, specify the choice leadership must make and the evidence needed. Do not prescribe spending levels without the relevant budget and authority. Suggest a small set of measures with definitions, baselines, reporting intervals and data owners.

Return an executive review, the initiative register and a 90-day decision agenda. Separate quick operational corrections from changes requiring board or partner approval. End with the five questions leadership should answer before renewing the plan unchanged. Do not manufacture stakeholder consensus or claim that the strategy caused regional economic changes.

Leadership should validate resource assumptions and decision rights. Confirm the baseline and metric definitions with the people who maintain the data.

Turn the approved priorities into a quarterly operating review with a small number of decisions, accountable owners and evidence for progress.

Find one initiative that has neither an accepted owner nor a defined completion test.

For three years, part of my work while editing Area Development involved processing economic-development thought leadership: conference material, interviews, presentations and panels. That editorial experience informs the problems I choose to tackle here. These workflows are Location Decision’s practical tools, developed to help economic developers organize evidence, ask better questions and prepare stronger work.

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