The 2023 - 2024 Aitkin County Revitalization Initiative is laser-focused on increasing both organizational effectiveness and employee engagement at all levels, creating room for necessary innovation through with rapid solution-sessions (called Workouts) that aim to reduce burdensome, wasteful, and ineffective processes.

This Aitkin County Revitalization Primer is a practical companion to the Workout workshop. It brings tools and frameworks to life through hypothetical examples, provocative thought-experiments, fictional case studies, and reflection questions.

This primer does not represent actual strategic initiatives or projects that have been decided upon, discussed, or suggested by Aitkin County Administration, Department Heads, or Commissioners. 

Instead, I’ve developed this guide to help prime your creativity and accelerate a consensus driven approach to identifying Workout projects that are desirable, feasible, and practical.

Again, the examples I provide are not real, but instead are designed to help you brainstorm and think critically about future challenges and opportunities specific to your unique departments. While this primer is meant to help you picture these tools in action, the true power of Workout will be unleashed through the collective creativity of the stakeholders you engage with.