When I started writing this blog a couple of years ago, it had a very obvious purpose. It was a way of recording my journey through my Systems Thinking in Practice studies. I wrote about ideas I was exploring, assignments I was wrestling with, and things that caught my attention.
Along the way I found the writing itself was helping me explore my own thinking. I seem to do quite a lot of my thinking outside my own head. Writing is part of it, but so are sketches, diagrams, dictated notes, and conversations with other people. I need to get raw ideas out into a form where I can stand back and look at them differently, before I’m able to develop them further. That’s been one of the roles of this blog all along, which I maybe hadn’t recognised until now.
A couple of weeks back I was awarded a Postgraduate Diploma with Distinction in Systems Thinking in Practice – something I’m immensely proud of. It’s been a long and demanding journey. Looking back at some of my earlier posts, I can see how much changed over that time, both in my professional practice and in the way I think about problems.
The blog also feels different now. I no longer need to write, and I’m not even sure I know what I want to write about.
It’s an odd feeling. Since its inception there was always something waiting to be explored. Now there isn’t. Maybe that gives me more freedom. Maybe it makes it harder. I don’t think I’ve quite worked that out yet.
Then someone asked me the question: ‘Looking back over the last two years, what have you learned?’.
As I thought about it, I realised there are some really significant themes that have emerged. Some of these were things I was perhaps already doing, or doing in part intuitively, and systems thinking has given me a language to articulate them better. Some of them are whole new aspects and behaviours.
It’s only with a little distance that I’m able to see those themes clearly enough to capture them. That’s what I want to write about next.
Beyond that, I don’t know where the blog goes. I know I need some kind of purpose or mission to prompt me. I also know I enjoy writing, and the ‘thinking outside my own head’ it allows me. Maybe one answers the other?
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