Dynamic Change Framework: Birth of the Book

I’ve come to the end of the primary writing i’ve been doing around Organisational Change, which is sitting under the provisional title of ‘Organisational Change in the Social Age’. Not the most glamorous title, but it’s first draft and i’m #WorkingOutLoud, so i’m sure a better one will emerge.

The job is not done: to get from here to the finished book will probably involve a lot of rewriting and a chunk of new writing too, but for now, there is, for the first time, a single, coherent path through the whole piece. Next step: go to page one. Next week i’ll be heading over to Amsterdam so that i can find a quiet cafe and read it, start to finish, working out what comes next. Typically i’ll share the rewrites as i do them, and some full chapters as they come together. People sometimes ask if i’m worried that i give too much away: no, because my plan is to give it all away. Words don’t like to be hidden, they like to be read, to be challenged, to be shared.

And anyway, the book, when it arrives, won’t look like the blog. This is my first reflective space, my working space, my thinking space. The book will be a second level of reflection: slightly fewer spelling mistakes, slightly better grammar. But more rigid.

The book won’t be in the order that it was written here: if you track back over the articles, you’ll see they dot around, whilst the book will follow the sequence start to finish, through the framework. That’s the difference between thinking and reading. One is linear, the other is like an excitable dog. My thinking runs all over the place. And sometimes has an accident in the corner.

I should feel more excited than i do, but actually i find the next part hardest: rewriting, editing, proofing. I’ve been spoiled by writing here, where i can get away with loose thinking and looser spelling. There’s a discipline to books that requires harder work and more concentration, neither of which are my strong points.

And there’s always something sad about finishing the writing of a book: whilst the blog is alive and continues to evolve, i only ever look back at my books and think ‘i could have said that better…’. Which i guess is why you keep writing…

But, for now, i will close my laptop at the end of a friday night, content that the first pass is over, and preparing myself for the task ahead: the birth of the book.