#WorkingOutLoud On The Dynamic Change Book

I’ve put this week fully aside as i work towards completing a first draft (alpha, early stage, preliminary and suitably caveated) manuscript of the next book, which is about organisational change in the Social Age. It may be called the Handbook of Change for the Social Age. Or the Dynamic Change Handbook. Or something else. As i said, it’s evolving.

So, no new writing this week (at least, not in a coherent and stand alone format). Yesterday and today have mainly been about the overall structure, which is driving me mad. Whilst i’ve completed around 35k words of content, i’m still playing somewhat with the structure, and i find it hard to hold it all in my head at once. There’s a lot of other unrelated stuff floating around in there. My head, that is, not the book. I hope that once the book is finished it will be both lean, relevant and actionable.

I’ve already worked extensively #OutLoud to get it this far, through fifty original articles which have morphed into the first version. I’ll continue to #WorkOutLoud as i complete it, but give me a few days of incomprehension before i feel able to see where it’s landed.

Yesterday was easy: i’d printed out what i had so far and marked it up with minor amends and typos, so just updating core text. But today it’s more about restructuring the core sections: i’ve got about half way through and ground to a halt, so it seemed like a good time to share.

Writing is funny: for me, the hardest part is remembering if i’ve said something before, and, once you restructure things, it’s easy to get out of sequence (for example, i wrote the section about ‘Elasticity’, then later discovered the section where i first introduced the concept, out of sequence). Errors like that are hard to avoid, but to do the restructuring, i have to plough through it and count on the fact that i can correct later.

So: overall, i’m pretty pleased. This was the first time i’ve read it end to end in one shot and it actually held up better than i’d thought. I reckon about eight days work to finish it, but then i’m an optimist, so we shall see…