The Perfect Path

I first started writing on the internet, in the style we then called weblogging in about 2001. Experiments came and went, I would write and then delete the whole thing, like some emo teenager burning his journals. I worried a great deal about what people at work would think. I've tried to remember where these things happened to see whether there's any trace - I used Blogger before they sold out to Google and Radio Userland for a while, but little of those days survives, even in the fabulous Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.

And then I gave up my job and went independent and continued to experiment although I now had different fears about being visible. At least in my job before I'd been able to treat it as an interesting tool that might work for y'know, actual work. But now I was a bit dazzled by the other consultants around me who talked very seriously about their marketing strategies and I worried that a personal blog would detract from my burgeoning and all-important gravitas.

Luckily, I also kept reading other people's blogs and listened to the collective voices of the blogosphere who pointed out that a well-kept blog was probably a good source of professional reputation in a knowledge-rich economy.

So I made it official in the autumn of 2004 after I'd finished a long interim management contract and was looking round for something else and able to pootle on the internet for a while. I named it Perfect Path and bought perfectpath.co.uk after the consulting business I'd started and that was meant to refer to something I'd learned about complexity and chaos theories, that there's a creative boundary between order and chaos that can be navigated, lean one way or the other too far and you get stuck in regimented stagnant order or fall into the chaotic space where nobody knows which way is up. But between them there's what I dubbed a "perfect path" and the idea was that my consulting would focus on helping my clients to walk along that path. And so I kind of wrote about those ideas and where I saw it manifesting in the world and what it all might have to do with managing knowledge.

And that's the path I've been treading, sometimes more explicitly than at others, ever since. My blog still exists, but for the last eighteen months or so I've been writing almost exclusively here on Steemit and if you've been listening to my vlogs and podcasts, you'll know that I'm still very interested in the relationship between chaos and order and finding a way between them.