I started writing this about a year ago as a way of wrestling with some ideas I had been thinking about for years. It was supposed to be something I could do fast and easy. In the event, the very act of writing it changed what I was thinking and after a fast burst of the Prologue and the opening chapter it became a much slower, more difficult process. So slow in fact it has almost ground to halt.
One of my motives for setting up this site is to provide me with an incentive to get Purposive Drift going again. It always was my intention to write this on-line. I liked the notion of engaging with an audience during the process of writing and allowing that process to influence my thinking and what I wrote. I want to make writing a more collaborative process – more of a conversation than a speech.
My friend, Ben Copsey, who has put this site together for me, built an earlier version of the site to do it, but my deep technophobia got in the way. Instead, as I wrote each chapter I emailed them to a small circle of friends and other people I knew. Some people have warmed to what I have done so far and want more. Others have been cooler about the presentation. So this is very much a work in progress. Five chapters have been done and you can read them here. There’s another seventeen to come, who knows quite when. It may depend on you…
000 Prologue: Valued Moments
001 Purposive Drift
002 The Myth of the Machine
003 Plans, Processes and Mindlessness
004 Chreods, Grotesques and other monsters
UPDATE 25 March 2007
For my most recent thinking you can download my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along” from the ChangeThis site:
“Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”