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It seems a long time since August when I first sent my proposal to ChangeThis for my manifesto “Purposive Drift: making it up as you go along”. So thanks to all those who voted for my proposal, thanks to Gill for letting me know it was up, thanks to Sally Haldorson of 800-CEO-READ for a great editing job, and finally thanks to Karen for a nice, appreciative e-mail that arrived within hours of the manifesto going up.
If you want a look you can get to the manifesto HERE!

I don’t know about you, but I found 2006 to be a pretty fallow year. It wasn’t a particularly bad year, though there were plenty of frustrations. The problem for me was that little seemed to move and a lot of exits signs flashed with no clear way out. But alongside the frustrations and the sense of stasis, I suspect that I will look back at 2006 as time when a lot of seeds were planted that will take time to reach fruition.
My metaphor for the year was my discovery in early December of the word ‘kairos’and my quest to find how it might relate to purposive drift. It began with a link from Pat Kane’s del.icio.us list on his Play Journal blog to an article by Edwin Bendyk. In it Bendyk describes how attitudes to work and time in Poland had changed dramatically over the last ten years, with those in work now working some of the longest hours in Europe.
What caught my imagination was the distinction he made, late in his article, between Chronos (or Kronos) – clock time – and Kairos – “Kairos is the time of the archer who releases an arrow that travels through the space of eternity, creating an event.”
Now I suspect I must have come across this distinction before without fully registering it. Anyway, there was enough of a prompt in his brief discussion of this idea to set me off looking for a fuller explanation of the concept of Kairos. What followed was a pretty dreary trawl through the web finding and discarding what seemed like a mountain of uninspiring references, with odd one or two seeming nearly there, but not what I was looking for.
This journey that seemed to be getting nowhere carried on over several days. Not full time, of course, because I had other stuff to be getting on with, but long enough to begin to think I was on a fruitless quest. I had nearly reached the point of giving up, when I came across this:
“…The Greeks had two words for time. One, kronos, refers to the quantitative aspect of time; to time as continuous and thus as measurable. That is the aspect of time with which we are most familiar – in our contemporary world we think of time as clock time and calendar time. History (at least according to the modernist world-view) unfolds in kronos time.
The other word for time, kairos, refers to time’s discontinuous, qualitative aspect; to time as differing in kind from one moment to the next. In kairos time there are kinds of time that are apples and others that are oranges. There is a time when the rain will fall from a cloud, a time to attack the enemy in a battle, a time to negotiate a truce, a point in time that is qualitatively different from the time in kronos just before. (In modern Greek kairos is translated as ‘‘opportunity.’’) When the book of Ecclesiastes was translated into Greek from the Hebrew Bible, kairos was the word used for time in the passage that became the text of a popular song in the 1960s: ‘‘A time to plant, a time to reap, a time to laugh, a time to cry . . .’’ (adapted from Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8).
Kairos is the time of tactical appropriateness, of shifting priorities and objects of attention from one qualitativel differing moment to the next. This is time as humanly experienced; ‘‘in the fulness of time,’’ the emergent ‘‘not quite yet,’’ the ‘‘now’’ that once arrived feels right. It is a brief strip of right time, marked at its beginning and end by turning points. It is not simply a particular duration in clock time. Yet every kairos strip of time has a location in kronos time.”
This passage is from the opening chapter of Frederick Erickson’s “Talk and Social Theory” my book of 2006 and probably of 2007 too. It is hard to describe the sense of pleasure, relief and excitement and above all the sense of rightness of hitting this after wading through so much unpromising material.
My initial enthusiasm was at finding this key to using the concept of kairos to think with – a concept that makes articulate the underlying, but previously unarticulated basis of purposive drift. But more than that Erikson’s book is filled with ideas and insights about how we interact with each other and our world – a book I know I will return to many times to prompt trails of fresh thoughts. (It’s also a good example of how putting up free material on the web can pay off – I bought the book and have been busily recommending to friends ever since.)
I draw a few disorganised thoughts from this experience. The first is that the process of finding a glimmer of an idea, wading through a long, seeming unpromising period of feeling as if I was getting nowhere and then hitting that moment of rightness is the dark side of purposive drift – the bit I have drawn least attention to. Living a life of purposive drift does mean experiencing periods of time where nothing much seems to be happening. The difficulty with this is that it is often hard to tell whether actually nothing much is really happening or whether there is a whole lot going on, but you just can’t see it.
By one of those convenient coincidences, John Naughton recently posted a quote from Don DeLillo, which tied in with one of the things I had been pondering about the relationship between kairos and purposive drift. The question I was pursuing was how do we know when we are wasting time? As DeLillo says:
“One’s personality and vision are shaped by other writers, by movies, by paintings, by music. But the work itself, you know — sentence by sentence, page by page — it’s much too intimate, much too private, to come from anywhere but deep inside the writer himself. It comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out of the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and, in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming. It’s too deep to be attributed to clear sources.”
What DeLillo is talking about here is the “wasting time” that could be confused with procrastination, maybe sometimes is procrastination. How do you tell when you are allowing what I call your back brain to be getting on with stuff or simply putting off doing something you should be getting on with?
There is another kind of wasting time, which is the time spent when you are waiting for the right moment to do something. The moment when the elements in a situation you are trying change come together in a configuration that will enable an intervention to have a desired effect. This is almost the opposite of the letting your back brain get on with stuff, where you are having to turn off attention. Here paying attention is your key activity, but again it can seem as if you are doing nothing. And, once more, how do you tell whether your attentive waiting is purposeful or just putting off something you should do?
But perhaps one of the activities where it is the hardest to know whether you are wasting time is when you are on a quest like my search for kairos. Had I stopped before I found Erikson’s chapter, I might well have concluded that I had been wasting my time. The difficulty here is that the thrill of the chase can blind you to the fact that the quest might be misguided, a happy, busy way of filling time that takes you nowhere.
I am still thinking my way through all this, but my intuition is that the notion of Kronos has become so embedded in our being that we have lost much of our sense of Kairos. My feeling is that if we were to cultivate our sense of Kairos, we would suffer less from from wondering whether we were wasting time or not. Clearly something I will be returning to many times in the future.

The Apple (i)phone been presented as a very sexy gadget, but I suspect its real significance lies beneath the flash in its multi-touch interface. Like many people, I assumed that this was based on the work of Jeff Han and his team at New York University’s Courant Institute, which he demonstrated at a recent TED conference. However, a bit of digging around suggests that the basis of this UI is much more solid and based on work that has already resulted in real products (iGesture and Touchstream), much loved by their users.
The seeds of these products began their life in a PhD thesis by Wayne Westerman, at the University of Delaware, supervised by Professor John Elias. They then went on to found Fingerworks, which, while the purchase is shrouded in a certain amount of mystery, was later bought by Apple.
The significance of their work is summed up in this extract from a press release in September 2002:
“Elias said the communication power of their system is “thousands of times greater” than that of a mouse, which uses just a single moving point as the main input. Using this new technology, two human hands provide 10 points of contact, with a wide range of motion for each, thus providing thousands of different patterns, each of which can mean something different to the computer.
While much about the computer has changed over the last three decades greater power, faster speeds, more memory what has not changed is the user interface.
“For what it was invented for, the mouse does a good job,” Elias said. “People accept the mouse and the mechanical keyboard because that’s the way it is. But there are limitations in terms of information flow. There is so much power in the computer, and so much power in the human, but the present situation results in a communications bottleneck between the two.”
Elias and Westerman have a better idea. “I believe we are on the verge of changing the way people interact with computers,” Elias said. “Imagine trying to communicate with another human being using just a mouse and a keyboard. It works, but it is slow and tedious.”
Elias said he could envision in the next 10 years “a very complex gestural language between man and machine.””
This would seem to answer a complaint about current computer technology raised by Brian Eno in interview in Wired twelve years ago:
“What is pissing me off about this thing? What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you?”
If Apple pushes forward with this technology, as I think they must, we may see their phone as being even more significant than the Mac in changing the way we interact with computers. Just as the Mac, regard by many when it was introduced as just a toy, brought the insights of the team at Xerox Parc to the mass market, the iphone, or whatever it will be called, will shift in perception from being just a sexy, desirable gadget to being seen as the forbear of a range of devices that engage much of our body and more of our mind.

Nabeel Hamdi’s code of conduct for professional planners, looks like pretty good advice for all of us:
“work backwards, move forwards; start where you can”
“recognise your own ignorance”
“never say ‘can’t'”
“be reflective”
“embrace serendipity”
“challenge consensus”
“look for multipliers”
“feel good about yourself”
So maybe we should all buy his book, “Small Change: The Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities” to show our support.(UK here, USA here)
(Too often I leave out the convoluted chain of links that lead to one of my posts. Since this chain is a bit simpler and contains two of my best sources of links and ideas, I thought I’d better try. It began with a link on Abe Burmeister’s excellent abstractdynamics to a thoughtful article by John Thackara on on his blog, where I was intrigued by a bit about Nabeel Hamdi, who I googled and found the bit that ended up here in a review of Hamdi’s book by Nick Falk on the Resurgence site, from which I took the quote.)

Back in 1995 Nick Routledge (Nick then, Nick nowish) invited me to contribute to his site World3. So I sent him a longish piece, “As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now?”. In the short accompanying bio I described myself, in part as a joke, as presentologist. So I got a little frisson of pleasure,when delving into the writings of Russell Ackoff, to find a paper that begins:
“I am not the right person to have been assigned the topic, “Thinking about the Future.” I am a presentologist, not a futurologist.
So much time is currently spent in worrying about the future that the present is allowed to go to hell. Unless we correct some of the world’s current systemic deficiencies now, the future is condemned to be as disappointing as the present.
My preoccupation is with where we would ideally like to be right now. Knowing this, we can act now so as constantly to reduce the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Then, to large extent, the future is created by what we do now. Now is the only time in which we can act.”

Slightly stung by a comment by Gill on my first entry for 2007 asking why I had made no “drift” predictions, I refered her to a longish piece I posted on July 18, 2003, “It’s hard to predict”.
Reading it again I was quite pleased to see that my intuitions still stand and are still working their way through the shifting aspects of the world where we can practice purposive drift.
The three predictions were these:
“The first is that we should still expect a lot of disruptive, technological surprises to come.
The second is that network thinking, or what George Nelson called the “connections game”, is going to become a key ability in life and in business.
And the third is that analogue interfaces to digital media are going to be a hot area of development over the next few years.”
Taking one little chunk out of this longish piece as my thought for 2007 (and something I should pay attention to myself) I put forward this one:
“… the strongest advice I could give to any individual or business is to become sensitive to where you fit in your networks, learn to think in terms of nodes and connections and the complex interactions and feedback between them, and be conscious of the dynamics of your patterns of connection. Whether you are aware of it or not, your success or failure is going to bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks.”

At this time of year we all need space for a meditative journey. A good place to start is to click through Hans Konig‘s “Little Book of Comforts and Gripes”. Take a wander with him and enjoy the trip.

Ed Sutt and his team at Stanley Bostitch have rethought the nail to improve the capabilities of buildings to withstand the effects of hurricanes and earthquakes. When Ed Sutton was a post-graduate student he discovered that the weak point in buildings constructed using wood was the nails that held them together.In 2000 after gaining his Phd he joined Stanley Bostitch and began working on the solution – the HurriQuake nail.
You can read about how Ed Sutt and his team developed the HurriQuake nail here.
Listen to an interview here.
And look at the technical details here.
Thanks to the invaluable 3Quarks for the tip off.

For some bizarre reason I have spent the last hour or so reading commencement speeches. Among them was one by Susan Sontag that she gave at Wellesley College in 1983. In a backhanded kind of way it is quite comforting to read a passage about the President of USA then,that, given a few minor changes, could have been written today. But I won’t quote that one – you can read it yourself – instead I draw your attention to this one, which is worth some moments of time to ponder:
“As individuals we are never outside of some system which bestows significance. But we can become aware that our lives consist: both really and potentially, of many systems. That we always have choices, options—and that it is a failure of imagination (or fantasy) not to perceive this. The large system of significance in which we live is called “culture.” In that sense, no one is without a culture. But in a stricter sense, culture is not a given but an achievement, that we have to work at all our lives. Far from being given, culture is something we have to strive to protect against all incursions. Culture is the opposite of provinciality—the provinciality of the intellect, and the provinciality of the heart. (Far from being merely national, or local, it is properly international.) The highest culture is self-critical and makes us suspicious and critical of state power.”

“What is small, dark, and knocking at the door?”
Answer: “…The future!”
Thanks to Bruce Sterling for the tip
And to my friends in Romania, especially Costica, I hope all goes well for you and that your futures are bright and large.