How to Move This Blog Forward?
As you can see by the frequency of writing here, this weblog on energy regime change is not my main topic of interest, nor is it my core blogging activity. Although there is an enormous amount of material to write about in terms of this blog’s theme, I find it difficult to ‘convert’ this material into entries here.
Some reasons, apart from finding my blogging rhythm in general, while contributing to 8 or more weblogs in some shape or form, seem to be:
1) The confusing and complicated mix of themes that get entangled whenever you start talking about moving away from oil towards possible other energy regimes. Political schools of thought, debates on the truthfulness of data and theories, debates on the scientific solidity of material, throwing multiple agenda’s on one heap (e.g. energy conservation, alternative energy resources, mixed in with wider ‘green’ agenda’s like battling bio-industry and promoting bio-cultures etc.), the liberal-conservative political dichotomies in the UK and especially the US, where every other discussion seems to end in either ‘you’re liberal so you hate the US’ or ‘you’re a greedy capitalist republican that believes everything Bush and his cronies say in return for more tax-cuts’. Anyway I’m ranting…
2) My own undecidedness which part of this discussion is ‘mine’, and my lack of knowledge about all the different subthemes and arena’s. This makes it difficult to both pick a main theme, as well as pick the place to start interacting with others on this.
3) Me not taking my own professional knowledge and experience into account while approaching the subject of energy regime change. I am a change management professional after all, and I have positioned this blog to be about energy regime change, precisely because it is such an intriguing and complex thing to accomplish. I was drawn to it out of both professional and personal interest (which to the largest extent are the same anyway), but seem to have forgotten to bring my own professional baggage to it. Even though doing that, being a Pro-Am in a way, is precisely what I am telling audiences is happening throughout society as well as to me, in my presentations and key notes.
I think this happened because the bewildering chaos of discussion and argument I sketched above has distracted me from my original plan. When I read a discussion I feel the need to take position as well, and in this case most of the time that is just a waste of energy and time. A lot of these discussions are of no real significance and will be overtaken by facts and developments soon enough, while at the same time there is no way to resolve them in the here and now. So I bogged myself down in a quagmire of details and shouting matches that don’t really matter, all told. I allowed myself to get stuck in the mud.
Time to pick ‘my’ storyline in this, and stick to it, so that it gives me energy instead of taking it away from me. And energy is what this blog was meant to be about in the first place, right? Time to free myself from the mud and fly.
Photos: Bog Man by Amonkeykuppa under Creative Commons license, Paraglider by myself.
This weblog is written by Ton Zijlstra (Enschede, Netherlands). I'm a knowledge management and change management consultant.
