An Important Milestone

The blog is proud to announce that it has achieved half a million clicks!

It started in 2009 and I never imagined that it would still be running 13 years later – although my statistic is dwarfed by a friend’s blog which has clocked up three times as many clicks for a highly specialised blog which posts daily with a Marxist exegesis and the occasional contemporary comment.

Most blogs milk the writer’s specialism. And, indeed, that’s how I started – having worked for 20 years in ex-communist countries on issues of “institutional development”. Forgive the jargon – it’s the term used by consultants to describe the dubious processes used to justify the establishment of state structures which then allowed western capital to ravage central European societies. It should be noted that I defined “consultants” in my little, sceptical Just Words as “con-merchants who act as Sultans”. 

I started this blog a few months later – with three objectives

· This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

· I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination to read widely.

· A final motive for the blog is more c omplicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us?

And the blog has become something to which I devote most mornings. I came young to responsibility (becoming a Chairman of a social work authority at the tender age of 28) giving me a certain sense that what I was doing had some wider significance. And by the time I was 32 I found myself one of the leaders of a Region responsible for the public services of half of Scotland. And able to use this position to develop new ways of doing things – and having the luxury of sharing my reflections about our work in academic and other journals. A year ago, I mused about these aims using the johari window to be a bit more personal than I normally allow myself.

It’s appropriate that the 60 page paper I put up recently on the blog focused on how various writers have treated the issue of change since understanding change and making appropriate interventions has been the story of my life since 1968.

Memoirs and autobiographies allow us all to reflect on our lives – and I recently posted a very personal selection of what I considered to be some jewels in this genre. A recent example was a collected tribute (or Festschrift) to one of the true greats of decision-making entitled An Heretical Heir to the Enlightenment – politics, policy and science in the work of Charles Lindblom ed Harry Redner (1993) which takes 110 propositions attributed to him by his colleagues and has him assess their veracity in a final chapter.