Purposive Drift

A thought for 2007

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.

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."