10 Years of Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Writing

10 years ago my first post appeared here on the blog. A brief inter­im bal­ance about what moved me in the course of 540 posts and what I was priv­i­leged to move and expe­ri­ence through them.

Pre­cise­ly 10 years ago, on June 7, 2010, I pub­lished my first blog post (avail­able only in Ger­man). I start­ed blog­ging at that time with a mix­ture of curios­i­ty and fas­ci­na­tion, but also with the hope to make myself and our new­ly found­ed con­sult­ing com­pa­ny, esc Solu­tions GmbH, known through good con­tent. That was my very lean strate­gic plan, but plan­ning replaces coin­ci­dence by error any­way (some­thing which I also wrote about in the first month). Besides, I like it any­how bet­ter when things and chances arise in the flow of life (much lat­er I found the con­cept of Wu Wei for this and real­ized that for me it’s about life paths not career paths).

This first step has result­ed in 540 posts to date, since 2018 bilin­gual in Ger­man and Eng­lish. The focus shift­ed from project man­age­ment at the begin­ning (a main focus of esc Solu­tions’ con­sult­ing ser­vices at that time) to lead­er­ship, agili­ty and new work. Always remained the focus on my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and the expe­ri­ences at hand. I always wrote and still write about the top­ics that were close to my heart or that occu­pied me at that time. That also explains the sub­ti­tle, bor­rowed from a book by Hein­rich von Kleist and slight­ly mod­i­fied: Grad­ual fab­ri­ca­tion of thoughts while writing.

Start by doing what’s nec­es­sary; then do what’s pos­si­ble; and sud­den­ly you are doing the impossible.

Fran­cis of Assisi

Writ­ing helps me to think and digest. Hav­ing to get to the heart of some­thing in writ­ing helps me to pen­e­trate top­ics bet­ter, to under­stand con­nec­tions bet­ter and final­ly to sort my thoughts. In the course of the last 10 years, the week­ly blog post has become a rit­u­al of men­tal hygiene that I would not want to miss anymore.

The fas­ci­na­tion with coin­ci­den­tal encoun­ters that occur here on the blog or in social media on the basis of the arti­cles has also remained through­out the years. Among oth­er things, these encoun­ters led to such excit­ing ini­tia­tives as the PM Camp move­ment or openPM. It took me sev­er­al years to under­stand that this gen­er­ous shar­ing is there­fore also a core con­cept of Work­ing Out Loud. And then it took a few more years and the move to the cor­po­rate world to under­stand why it takes Work­ing Out Loud in such struc­tures to pro­mote this behav­ior, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry full of pain of adap­ta­tion.

In ret­ro­spect, I have to say that the approach of gen­er­at­ing reach and aware­ness through con­tent works well, but took much longer than I had hoped back then. Now, after ten years, with more than 1,100 recip­i­ents in the newslet­ter and 12,000 vis­its with 17,000 page views per month, it is work­ing quite well, which man­i­fest­ed itself in many requests for keynotes and work­shops.

The suc­cess of the Man­i­festo for Human(e) Lead­er­ship as a book cer­tain­ly played a sig­nif­i­cant role in this. This showed me that blog and book com­ple­ment and mutu­al­ly stim­u­late each oth­er very well. Maybe this will not be my last book. After all, it would cer­tain­ly be worth­while to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly work through the expe­ri­ences of four years of agile trans­for­ma­tion (work­ing title: Per­sis­tent in effort, mod­est in expec­ta­tion of suc­cess). And the nov­el frag­ment about every­day cor­po­rate life (work­ing title: On the handrail into the deci­sion-mak­ing cir­cle) is far from com­plete. It will come to pass, just like many oth­er things in recent years. But one thing is cer­tain: This was not the last post here in the blog!

I would like to thank my many loy­al read­ers and espe­cial­ly those who reg­u­lar­ly sup­port my work here via Steady (by doing so you help to keep this site free of ads as it has been for the last 10 years).

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By Marcus Raitner

Hi, I'm Marcus. I'm convinced that elephants can dance. Therefore, I accompany organizations on their way towards a more agile way of working. Since 2010 I regularly write about leadership, digitization, new work, agility, and much more in this blog. More about me.

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