Not quite ‘Bah, humbug!’

This year’s Christmas long since passed, and New Year too – and I’ve done almost nothing about either of them. Not quite ‘Bah, humbug!’ – more that I simply hadn’t noticed… Oops…

In some ways it’s hardly a surprise that it should all slip past my attention. Christmas is for Christians, families and children – none of which themes are especially relevant to my own life these days. With friends and colleagues my only real ‘family’, scattered as they are across the globe, most connections are virtual, and happen in virtual-world time – hence arbitrary events with little cultural context barely seem to register right now. And New Year is a good example of an ‘absurd belief‘ – an extraordinary excitement about a very ordinary and entirely imaginary point in time. (It’s supposed to mark the solstice, but that passes by some eleven days earlier than the ‘New Year’ – a relic of a calendar-adjustment several centuries back.) Why bother? It’s just another day that’s disappeared from view, just like all the others…

Yet such arbitrary inventions do have their uses, and one of them – in this case – is to reflect on what’s happened over the previous year. Dunno, really: it’s all been a bit of a blur… 🙂

Mostly a time of change, for me, as it has been for so many others. Two new books on enterprise-architecture; another of my old film-scripts out in published form as a book and e-book; a formal paper on methodology for the peer-reviewed archaeology journal Time & Mind. A blur of enterprise-architecture conferences, in Seattle, London (twice) and Hong Kong; a blur of meetings with many different people, scattered round in various places in Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere; and a slow, sad recognition that it’s been an almost total waste of time trying to get anything going in the fast-decaying corpse of present-day corporate Britain, and that I need to accept that it’s time to move on once more. Hence even more change to come in the year and years ahead – though as yet I have no clear sense of which way it will take me. Another case of ‘Watch This Space’, I guess?

What’s also clear is that for someone who claims to be interested in social structures and social-media, I haven’t been particularly social in any sense over the past year: more like withdrawing further and further into my shell, in fact, in an accelerating evasion of engagement that hasn’t been much help in any sense, for anyone. Hence many apologies to all those whom I’ve somewhat let down in that regard over the past year – especially the Whole-of-Enterprise Architecture group on LinkedIn, which I’ve allowed to fall fallow for far too many months. New Year Resolution on that score is definitely one of ‘Must Do Better’!

Other definite goals for the coming year include a couple more books, including the Yabbies project that’s already been brewing for more than a decade – more on that in the coming months, of course. And also looking forward to more projects like the recent set in Central America, linking enterprise-architecture and organisational-change throughout every layer of the enterprise.

In the meantime, enjoy your New Year, wherever you may be – and have fun, of course!

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