On Writing

This page did not move from Thompson's web site so here is the original with its links attached. FedWiki

I wrote in my original wiki for about a year before it began to feel a sense of wholeness. Some 450 pages that held the deeper learning of my experience of bringing the essence of agile to education.

It was then that Ward began to help me visualize the relationship of these pages, the patterns of meaning. This visualization was a breakthrough for me.

Writing in the wiki allowed me to reimagine what it meant to make meaning. I began to understand meaning-making as Holonic in nature, a Poetry of Patterns. Each word was a holon, a container of meaning. I would honor that, seeking a good that might delight.

Each paragraph, as a plugin, a moveable block, was a holon. A good that might delight.

Each page, a holon in an emerging holarchic structure.

And then patterns of increasing complexity began to emerge, as concepts clumped into clusters around anchors that revealed the richness of a garden whose deeper meaning was unfolding.

An image based on a premise that we all make meaning on a plane of consciousness. This meaning starts from a place of our truth. A center point. The zero point. The wellspring of our spirit through which our Creative Genius flows.

But, in truth, this original wiki was more of a labyrinth than a garden. Valuable for me, but largely inaccessible for others. It was then that I was given the idea of a story arc, in the shape of the golden mean, attached to interlinking concept nodes.

We start our stories from this truth. From there, it arcs out. But this story is told through concepts that have a deeper meaning to us. The story, then, not only forms a path by which we can succinctly convey meaning to others but also serves as a gateway to a garden of concepts - a Meaning Matrix - in which that story is more fully understood.

On Ward's recommendation, I created a new wiki where I told the story . As I did, I would reference concepts that I had developed in my original wiki. When these concepts were mentioned, I would fork that page over to the new site. I then forked over the pages linked on that page and the next level under it. In all, about 100 pages from my original garden were forked over.

Once these pages were brought over, I graphed them again in their entirety, allowing me to appreciate the clusters that were forming. I restructured that wiki into a print book that was published as The Dayton Experiment.

It took over a year for me to create 450 wiki pages.

Writing together here in this learning pod focused on Making the Future Together, it took us about a month to create the first 300 pages.

Will these pages form into a pattern of deeper meaning for others? We are not sure yet. But we trust that valuable meaning will organically emerge.

One that may become an important book someday, one that may help light the path forward both for the Agile movement and our organizations. One that may help companies better unleash the creative genius of all of their employees to design and build more vital and resilient systems.

This quest is a Hero's Journey. We don't know if, as we wander into the forest together, we will find our way back home with a new truth, a new wholeness. But a worthy quest, for sure.