I've unwittingly stumbled into writing another book - online - about the world and its future paths
Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 4:53PM 
The big clue? My whole eating and sleeping and day-jobs working habits fell into that same pattern I subconsciously adopt whenever I write a book. Finally I just turned to Vonne and said, "I feel like I'm writing an entirely new book online for Wikistrat."
To which she replied, "Duh! I picked up on that a couple of weeks ago."
Just finished the Social-Demographic "global trends" page in the Wikistrat Global Model that I'm building with Joel Zamel and his team. It clocked in at about 5200 words in all (summary, quick one-liners on top-dozen world powers, then six major trends, then six regions and their trends, then six major forecasts, and a wrap-up of opportunities, risks and dependencies). This is the third of six global trend pages that I'm populating. Done Political and Security, teeing up Sustainability, Technology and Economics. When all said and done, these six base pages will come to about 35,000 words, or the equivalent of my biggest book chapters (the Core-Gap chapter in PNM or the American Trajectory chapter in GP).
Many more base pages (the ones you visit most frequently to start your journey through the model) to go after that in preparation of launching the first iteration - or "lite" - model in early January.
I have to tell you, it really is like crunching down all my thinking from the trilogy of books but then writing it all in a new synthesis.
Actually, that's misleading because I'm stunned at how much new material I'm writing (like basically all of it and none of it at the same time). It's like I've slipped into this back-office alternative-universe of my work where I'm drilling downways and sideways and backways and upways [he typed, in his best imitation of Gene Wilder doing Willy Wonka] and it's feels like I'm creating something at once more concentrated and a lot more expansive - original but familiar.
It's hard to explain but it signals my creative juices are flowing.
It's not a book, but it's not just a lot of words either. It's these dense-matter concepts linked nodally to one another, the idea being that if you get enough linkages, it starts to take on its own thinking function.
My favorite-but-hard-to-deliver brief was my first in "The Brief" series that I use to this day (literally about 1000 slides later, a number I can verify because I sent that many on to Joel and Wikistrat for various embedding throughout the model--something I'm hugely excited to share in this fashion): a scenario-based exploration of alternative global futures that drilled down by regions and domain trends (same ones we're using at Wikistrat) and Waltzian levels (system, states, societies/leaders/individuals). In many ways, I'm recreating and updating that monster of a package but doing this time in a wiki structure, for which it is eminently more suited than that one-damn-thing-after-another (Tufte's criticism) manner of presentation that I employed in the original brief (long abandoned by me as a presentation approach--in part in response to attending Tufte's class).
So it's like I'm rewriting everything I've ever known/written/briefed/analyzed and - as writing goes - it is exhausting . . . just like a book but worse in the sense that it is the intellectually-hyperlinked, super-packed text style of that "State of the World" piece or the sidebar list from "The Pentagon's New Map" original article. Sort of like an encyclopedia entry but more dense--like my baker-supreme spouse's cheese cake, but filled with analysis instead of cheese (you can only eat so much at one sitting).
[Hmm. Must have been the Green Bay sojourn with Vonne Mei to Lambeau last Sunday. My inner cheesehead is melting from all this writing. Which gives me this other weird image: what would Hannibal Lecter do to a cheesehead? Would it be like that scene with actor Ray Liotta in that creepy sequel but more like a fondue?]
And I think that's fitting-- and fun for the reader. It'll be a place to visit again and again and sort of interact on your own with a virtual version of--initially--my strategic "brain" and later those of other analysts we bring on. [I'll be like some original code that slowly fades under the weight of new iterations--not unlike a parent with too many kids!]
It's an amazing intellectual challenge and before we turn it loose to the public, I will definitely take a snapshot and hide it away in some file cabinet, because it'll be the closest thing - for now - of a virtual version of me in all my intellectual glory (just plain gory to some, but glory to me). It almost feels like I'm transferring my mind to the web, so I get that same immortality tingling that I experience when I'm penning a book--this sense of intellectual completion.
But unlike a book, this thing will live and breathe online, interacting with, and changing in response to, readers and premium-readers-turned-contributors and content-generating clients. The scenarios will come in all forms, on all sorts of subjects, generating in all sorts of dynamics both mass and elite. Eventually, my initial populating of the model will recede, like some early lizard brain as this monster evolves upward, but it'll always be there--its strategic DNA.
Most importantly, it's delivering exactly what the Civil Affairs officer at Monterey was asking for: an online universe of my strategic thought that anybody can access and explore and absorb and - best of all - manipulate and make their own (he kept repeating, "I just can't help but think it would be great if there was this place . . . online . . . where all your thinking was crystalized and we could send officers there to get it down in their heads.")
Anyway, I just completed a bit and the whole emotion reminded me of putting a first draft of a chapter to bed, so I felt writing that down here, just like I do when I write a book.
Plus I'm putting off writing my weekly WPR column, which I think will be on Yemen.
Reader Comments (4)
Tom
As a long time follower of the blog, I have sensed you were up to something bigger than a new gig. The creative juices were beginning to ooze out of every post for the past several weeks. When you write:
"But unlike a book, this thing will live and breathe online, interacting with, and changing in response to, readers and premium-readers-turned-contributors and content-generating clients. The scenarios will come in all forms, on all sorts of subjects, generating in all sorts of dynamics both mass and elite."
This to me is the Medici Effect gone nuclear, with ideas pouring in and flowing out in an ever expanding circle. Looking forward to watching this grow and hopefully add my two cents now and then.
Thanks for adding bits of humor to these otherwise daunting international relations issues. I always get a good chuckle from you while simultaneously gaining new perspectives ~ keeps me from sinking into the muck of negations.
Just looking at this week's posts, Kashmir, the population density map, the physical barriers (i.e. the Hymalayas et. al) the cultural barriers, the action is at the seams. The US's clumsy approaches to the India/Pakistan problem, going on these 60+ years with China present on the northern side of the physical barrier with the G20 going on. I'd say worth another book with new synthesis. Keep up the good work.
During this "great transition" that the world is in the process of going through, I think that a non-partisan, popular work of global foresight, like this, is sorely needed. I think that the substance and tone of your early work is a perfect fit for this sort of endeavor. If there is anything that I can say to encourage you at all to pursue something like this, I'll say it. Whatever form it takes consider making it available to as wide an audience as possible. I think the world needs it. Works by Florida, Kotkin and Friedman can only get things so far. I always wondered what the 21st century (or the Gen X/Y) version of Megatrends or Powershift would look like... maybe this it is?