Change and the Discworld

A new year is a good time for launching new ideas.

2008? Where did 2007 go? Seriously, I hope you all had a great holiday season and that 2008 will bring you what you hope for. As for us, Jan 1 2008 was the first official day of Bloomstorming (is that a word? Should it be?) and we're moving more to doing, rather than simply thinking, mode.

Bloomstorm, as you know if you've got this far, is about making real, enduring change happen. I've been trying to summarise the practical and effective nature of what we do with limited success and it has been an increasing source of frustration to me.

And this state would have continued, had I not been given a copy of Terry Pratchett's latest tome, 'Making Money,' for Christmas. For those who don't know (and I think this will include most readers outside of the UK) Terry Pratchett was the UK's biggest selling living author until a certain Ms Rowling introduced the world to Harry Potter. Pratchett's milieu is the Discworld, an alternate, late-middle-ages world with magic and is the most telling and consistent (and consistently funny) satire on our modern world that exists in print.

Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett uses humour to disguises the fact that he has quite a lot to say on matters of philosophy, theology, government and human nature.

And in this, his latest work, I found the following exchange:

"Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr Lipwig?"
"Because people don't like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one kind of normal to another."

This seems to me to be so accurate, so profoundly correct, that I am adopting it as my abiding principle for 2008: Make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

In Bloomstorm, we look forward to putting skates on change and strapping on the rockets...

Happy New Year.

- Mike