I’ve started looking towards next year, and the launch of the new publishing arm of Sea Salt Learning. We live in a renaissance of publishing, where reports of the death of print have been seen to be naive as, instead, it’s simply adapted. Both to high value art, and democratised crowds of funders and creators, as well as an essential gift format.
At a time of broadening social collaboration in particular, magazines are thriving: crowd funded publications like ‘A Profound Waste of Time’ (video games) or ‘Lets Explore Magazine’ (curated and themed collections of photos and prose) have generated loyal and dynamic global audiences, whilst providing their creators a degree of freedom and agency (as well as, i’m sure, an equal degree of stress and anxiety!).
For my own latest book, ‘The Humble Leader’ (crowd funded), the artefact is central to the experience: indeed, there will be no eBook version of this. The action of reflection is grounded in the physical experience, and even though that may limit what it does commercially, i’m ok with that, because publishing does not have to be a commercial venture!
I’ve always described my own books as yesterdays thoughts: you write and iterate them, version after version, and then you finally give it away, and that is that. Your thinking stops: nailed to the page through indelible ink. But your ideas surge forward. A book represents what i used to think, and acts as the foundation for what i will think next.
That’s where i find the digital platforms come to life: this year i’ve loved using SubStack as dynamic, reflective space, for Social Leadership Daily (to be in practice) and Learning Fragments (to be wrong, or simply curious), and even The Identity Project (to bring hidden stories to light).
The blog remains my first reflective space, something as far away from print as it’s possible to be, whilst still carrying a permanence.
Our conversational spaces, like Twitter, Teams, Slack or WhatsApp have been much in the news, especially Twitter, as it struggles through paroxysms of self doubt and hostility under new ownership, but what really matters is not the specific platform, but rather the fluid space that these platforms create: space for conversations, albeit some of them of difference and dissent.
So ‘Publishing’ is a broad church for me: from the physical to digital, from the permanent to the conversational, from the certain to the curious.
I’m excited to be making plans to spin Publishing out from the main business into an entity in it’s own right: partly because i think the time is right, and partly because what fun! In an age of democratised technology and this renaissance of books, and with a view that publishing is an integral part of my own creative process, i’m excited to shape a tiny part of this ecosystem. To create something from nothing is a deeply satisfying affair.
My Writing
I’ve had a real focus on the Learning Science Guidebook over the last three weeks, and have shared the latest post of our collaboration here, exploring Nested Contexts:
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2022/11/23/learning-science-guidebook-4-nested-contexts/
I think that this one nicely shows how we are tying the science into the broader observed trends in Organisational Learning, from generic to individual, from central to distributed, and so on.
I’ve also shared a behind the scenes reflection on the Guidebook over on Learning Fragments, here.
An output from the current Culture Explorer programme has been to consider ‘the enemy’, and how we sometimes create it.
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2022/11/24/making-the-enemy/
I think that there is something in this: how opposition can unify us, but how true change may require us to recognise that we construct opposition as often as truly discovering it.
The Humble Leader had a great launch last week: there are still copies of the first print run available here:
With best wishes
Julian
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