Keen observers of this website will have noticed an increase in blogging over the past week. In case you're thinking "maybe they're bored..." I thought I'd provide a little meta-post (blogging about blogging) to shed some light on what's up.

In a previous incarnation I was a business professor (cue dramatic music). I specialized in Strategic Management, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Over the years I became generally fascinated with the ways humans organize to get things done. My studies took me all over the map, into anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology (social network theory mostly), and technology.

The one thing I learned through that period of study that I vowed to make sure I carried forward? You must be open to be relevant. Without strict attention to processes, mechanisms and plain old effort, the best intentioned people in the best intentioned organizations risk becoming disconnected to their core purpose... the reason they exist in the first place.

Tom Peters (one of my favorite business authors) and many others have been talking about this kind of thing for a long time. But it is only relatively recently, with the advent of social media like blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. that the kinds of things Peters talked about (such as using Management by Walking Around to find out what's happening in and around your organization) have made it really easy to peer into (and out of) an organization.

So what? How does this matter? How does this make Calgary Arts Development better at realizing our mission? If you spend any time at all reading blogs or thinking about these kinds of questions, you should also spend some time perusing The Cluetrain Manifesto by Locke, Searls & Weinberger (you can read it online free...). Their main thesis is "markets are conversations." That is, whether you like it or not, there is a conversation going on about you and your organization, its products and services. You can't control it, but you can join in on it.

Hugh McLeod, a marketing consultant and proprietor of the site Gaping Void, has expanded the conversation about why blogging (and the like) is important for any organization that wishes to remain relevant in 2007 and beyond. He calls it "The Porous Membrane." His thesis is that blogs help to start and maintain important conversations that ultimately help keep your organization in tune with and in alignment with those who matter most.

And this takes us back to the start... why more blogging on calgaryartsdevelopment.com? It might be because I'm buying dinner for the team if we can maintain a post-a-day pace for 6 weeks. (Yes, I'm a master motivator!) No... it isn't that. It is really simple: we've got a lot going on right now. We understand that our success is the community's success, so we cannot risk disconnection. Everyone in our office wants and needs to understand the real opportunities, pressures, successes and laments that exist in our community. We do our best to get to as many real-life events as possible (that "walking around" thing really works!), but we can't be everywhere. It's our hope that these blog posts help you understand what we're thinking about, and we really hope that the odd post spurs discussion on these pages.

[NOTE: You can expect me to be posting about how we do our work, the reasoning behind the approaches we take, and probably a bit about some of the strategic issues we're grappling with. I also take requests.]

[DOUBLE NOTE: I suppose another reason we're blogging more is that last week Karen said... "why do we have a BLOGS tab at the top of our site if we don't actually blog?." To which Mike said "Huzzah!" and I threw down the dinner challenge and a few others around the table started to shiver. Stay tuned!]