Yesterday, I highlighted a Harvard Business Review article with the central point that “Before you can create, you must forget”. At the end of the post, I encouraged readers to consider three questions as they embark on 2011:
1. What am I willing to forget, in order to create long-term value and success?
2. What preparations do I need to make today, to achieve the longer view?3. How can I free up organizational memory to embrace creation and change?
Today, I want to share my own ‘creating and forgetting’ decisions for 2011, which will influence the Elemental Links writing and service agendas for the foreseeable future.
First, the fun part. The creating. As first reported in June, I identified a business-technology-capability-value path that I want to pursue. If you’ve ever visited the Elemental Links business homepage, you won’t be surprised to learn this path pertains to increasing Business Visibility and Responsiveness.
The short story, I’ll be exploring the capabilities, techniques, architectures and technologies that contribute to organizations being Change-Friendly.
Along the way, I’ll incorporate all of my soapbox items, including how getting change-friendly connects to the transition of enterprise architects from archivists to activists.
I’m quite excited about this pursuit and mildly enamored with the current sketch on my whiteboard.
Now, the hard part. The forgetting. To effectively pursue the change-friendly line of research and grow the related services, I need to stop doing something else.
After much consideration, I made the difficult decision not to renew my advocacy work with the OMG’s Business Ecology Initiative and Communities of Practice. I truly enjoyed my time working with Richard, his team, and of course, the community members.
As for Elemental Links’ primary services – advisory and enterprise consulting – it is business as usual.
Ah, together at last. The 
