Not so surprising that while working on rediscovering where my passions were I re-discovered one that I knew was there. But now I have a new name for it.

First a bit of a story. Last years were a great journey into a networked world – living and working “on the network”, emerging from social connections that defy structure and boundaries. I also saw quite a few people moving from working for an organisation to becoming self-employed networked professionals (last year at Elmine’s birthday party conference we discussed it as “working in the cloud“).

However, I also feel that the networked ways of working are somewhat idealised, often in contrast to organisations with their controls, hierarchies and lack of transparency. But, if you look deeper it’s often about an ecosystem, where networked professionals feed of the “old-fashioned” organisational structures (as an experiment you take a couple of your favourite social media consultants and check their client list :)

May be it’s my preferences for sitting on the boundary (and building bridges ;), but I find important to think not in terms of polarities between networks and organisations, but about synergies. Now I picked up a new way to call it - triangulation – from conversations with Nancy White on connections between organisations and learning that happens in networks. (Nancy promised to blog about it and I’ll make sure it’s linked from here).

What is funny that if I look back at what I was thinking about over the last few years I see interest in triangulation everywhere: integrating formal and informal learning (and earliest PhD proposal about it), playing with forces in a middlespace,  connections between communities and courses, bringing blogging into work or into integrating it into research…  At my PhD defense one of the questions was about “sitting on the fence” methodology-wise and not making an explicit choice between a “conventional PhD” and “blogging PhD”. Guess what – I talked why triangulating those is important :)

• Leadership as releasing the energy of others
• Playing with forces in a middlespace
• Middlespace: predicting and managing bottom-up processes