Today is my last day with ThoughtWorks.

It feels strange to be leaving a job I love with the most amazing company in the world, at a time when I should rightly be thankful for having a job in the first place. So, let me explain why I’m going.

Remember this post, back in November? I decided to actually do some work on the novel which has been hanging around my head for some years. Remember all the follow-up posts in which I told you how I was getting on?

No, neither do I.

The truth is that my day-to-day work – coaching, development, and learning about how brilliant, technical people think – has been taking up huge amounts of my life, time and creativity. I have no regrets about the energy I’ve put into it; watching teams and individuals learn and grow, knowing that I’ve been part of that, gives me pride and hope for the world. Learning how to help them better, and having them teach me, is fun and uplifting. It’s also incredibly draining on my creative energy. Looking back, I’ve hardly written any haiku in the last six months, and I’ve had no poetry published in two years. Nor have I made much progress with the novel.

So I’m going to leave ThoughtWorks and strike out part-time as an independent consultant. (I’m ideally looking for about three days a week leading or helping with Agile transformations, and will be flexible.)

The rest of my time will be going into ongoing training and development – giving my brain the space it needs to learn properly, to create the workshops and training courses which will be most effective – and, of course, writing my book. Maybe more than one of them.

So, from one world to others. I’ll be spending the next month or so in the diverse company of Grey the cat, Susan, Susan’s chair-dragon, Pigeon, Koley, Aquila, the Lunivore and the dryad of Islington Green.

They’re wonderful to be with, but I’ll still miss you.