Going Back to My Old Neighborhood

For the past several days, I've been visiting one of my old haunts, Northern Virginia (🙌 to my NoVa peeps!), where I started my professional career, my wife and I bought our first house, and my older son was born. We moved away over 25 years ago.

I've visited the area in the intervening years on occasion, but I took the time today to go back to my old neighborhood, walk by my old house, and take a walk in the neighborhood park. Intellectually, I knew things would be different after 25 years, but it hit me viscerally on my visit today just how much things #change. I felt an enduring connection to the place while also feeling very much like a stranger in a new, but vaguely familiar place.

This got me thinking that just like neighborhoods can and do change, people and organizations change. When we are working day to day, we may think things will never change. We may also look at our colleagues and assume that they will always exhibit the same behavior and ways of thinking as they do now, assuming they have a fixed mindset. However, in reality, people and organizations both have the capacity to change and undergo change over time.

Change is emergent based on new experiences, new practices, new colleagues, and new interactions. While we are present in an organization, we can and do influence change by our own actions, how we treat others, who we attract to our organization, etc. Changes in organizational structure, reward systems, and management styles also drive new cultural norms, practices, and values. Change isn't something that just happens - we make our own change by our actions and decisions on a day to day basis. We may not see the change happening because we are too close to it, but over time it is easy to see.

As a practiced external agile coach, you only have a limited amount of time you "live in the neighborhood", so your direct influence only extends to the duration of your tenure. To have the greatest long term impact, your most important job is to support internal individuals and cultivate their ability to effect positive change on their own. As "long term residents", they will play the biggest role in determining the future character and culture of the organization.

Just like I did today in visiting my old neighborhood, if you come back to visit the organization years later and see that it has developed in ways you couldn't imagine or in ways that you don't recognize, that's perfectly OK. In fact, it might be that the more change you see, the better job you did empowering internal change agents and instilling a culture of continuous improvement.

Most important, if you do go back to visit, remember that the organization needs to work for the people that live within the organization, not how you might have envisioned it when you were coaching. I do think, though, that if you squint enough, you'll be able to see traces of the impact you had while you were "living in the neighborhood."