Over the years, I have had the opportunity to return to several organizations after long periods away. In three cases, the gap was around ten years. These were large, established organizations. They had existed long before I first worked with them and would presumably continue to exist long after I left. When I returned, I therefore expected a certain degree of familiarity. I was, after all, returning to the same organization.
And in some ways I was. The company name was the same. A few familiar people were still there. Some things were immediately recognizable. But the organization itself felt remarkably different.
Ten Years of Ordinary Change
There was nothing mysterious about this. People had left and new people had arrived. Leadership had changed. Teams had been reorganized. Products and systems had evolved. Priorities had shifted. New initiatives had appeared and old ones had disappeared. None of this required a dramatic transformation. It was simply what happens when an organization continues operating for ten years.
From inside the organization, those changes probably happened gradually. One person left. Another was hired. A team was reorganized. A system changed. A new manager arrived. A different priority emerged. Each change became part of normal organizational life.
Returning after ten years was different because I encountered the accumulated result all at once. The company was still there. The organization I remembered largely was not.
The Same Company?
This made me wonder what we actually mean when we talk about the same company. Institutionally, there is little difficulty. The company has a name, a history and a legal identity that persist over time. We can talk quite comfortably about a company that has existed for fifty, a hundred or even several hundred years.
But the organization that people actually experience is much less permanent. Imagine taking a snapshot of an organization today: its people, leadership, teams, products, systems, priorities, responsibilities and ways of working.
Then take another snapshot ten years later. Even in a very large and relatively slow-moving organization, how much would still be the same? Probably much less than the continued use of the same company name suggests.
An Organizational Generation
There is another way of looking at those ten years. When we talk about generations of people, we usually think in terms of several decades. Thirty years is a reasonable approximation.
An organizational generation may be considerably shorter. Ten years can be enough for much of the leadership to change, large numbers of employees to leave, new people to arrive, organizational structures to evolve, systems to change and priorities to shift.
In that sense, returning after ten years may mean returning not merely to an older version of the organization, but to another organizational generation. The interesting part is that there is no clear boundary between those generations.
One organizational generation does not leave on Friday so that another can arrive on Monday. People overlap. Systems span generations. New structures inherit parts of old structures. Some practices continue while others disappear. New people learn from people who themselves learned from an earlier generation.
The replacement is gradual. There is no handover ceremony between one organization and the next. The company simply continues.
The Ship of Theseus at Work
There is something of the Ship of Theseus in this. If the parts of a ship are gradually replaced until none of the original parts remain, in what sense is it still the same ship?
Organizations make the question even more complicated because they replace far more than their physical parts. They replace people, structures, technologies, products, priorities and ways of working, while continuing to operate under the same institutional identity.
A company that has existed for a hundred years may therefore have passed through many organizational generations.
And yet we still experience continuity. Customers continue dealing with the company. Employees inherit responsibilities from people who came before them. Products continue developing. Decisions made by one generation affect another. Commitments survive the people who originally made them. Somehow, the organization crosses those generational boundaries.
Reflection
Returning after ten years made something visible that is much harder to notice while working inside an organization. Organizations change continuously, and the cumulative change can be enormous.
The company I returned to was unquestionably the same company. Yet in many practical respects, it was a different organization from the one I had left. Perhaps that is entirely normal. Perhaps even the largest and slowest-moving organizations have generations measured not in decades, but in years.
That leaves me with a question rather than a conclusion. If an organization may exist for fifty, a hundred or several hundred years, while an organizational generation may last less than ten, how is continuity preserved across those generations?
I do not think returning to the same organizations answered that question. It simply made the question much harder to ignore.
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