Origin Stories
The assignment for the 25 leaders was simple: find an image that represents why you joined the firm.
This was the pre-work for a strategic planning process at a successful design and engineering firm preparing to enter its 50th year.
What do we preserve? What needs to evolve?
Questions like these are usually framed as a succession story. But before we could talk about the future, we needed to understand the origin stories.
A four-foot timeline spanning five decades—from the 1980s to the 2020s—stretched across the room. One by one, in the order they joined the firm, each leader placed their image on the appropriate decade and shared the story behind it.
When the final story was told, I announced that I was going to assume the role of anthropologist and report back on what I had just observed.
Almost none of the stories centered on resumes, credentials, or impressive portfolios. Nearly all were about relationships.
There were stories of unconventional interviews, chance encounters, generous mentors, unexpected invitations, and moments of genuine fun. Despite spanning five decades, the stories shared a remarkable consistency. The firm's growth hadn't simply been fueled by great projects. It had been sustained by human connection.
The late, great MIT Sloan professor Edgar Schein called this personization: building working relationships based on knowing people as whole human beings rather than simply as occupants of a role. In Humble Leadership, published in 2018, he anticipated today's workplace when he wrote that work is "changing rapidly in a direction that requires more personized relationships that create psychological safety and, thereby, increase communication, collaboration, and mutual help."
That observation feels even more relevant today.
As organizations invest in AI, new technologies, and increasingly sophisticated systems, their competitive advantage may depend even more on something decidedly human: the quality of the relationships people build with one another.
For organizations like my client, that raises an important strategic question. How do you preserve—and intentionally scale—a culture whose greatest strength has never been a process or a structure, but the relationships between its people?
I have a few theories. That's the conversation we'll be exploring over the coming months.