Sometimes it's good to look in the rearview mirror!
I recently revisited my old workplace on a tour with a group of civic leaders and I was delighted to see how far the organization has come since I left. Certainly, there has been much progress, something I couldn’t miss, but what struck me was how positive and happy everyone seemed. What I remembered as a dark, depressing place to work was now replete with smiling people imbued with purpose and clearly making great strides in terms of technology.
My first reaction was a sense of strangeness at being back in the building I had not expected to reenter. Next came a happy sense of familiarity that left me missing some aspects of my years in the aerospace industry. Could it be that the positivity I now saw had been there all the time, right under my nose? It is difficult to tell.
My last five years in that environment were a time of great personal challenges, as I supported both of my parents through prolonged illnesses and their deaths, along with other challenging issues, not the least of which was returning to school as a working mom. I was also experiencing a need for personal and professional growth as my doctoral work took me in directions that did not fit with my role in the organization at the time and the work itself had significant challenges that went with the territory. There were also, admittedly, repeated frustrations with a few co-workers over the years. Clearly, when I left it was a good move for me.
Yet last week there I sat in the conference room, years later… in what seemed to be a positive, forward looking organization, hearing the all-to-familiar buzz of acronym-laden techno-speak that had been my common mode of expression for so many years.
To be honest, I felt a little silly.
It may very well be that the organization I had considered broken— the source of several unflattering anecdotes— may not have been so bad after all. To be sure, I was seeing my work and, indeed, my entire world, through the lenses of grief and frustration back then.
So where is the lesson? In yoga we learn to avoid judging our experiences as if they were our own unique mini-dramas. Carrerra (2011) states that when the ego identifies an experience as its own, then biases, fears, aversions, and incomplete memory kick in, coloring our perspective. Even the most legitimate concerns become much bigger deals than they need to be.
There is an element of social constructionism in the situation— Perception counts!
Yet so does materiality. It wasn’t ALL a matter of perception either, as these things seldom are. There were certainly material aspects to my long-lived frustration as I stayed too many years in a job that no longer suited me. With no opportunity to advance or transfer laterally, my only option for growth was to leave. What inspired me to quit a well paying job after eight plus years certainly had sociomaterial aspects to it.
Back then I did not know about relational introspection, the way we can spot patterns in our work environments through attunement to ourselves, others, and the ecosystem (Wakefield 2012).
...I had a sense that there were fractal patterns in the way people interact, but I had not yet explored what that meant and begun to look for them consciously. Had I known, I might have looked for scalable self-similar repetition in the patterns of behavior I saw at my level of the organization. I might have developed a better sense of which ones were unique to my own context and which ones were truly systemic.
The patterns that occur repeatedly at multiple levels of an organizaton are the ones that count!
Perhaps a zoomed out view might have allowed me to see the more positive, generative patterns that became apparent when I visited last week. As it was, I left that job years ago, convinced that my own limited view constituted the whole of the situation. I may still have left the organization if I had understood fractal organizing processes, but perhaps with a better understanding of the overall situation.
I chose reverse warrior to illustrate this point because it reminds me of the need for retrospection on occasion. I am not saying it is productive to look back and second-guess our decisions, even those made under duress. The point is that after some time has passed, when our feet are no longer being held to the fire, we sometimes see things more clearly.
I can think of two good reasons to examine the past like this— ways that looking back can elicit helpful reflection instead of causing us to get stuck in the woulda, coulda, shoulda's. The first is for fond remembrance, the kind of thing that parents of grown children often do as they remember a beloved son’s years as a toddler.
—Some feelings are so good that they should be carried around in case smiles are ever in short supply!
Secondly, and of equal importance, we can look back in order to learn from the past, bringing the lessons forward in positive ways. Today I am happy for my former colleagues, glad to see progress in my old work environment, and humbled that way back then I failed to notice the early stages of what look to be some very generative fractal patterns.
…Could I have been part of the problem??? I have to accept that, while I was good at my job and worked hard, I may very well have been.
What about you?
Have you ever revisited a former employer years after your departure?[1]
How did that feel?
Were there positive patterns you saw later that were not clear to you before?
What lessons can you extract from that experience?
Copyright Gly Solutions, LLC, 2015
[1] Thinking about going back to a prior organization? Check out Wanda Tisby-Cousar’s (2014) work on ontological storytelling and reentering an organization for greater impact.
References:
Carrera, Jagnath. 2011. Inside the Yoga Sutras. Buckingham, VA: Integral Yoga Publications.
Tisby-Cousar, Wanda. 2014. "Can Onological Storytelling Perpetuate a Breakthrough for Leaders to Re-enter their Organizations with Greater Impact." In Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative, edited by Boje David M and Tonya L. Henderson, 430-449. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Wakefield, Tonya Henderson. 2012. "An ontology of storytelling systemicity: Management, fractals and the Waldo Canyon fire." Doctorate of Management Doctoral dissertation, Management, Colorado Technical University.
