Partway through our lunch and learn, an Improver dropped this question into the chat: What changes had I seen in the culture at Improving over ten years? Could I point to specific events or triggers for those changes, or were they the result of a slow evolution?
I’ve been asked many questions about my decade here, and this is one of my favorites because it asks me to look at the shape of the change rather than just the highlights. And the honest answer is that most of the change was slow. Not because nothing happened, but because it happened the way things usually do: a little at a time, until one day you realize how far you’ve come.
Slow, because that’s how I move
Part of my answer is temperament. I’m a patient person. It’s one of my things. I tend to let things roll, observe from a distance, stay there with everybody else, then take another step and see how things are going. So the gradual version of change fits me.
But it’s also just how culture works. You don’t flip a switch and get a new set of values. You get people working on problems, building small things, and letting those things settle. Over ten years, I’ve watched that happen again and again. There are a few punctuated moments, but the through-line is slow evolution. The Nine Years at Improving retrospective I wrote last year shows the arc in the involvement data, and it looks exactly like that: not a spike, but a gradual climb with dips and recoveries.
Slow evolution is easy to miss while you’re living through it. If you’re watching week to week, nothing changes. You have to zoom out. And zooming out is something we rarely do in the middle of a career. We’re too busy taking the next step to notice that the path we’re on is different from the one we started on. Ten years gives you enough distance to see it.
The Engage platform
Engage is the clearest example I have. I remember when we didn’t have it. Reporting involvement was manual. If you gave a talk, where did you report it? You sent an email to a person, and that person put it in a spreadsheet, and so on. Goals were the same. How did we know if people were setting goals and working on them? It was all ad hoc, and it was a real problem.
We really needed to solve this. And then, slowly, the Engage platform came together. It didn’t arrive finished. It arrived as a working thing, and it’s been improving since. Now it’s just there, and a lot of Improvers who joined after it existed don’t know what life was like without it. But for those of us who remember the spreadsheets, it’s a visible sign of how much has changed.
The programs that arrived slowly
The same story plays out across the programs. PATH didn’t start as a thing. We were discussing coaching and mentoring for years without any structure, and then over time we formalized it. It’s not perfect, and there’s no perfect system, but it went from an idea to a program with a real shape.
Delivery Excellence is the same. Years ago, it didn’t exist. I was part of the creation of the initial classes, glad that somebody had taken the initiative to gather a bunch of Improvers and work on it. And then it became a thing across the company.
Even trust pods. We didn’t have trust pods before. Now they’ve been around so long that Improvers who joined after they were created take them for granted. For them, it’s always been a thing. For some of us, it hasn’t. That’s what slow evolution does. It makes today’s normal so obvious that you forget it used to be a question.
The punctuated moments
It’s not all gradual, though. There are punctuated things. Come Together is one. I can point to the year it was created and watch how it’s grown since, and all the great things that have come out of it and brought us together.
But even those were built on the slow work that came before them. The punctuated moment only lands because the ground was already prepared. So my answer to the chat was both: slow evolution, and some punctuated things that came up along the way.
The sharing that grew quietly
The thing that changed most quietly, and matters to me most, is how normal sharing became.
Little by little, more people started sharing. The programs gave it a place, the recognition gave it a reason.
That’s the version of change I have the most respect for, because it didn’t depend on any single person. It depended on a lot of people taking small steps in the same direction.
Settling into a thing
I’ve written before about how small initiatives settle into a thing over time, in AI Maturity, Building in Public, and the Ferrari Grocery Getter. It’s a recurring pattern. Someone starts something small, a handful of people join, it finds its footing, and then one day it’s just part of how the company works. You can’t always point to the moment it happened.
My annual reviews track some of this year by year, too. 2025: Annual Review is a record of how my own internal contributions evolved over the year, and it shows the same gradual shape from the inside.
Culture changes the way a garden grows. You don’t plant a seed and get a tree next week. You plant, you water, you wait, and you keep showing up. Ten years in, I can look back and name the moments that seemed big at the time. But the change that actually kept me here was the slow kind. The kind you only notice when you stop and look back over a whole decade.
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