my digital era change-log, 2002 - 2025
If I’m going to make the lofty claims that I think my musings and evolving theories will help others change the way they think, perhaps I should give a bit more background on my own evolution.
2002 - join the “digital transformation” age in an entry-level consulting / project coordination role
2004 - Promoted to lead to creation of a department focused on changing work output from paper to digital. Project finished in two years.
2007 - First inkling that the whole “digital transformation” thing was not resulting in as much change as had been marketed by the solution providers. This was pre-cloud solutions. Pitched an idea to the CEO and personally recognized by him for my idea. Huge company so I’m thinking the CEO had no idea that a department under his watch was actively starting to outsource our work. I did not stick around to see what would happen.
2010 - First time going into a new opportunity to change the model with a new department function for how we did the work (because projects had consistently barely survived through constant rework and firefighting at every place I had worked up to that point.)
2011 - Management deciding not to go in this direction and asking me to go back to the old ways.
2012 - First career sabbatical. First thing I did was complete a 6 month formal coaching program. I wanted to learn how to develop people beyond the traditional management and mentoring model. Eye opening experience!
2012 - 2014 - Intense interest in the exploding craft beer market so I use my coaching to coach consumers. Develop a taste coaching app. Bootstrapped so I ran out of runway. Entered the NYC tech scene to start trying to find a developer to join me. No one knew what craft beer was!
A colleague suggested that I read Lean Startup. It taught me every mistake I made. Started attending and pitching my idea at Lean Startup Weekends. Again, NYC was still a wine and cocktail town so my project never got selected but I worked on a few other projects.
2015 - Start hearing about and researching Agile development.
2016 - Invited to join a startup back in my industry. I was hired on pitching using Lean Startup and Agile principles to the work. Org was not ready and I found myself sidelined most of the time.
2018 - Career sabbatical # 2 and now diving deeply into the Agile Community and writing a lot about it on LinkedIn. Somewhere and somehow this led me to discovering Systems Thinking. Systems Thinking quickly stole all of my attention. I loved Donella Meadows but I wanted to find a way to make Systems Thinking more approachable and relatable down in the trenches where the actual work gets done. Donella had the most approachable thing with the systems levers diagram but it was still written in business school-speak. Spent a few years investigating this and forming and evolving theories.
2020 - PANDEMIC! Need to find a remote role! Back to industry in a business analyst role, with a particular focus on Change Management. So glad I was not pegged with Project Management (my history up to that point) on this project. One lead project manager with constant additions of project coordinators to try to manage the work getting out of control.
The writing was on the wall! What a mess because we were now decades into trying to make square pegs fit round holes. First project to ever fail in my career. It was not my project but I ended up laid off.
2022 - Career sabbatical # 3 - This is it! I’ve got to figure this out. Something is still missing from Systems Thinking? It needs something to bridge the intangibility problem. I keep journaling, writing , and rehashing over its main principles and objectives.
2023 - Pick up a “real camera” and start exploring photography.
“Hmmm…I think there’s something here for bridging the gap.”
2024 - I learned of a concept called “Art Thinking.” BOOM! It’s art! Art is the origin of human vision and imagination. This is where our best shots at new learning and change originate from!
It starts to click how photography is a mindful and hands-on activity for demonstrating and adopting a mindset for genuine change and transition. Photography is an activity that inherently creates liminal mindset and space. This learning can be parlayed and extended back out into other areas of life.
Photography also teaches us the most appropriate place for tech in the relationship….that the camera and lens is simply a tool for augmenting our human vision and imagination.
2025 - The main theme is to introduce, teach, and coach the implications and role of liminality for change and transition, starting with immersive photographic exercises as a catalyst for experiencing the benefits of liminality.
I transitioned from very traditional project and change management, to adopting a coaching mindset toward human development, to exploring cutting edge product development methodologies, to becoming a self-professed Systems Thinker, and on to discovering the philosophical role of art and liminality for change.
Since 2012, I rarely spent more than 2-3 years of settling on a current evolution of thinking. That’s over 12 years of pursuing a highly emergent desire for changing how I looked at systems and society.
It’s been quite an intense cognitive journey!
