Low diatribe

If everything about us changes over time, what makes us still us?

Almost two millennia ago the historian Plutarch asked: if you replace every plank of a ship, one by one, until none of the original material remains, is it still the same ship? Philosophers have debated this since, exploring what makes something essentially itself. The question for me isn't whether it's still the Ship of Theseus, but what makes the Ship of Theseus the Ship of Theseus in the first place.

Consider the Chicago Bears. Not a single player from their legendary 1985 Super Bowl XX championship team remains on today's roster. The coaches, the playbook, even the stadium has been rebuilt. Yes, it's still Soldier Field and yes, they're still da Bears — but do they Shuffle? For that matter, look at any professional sports league — the constant churn of players, managers, and staff means the team you support this season shares only some of last season's incarnation, and is at best a hint of what the next will bring, yet the identity persists.

This pattern shows up everywhere I look, especially as I watch engineering teams evolve over time. The development team I built three years ago doesn't even exist anymore, yet the culture of it lives on in an expanded and distributed form. The people have scattered to different teams, different companies, different countries. Our codebase has been rewritten. The problems we solve, the tools we use, even the company's mission has shifted. Yet somehow, something essential persists through all the change.

The same is true for my own life. Twelve years ago I was leading a small team at a music startup, convinced I knew what leadership meant. Nine years ago I was a tiny IC cog in a monolithic organization, learning humility and a deep distaste for the segmented and disparate way organizations have evolved to scale. Six years ago I began to spread my actual leadership wings, discovering what it meant to scale people and culture alongside code. Three years ago I embarked on a quest to integrate human-first leadership into the corporate world, learning that change happens in pockets and that sometimes the corporate juggernaut is too massive to redirect — but the experiment was worth it.

Today I am in search of my next adventure and working to capture my thoughts along the way. Each phase feels like a different person lived it, yet somehow it's all me. I am the accumulation of all these experiences, but somehow not the same person at all. The paradox lives in each of us.

But here's what I've started to understand: if we are indeed the accumulation of our experiences, then we have more agency than we think. We can, in a sense, gamify our systems. Every day we choose which experiences to seek, which conversations to have, which challenges to embrace. We can reinforce old neural pathways or forge new ones. We can feed our accumulating self better inputs.

This isn't about self-optimization or life hacking. It's about recognizing that change is happening whether we direct it or not. The question becomes: do we want to be passive recipients of whatever experiences come our way, or active curators of our own transformation?

But this brings me back to the original puzzle. If we're constantly changing, constantly accumulating new experiences and shedding old patterns, what is that something that persists? What makes us recognizably us through all the transformation?

Maybe it's patterns. The way decisions get made. The quality of conversations. The standards people hold themselves to. The spoken, and unspoken, agreements about what matters and what doesn't. These invisible structures seem to survive complete turnover of people and technology while maintaining something essential.

Here's the twist: those same patterns must evolve or they become constraints rather than enablers. The team that clings too tightly to "how we've always done things" will find itself trying to solve tomorrow's problems with yesterday's tools. The team that changes everything all at once loses the institutional knowledge that made it effective in the first place.

There's something like an art in changing deliberately while preserving what's worth keeping. It's like renovating a house while living in it: you have to maintain structural integrity while upgrading the systems that no longer serve you.

I've watched leaders struggle with this balance — I struggle with this balance. Some try to preserve everything, creating museums instead of organizations. Others embrace change so completely that they lose the cultural DNA that made their teams special. I lean towards the sentimental side and have to actively push myself to distinguish between nostalgia and canon, but I do my best to treat organizational identity like a river: always flowing, always changing, but maintaining a recognizable shape and direction.

This seems to require a different kind of thinking about continuity. What if instead of asking "how do we stay the same?" we asked "what do we want to carry forward?" What if instead of preserving specific practices, we preserved the principles behind those practices? What if instead of maintaining rigid structures, we maintained adaptive capacity?

When I work with teams going through major transitions, this philosophy becomes essential. Mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations, technology migrations, leadership changes — all the disruptions that make people wonder if they're still working for the same company. The teams that navigate these transitions well don't try to prevent change; they put forth effort to guide it intentionally.

They identify the core values and practices that define their culture, then figure out how to express those values in new contexts. They preserve the essence while allowing the form to evolve. They maintain continuity of purpose while embracing discontinuity of method.

Growth at scale looks like transformation, not addition. Becoming what you need to be while staying true to what matters most. Plutarch's ship isn't the same ship, but it's still a ship. It still carries people across the water. It still serves its essential purpose.

Identity, then, isn't about maintaining the same components but about maintaining the same essence. The team that can solve new problems, adapt to new constraints, and serve new needs while preserving its core character — that's a team with a strong sense of identity. Not because it never changes, but because it changes well.

The paradox resolves when you realize that staying the same and changing completely are both forms of death. Real vitality lies in the space between: changing what needs to change while preserving what gives you strength. Growing into who you need to become while remembering who you've always been.

There's something transformational about embracing this constant change rather than resisting it. When we stop trying to maintain a fixed version of ourselves and start seeing change as the raw material of growth, everything shifts. We become less attached to who we were and more curious about who we're becoming.

This is where the real power lies: in recognizing that we are always in the process of becoming. Every conversation shapes us. Every challenge rewires us. Every choice we make is both an expression of who we are and a vote for who we want to be. We are simultaneously the sculptor and the sculpture, constantly reshaping ourselves through the experiences we choose to engage with.

Which brings us full circle. In the end, we are all ships of Theseus. Every cell in our bodies replaces itself over time. Every thought we think changes our neural pathways. Every experience we have shifts our perspective. We are never exactly the same person we were yesterday, yet something essential persists through all the change.

That something is our capacity to grow while remaining ourselves. To adapt while maintaining integrity. To transform while preserving what makes us who we are.

I think about the person I was when I first started building teams, convinced that consistency meant never changing course. Then I think about who I am now — still asking the same fundamental questions about how to create environments where people thrive, but with completely different answers. The questions persist; the solutions evolve.

We sail on, renewed and recognizable. Not because we've avoided the storms or kept our original planks intact, but because we've learned to rebuild ourselves while staying true to our essential purpose. The horizon keeps shifting, and so do we — carrying forward what serves us, leaving behind what doesn't, always becoming who we need to be for the journey ahead.