Last week was about Avatar and finding your strength.  This week is about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and evolving with changing context.  In case you don’t know anything about ninja turtles, essentially it is a story of 4 anthropomorphic turtles, who are trained to be ninjas and fight bad guys.  I grew up at the height of the TMNT craze in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  During this time period, the cartoon was a fun loving, light hearted show, filled with goofy antics and a love for pizza.  When many people think of ninja turtles they think of this cartoon, embodied by the image to the right.

The interesting thing is that the version of the turtles depicted in the image isn’t the only one.  It’s not even the original version.  The original version of the ninja turtles was a comic book that was quite a bit more serious and darker than anything in the show.  Throughout the years, the turtles have evolved to fit their time period.  There were goofy ninja turtle cartoons in the 90s along with movies that were serious and filled with slapstick.  The early 2000s brought turtles that were more serious like the original version.  The live action movies in the 2000s reimagined the turtles in more unique ways with cutting edge CGI animation.  The most recent version of the cartoon throws the turtles into mystical elements.

You’re probably wondering what teenage mutant ninja turtles has to do with work.  I think the show is an interesting example of adapting to changing context and times.  Throughout all of its reincarnations, the core of the show remains the same.  At its core, the show is about 4 brothers learning how to work as a team as they fight bad guys.  However, the tone, characters, plotlines, and other items evolve based on new context and unique reimaginings.  The ninja turtles of today wouldn’t have worked 30 years ago, and the turtles I grew up with 30 years ago wouldn’t have worked today.

I’d argue that we are all ninja turtles.  The core part of us often stays the same, but we have the chance to adapt as our context changes.  For example, I’m a dot connecting storyteller.  That will always be true for me.  At the same time, my stories change as my context changes.  The stories I tell as poet Andrew in Lilly are different than the stories poet Andrew tells outside of Lilly, because the surroundings, audience, and expectations are different.  The stories sales rep Andrew are different from the ones I told when I worked in communications and was trying to leverage organizational change tools to tell stories through others.  As a market researcher, I tell stories all the time, synthesized through frameworks I never used before I took this role.  Basically, as I gain new experiences my context changes, so I pick up new tools, frameworks, perspectives, etc. to help me tell new and engaging stories.  Just like the ninja turtles, it’s the same core show (skillset), just merely applied in different ways to meet my surroundings.  With that said, I think we all have a chance to grow as the context around us changes.  We just have to be willing to choose to evolve, rather than stay stagnant.

The challenge:  Who are you at your core?  How are you adapting to changing context?

Have a jolly good day and a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Andrew Embry