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The hammering of rain was drowned out by the helicopters roaring overhead. A clamor of soldiers filled the streets. Military buses were being filled to bursting with innocent citizens crammed on board. "The Netherlands tonight faces a total emergency," declared a news anchor on the Dutch national Tuesday evening news.

On January 31, 1995, an immediate evacuation was underway in this riverside town, displacing nearly 250,000 residents and 1 million animals (Rijkswaterstaat, 2025). A perfect storm of melting snow from the Alps and the deluge of winter rain caused the network of rivers (the Rhine, the Waal, and the Meuse) to swell to dangerously high levels. At one point, the Meuse was measured as high as 148 feet above sea level.

Emergency crews were terrified that the dikes could not withstand the onslaught of rain.

Among the quarter million evacuated citizens was 8-year-old Carina Verbeek. "I found it mostly very exciting," she recounted as she thought back on her experience (Rijkswaterstaat, 2025).

Fast forward three decades. Carina now works to help correct the problems she experienced as an 8-year-old.

The Dutch relied on dikes for centuries, and that reliance moved through phases. In the same way, each generation goes through different phases.

We lived it. We pushed back. We went too far. We found a better way.

This is the Generational Pendulum. We experience something, challenge it, overcorrect, and finally recalibrate.

Generations swing back and forth, often rhythmically, each one carrying forward the experience of childhood, responding to what they inherited, and recalibrating society in the process.

I think our natural tendency as human beings is to overcorrect, because we don't want to repeat a mistake.

We often don't take the time to think about how that hits us at home or in the office. The pendulum isn't just looking at generational cohorts by age. It is looking at how the generations collide in a given moment in history.

Back in the late 2010s, before remote work was common, the company I was part of acquired a smaller one. Their team had always worked remote and hybrid, and ours never had, but that difference did not worry anybody. Then we found out one of them was working two jobs at once.

What happened next happened fast. We rented co-working space and required everyone to show up, and for the people who lived too far to commute, we required check-ins on a schedule. We installed software that tracked whether people were at their computers. We became militant about traditional hours, and we applied it to everyone.

It incurred a lot of costs on the company for one bad apple. It was an overcorrection.

I have also done the opposite and paid for it.

I once took the spending controls off a senior leader. He had more experience in his role than anyone else in the company, and our procurement process was slow enough to be a genuine problem, so we gave him room to move.

He used that room to open credit lines in the company's name and run tens of thousands of dollars off the books, and he knew our systems well enough to stay under the radar until the bill collectors called.

We trusted his résumé. Had he come up through our own ranks, without the pedigree, we never would have given him that much room.

Back to the Netherlands. For centuries, Dutch flood management leaned on the principle of "raising the dykes." If the dykes could be heightened and strengthened to hold water at bay, they could prevent flooding. That way of thinking is what led to the loss of 1,836 people in 1953 and subsequently led to Carina and hundreds of thousands of other residents fleeing for their lives in 1995.

Carina joined the National Water Authority during a movement dubbed, “The Room for the River Project,” which ran from 2006 to 2015.

The premise was the opposite of everything that came before it. Rather than building the walls higher, they widened channels, lowered floodplains, and moved dikes back from the water. They gave the rivers room.

It worked. It also went too far. Nearly 200 families and sixteen farms were relocated to create “Room for the River.” Some of these farms were in families for generations. They were a legacy being uprooted.

By 2025, the Delta Programme was recalibrating again, in a report entitled "Towards A New Balance In The Living Environment: Room To Live With Water" (Delta Programme, 2025).

What happened in the Netherlands wasn't just a technical overcorrection, it was a generational one. Carina's experience as a child was shaped by a system designed by a generation before her. That system failed. Her response wasn't random, it was rooted in the time she grew up, the trauma she internalized, and the moment she inherited.

Nobody overcorrects at random.

The Dutch raised the walls because of 1953. I installed the software because of one guy. Carina gave her career to water because she was eight years old on a bus.

Every overcorrection is an answer to what formed you. Almost never to the person in front of you.

So instead of getting frustrated with where you are, try to understand what forms the people you are working with.

What formed the team members who report to you? What makes them tick? What makes them who they are? And then think about the leader you report up to. What formed him or her? What excites them?

We get so caught up in generational labels that we forget the moments that formed each generation. And more than each generation, each person. When we forget that, we stereotype. We group. We lose the ability to lead. Leadership is understanding the people you lead and how to inspire them toward forward progress. That is leadership, fundamentally.

Generational conversations are not a crystal ball, and they are not a horoscope. "Gen Z has this problem." "Gen Alpha will be like this when they enter our workforce." "You know those Boomers." Each one of those locks a person into a moment in time as if it characterizes the rest of their life.

This isn't just Carina's story, it's all of ours. We live it. We push back. We go too far. And eventually, we find a better way. Pendulums don't just swing in history books; they swing inside organizations, families, and our own decisions. And they never swing alone. They're all around us, all the time, shaping our next steps.

One question before you go. What wall are you still raising? Hit reply and tell me.