Design management toolbox: Non-linear professional development
Approaches to coaching and career development that help build resilience in career paths
Do you feel overwhelmed with the complexity that vividly manifested over the last few years? Multiple converging crises keep us all on our toes and many of us on the edge. In the business world, companies are restructuring, downsizing, and sometimes disappearing altogether. Markets are shifting rapidly. People are quitting en masse. Inner dynamics change quickly and often. Things are unpredictable, and the maps we used to help us orient are not accurate anymore. The landscape has changed. Linear thinking is not useful in the new, unfamiliar terrain.
How do you plan your career in such circumstances? How do you navigate such complexity? And, as a manager, how do you help individuals on your teams to stay sane and thrive?
I’d like to share a few practical tools that I used to facilitate professional development conversations and with which I had really good outcomes. I won’t go into a deeper debate about professional development or resilience. We’ll leave that for some other time and here I’d like to focus on something actionable.
It’s worth noting that the tools below are mainly strategic tools, used in various contexts and situations, such as planning policies and strategies. They are repurposed here for the sole goal of helping with professional development. If you’d like to talk more about futures thinking, strategic foresight or systems thinking and systems design — and how these approaches can be used in both commercial and non-commercial contexts–reach out to Ben Lowdon or me. We’ve done some interesting work over the past several years.
1. Multiple paths approach
This approach derives from the concepts of variation and redundancy that are used to deal with uncertainty in complex systems, such as food production, the economy, or the human body.
Redundancy, or the presence of multiple components that can perform the same or similar functions, can provide ‘insurance’ within a system by allowing some components to compensate for the loss or failure of others. Variation means that components of a system can have different responses to changes or shocks.
How does it translate to career development? It simply means to deliberately plan and maintain different options for responding to change and dealing with uncertainty. Not keeping your eggs in one basket, but it’s little more than that. The key principle of this approach is to define multiple goals/paths connected by a common theme, or your reports’ “north star”. That means whichever path they choose would lead them closer to their desired outcome.
Sometimes people have their north star somewhat defined, e.g. “becoming a leader”, so you can start from there and define ways in which leadership can be materialized. Other times, people don’t have a single north star but have some ideas they want to explore. In this case, start with defining possible paths and then synthesize them in a common theme. Let’s use the same leadership example. How does one become a leader? Does it have to be through a management role? Coaching, mentoring, project leadership, presenting, and facilitating can be all good paths toward a leadership role.
Here’s an example. I was working closely with a report, a very senior designer, who was considering becoming a manager. But becoming a manager was highly unlikely at the time due to many factors we didn’t have control over. So we returned to my reports’ core values, and talked about one in particular: “helping others to be successful”. So what are the ways in which this can be achieved? Does it need to be through a management role? No, of course not, we both agreed. They could help others by coaching, mentoring, teaching, facilitating work or discussions, leading others on a project, and many more. So we defined north star not as “becoming a good leader”, and defined several paths and goals where each path would lead them towards a leadership role, and simultaneously prepare them for becoming a competent manager. They relatively quickly became recognized as a leader and people started to look up to them. As a nice “side effect”, they got promoted to a Principal designer, officially acknowledging their good leadership. They dropped the idea of becoming a manager for the time being and continued exploring multiple paths.
It’s important to write these things down. Here’s what the “canvas” might look like.
2. Stoic approach
At the core of Stoic philosophy is the concept of control, that is, the ability to distinguish between what is and what isn’t in our control. We then give full attention to that which is in our control, and let go of that which isn’t. Clinging on to things we can’t control is a sure way to get disappointed.
A good start is to distinguish between internal and external factors. Normally, we have little control over our promotion or salary increase (external factors), but we have control over building our skill-sets, establishing good relationships with stakeholders, increasing our visibility, or being diligent (internal factors).
Now, there are things we have partial control over, and many things in life fall into this grey zone (to different extents). Help your report to unpack these things into components and sort these components into “control” and “can’t control” buckets.
3. What-if approach
When working on our goals, it is a good idea to challenge our beliefs, assumptions, and projections on which our goals are normally based. That’s an important part of non-linear thinking. When we think about our careers (and our future in general), we tend to think that the present will continue into the future in a linear fashion. But that’s not necessarily how the future will unfold. Furthermore, there isn’t one future, but many possible futures that might happen as a consequence of multiple threads of possibilities interacting with each other. By exploring those possibilities we can bring them into our awareness and engage with them deliberately, effectively being more prepared.
The tool below is a tool used by strategists and futurists to explore multiple future scenarios, and we can repurpose it for helping people explore their professional possibilities more deeply. The model is originally published by Jim Dator in 1979, and it has been one of the cornerstones of my work ever since I discovered it. How does it work? A person runs each goal, assumption, or core value through 3 scenarios that will take those goals into various unknown directions. What would they do if each of these four scenarios happen? Just 2 years ago, almost no one was thinking about the pandemic, “quiet quitting” or a major war. But 2 years ago some signs, some potentials for these events were already there.
Once they challenge their assumptions, take the insights from the scenarios and bake them into their career paths. Add these insights into the multiple paths approach, or the next one we’ll come to in a minute.
In the table below I’ve provided guidance for using the tool and some examples.
Can you still achieve your goal? How? What would you do if you can’t achieve it?
4. Working backwards approach
When a person has their goals set, they should develop a plan on how to achieve those goals. Our natural response is to think linearly from the present day into the future. But as futurists know well, it is a better practice to start from a point in the future and work backward towards the present day. If someone wants to become a manager in say, 1 year, what things should be in place 6 months before that so that 1-year goal is achievable? Consequently, what needs to be in place 2 months from now to make a 6-months goal achievable? And what do they need to start doing today so that they can achieve their first, 2-months goal?
By chunking peoples’ distant goals into smaller and smaller goals in a reverse direction, it becomes easier to focus on what is relevant and important now (at any instance of now). Using use this approach together with the “variation” approach can help with managing multiple converging paths with more clarity.
Important: This table is filled from right to left!
As I mentioned at the beginning they are effective tools and have helped me to facilitate conversations with my reports in many instances. Your reports will likely need your guidance on using some of these tools, so I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. Please keep in mind these tools are not a silver bullet and are one-size-fits-all. Feel free to experiment and see if they work for you and your reports. If you do use them, I would love to hear from you!
Kudos to Ben, Milica, and Malin for exchanging ideas over this article.
