Project 52: Week 20 (4/8/24)

Our invitation and reflection ...

“There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended." ― Don DeLillo, Point Omega.

“We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”― Don DeLillo, Point Omega.

We may have ten important decisions to make and a hundred, possible pathways we could follow. We may wish that God would tell us exactly what to do, where to go, and how to choose. Yet Jesus only requires that we make sure our heart is good, our motives are pure, and our basic direction is right, pointing toward the "true north" of the kingdom of God. We can, in good conscience, choose from among any number of reasonable alternatives and continue to do the will of God. In the end what matters most is that we seek first God's kingdom and righteousness.

… This perspective on the will of God gives us astonishing freedom. If we seek first God's kingdom and righteousness, which is the will of God for our lives, then whatever choices we make concerning the future become the will of God for our lives. There are many pathways we could follow and, many options we could pursue. As long as we are seeking God, all of them

~ Dr. Jerry Sittser, a bridge between the academy and the church

We are delighted to continue with a year-long offering and to dedicate this week's Project 52 to your exploration of "Designing Your Life" ~ Gerald Doyle.

Designing Your Life, By Dave Evans and Bill Burnett

This book, one of the few we most often recommend in our Tri Cosain careers work, presents a Design Thinking approach to creating visions and plans for life and work.? We write more explicitly about Design Thinking elsewhere in this series. Still, in outline, Design Thinking calls for a five-stage approach to discovering and solving a problem or an opportunity.

• Empathizing - digging deeply into the essence of a problem by speaking and working directly with people affected by the challenge
• Defining - using the insights from empathizing to create a clear statement of the problem or the opportunity
• Ideating - using creative approaches to discover many possible approaches to the challenge and then choosing one or a few of those approaches for immediate (low-risk) experimentation
• Prototyping - building prototypes to embody experiments that allow rapid, risk-controlled testing of one or more proposed resolutions of the challenge
• Testing - exposing the prototype to real people potentially impacted by a possible solution and seeing how it works for them, then deciding whether and how to build more refined versions of a prototyped solution

The relationship of this approach to career (and ministry) decisions may take time to come, but as Burnett and Evans show, it is, in fact, brilliantly relevant. Design Thinking speaks to a journey of profoundly exploring our identities and intentions and then using rapid, low-risk tests of ideas to refine our life and career journeys continuously. We highly recommend a deep dive into Burnett and Evans's work for many of our participants from both the lenses of inspiration and career.

We’ll drill down separately into a number of Burnett and Evans’ key ideas, but as a brief introduction, here are some core themes.

• Crystallizing a Workview and Lifeview - brief descriptions of 1) how you see work, what it’s for, how we should do it, and 2) what your core beliefs and understandings about life and the world are.? Compare these ideas to the Tri Cosain notions of Inspiration and Career Vision.
• Creating a Good Time Journal - understanding when we are at our best, really enjoying what we are doing, noticing when we are “in flow” engaged, and drawing positive energy from our work and life activities. We’d suggest these practices are great ways to refine our career visions and shape our Agile plans for learning and careers.
• Odyssey plans - creating three (very) different visions of our possible life and career future. This practice is a beautiful way of stretching our thinking and uncovering new possibilities for exploration. Once again, these are great ways to open new opportunities for our Agile plans for learning and careers.
• Brainstorming - finding ways to create ideas about possible life and career directions.? More ways to open new possibilities for career vision and ideas for inclusion in our learning and career plans.
• Prototyping - trying out ideas in fast, safe-to-fail ways, especially by having creative conversations with people. Closely related to our ideas about Conversations of Inquiry and creative Networking.
• Life Design Decision Making - Making the best decisions we can with the best facts we can (economically) gain, especially from our prototyping, and then being willing to let go of the other possibilities and move on.? In our view, an inspired approach to making choices, reaching an agreement, and Closing is closely related to the idea of discernment that we explore elsewhere in our Tri Cosain journeys.
• Building a team - gathering a core group of thought partners for the journey of career and life development and creating great, productive dialogic relationships with both the inner core and a more comprehensive network of fellow travelers.? Connected closely to the ideas we share elsewhere about accompaniment, encountering, Conversations of Inquiry, networking, mentorship, and a MasterMind group.
• Failure immunity - Learning to judge our “success,” not by specific outcomes, but by the quality of our approach to life, the way we “play the game”: curious, learning, coherent with our values and core intentions. Truly seeing failures as learning opportunities and, more deeply, seeing that failed outcomes are no indicators of a failed life. Strongly connected to our ideas about inspiration, learning, and emergent planning for life and career
• Designing your dream job - ways to see any working (or other) situation into which we move as being full of opportunity for learning, growth, and contribution - and also a platform for new choices about the future. Back again to ways to be in harmony with our sense of inspiration and vision, always learning, and always building an emergent plan based on those learnings, inspecting and adapting constantly in response to experience.

As a kind of bonus, Burnett and Evans give some brilliant practical advice on job hunting, largely framed as practices to avoid and better choices to make instead.

For people of faith, we might sense the presence and the influence of a Higher Power in the design journey.

We will drill down on some of these points in other articles in this series. In the meantime, we heartily recommend Burnett and Evans’ book and online media related to it (they have several video talks available).

As always, I am delighted to accompany you on this journey and the related explorations that are calling to you.

Monday, 8 April 2024 (A Happy - Solar Eclipse - Monday to all)

Gerald Doyle

Resources:

• Dave Evans, Ted Talk, 2018, Liverpool (~ 18 minutes)
• Designing Your Life (website)

Doyle's note: A work-in-progress: thinking about how Designing Your Life might be framed across various faith traditions.

• The Christian Companion to Designing Your Life By Dave Evans

P.S. Click here to read Project 52: Week 19 (The Good Time Journal -- for writing and sketching)

Tri Cosain materials are developed with my colleague and friend of 40+ years, Scott Downs.

Copyright Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle, 2023/24

Residing in Chicago, Gerald Doyle provides ministry placement research and consulting for Career Services at the Catholic Theological Union ( Herbert Quinde and Christina Zaker ), as well as career services and coaching to students, families, and community members at Wolcott College Preparatory High School ( Miriam Pike , Kelly Ramos) and through the The Tyree Institute .

He advises several tech companies, including Upkey ( Amir Badr ) and GetSet Learning ( Eva Prokop ); he has also joined TSI - Transforming Solutions, Inc. ( Dan Feely )in their Higher Education and Career Services practice.

Scott? Downs, a former investment banker, management consultant, and entrepreneur, now works as an Agile coach, seeking to call forward great leaders and great organizations based on great cultures. He is a consultant with Expleo Group and is an associate of the TrustTemenos Leadership Academy.

Scott and Gerald are co-founders of Tri Cosain, a practice that weaves inspiration, learning, and career for leadership in life and work. Gerald and Scott co-authored 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work, Conversations of Inquiry, and several other volumes in the Tri Cosain series. Their work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity, and well-being as foundations for personal leadership.