Project 52: Week 25 (5/13/24)

Our reflection and invitation:

“Maturing into a viable adulthood is partly about discipline, but it is also about luck. Aldous Huxley famously wrote that experience is not what happens to you but what you do with what happens to you. That is profoundly correct. Our life experience is not one event after the other but a series of opportunities to grow by making sense of what is meaningful and what isn't. Some do that better than others.” ― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life.

“chess games are rarely lost by oversights but rather by “the failure to apprehend certainties.” ― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras.

We are delighted to continue with a year-long offering as part of Career Services initiatives. ~ Gerald Doyle .

Career Accompaniment: Week 25

Welcome to Burnett & Evans: designing your dream job

Readers of this series will know that in our Tri Cosain careers work; we are big fans of the work of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (B&E for short) around Designing Your Life, including their book of the same name. One of their book's chapters is “Designing Your Dream Job.” ( DesigningYourLife ).

We want to endorse the ideas in that chapter (and the rest of the book) and share them with our Tri Cosain careers explorers.

Their chapter title is in some ways cleverly misleading, because, for most people, B&E suggest that no dream job (they call it Job Charming) is out there waiting to be found. Most significantly, as Steve Dalton also indicates in his work*, many great jobs are never advertised or are only advertised after they are filled.? Both B&E and Dalton suggest that the vast bulk of the job market, especially the most desirable roles, is hidden. Like Dalton, B&E suggest that the best way to both find out about these jobs and to gain offers to take them up is to create conversations with people within the organizations and marketplaces involved.

B&E frame these conversations as founded on genuine curiosity to learn about people’s life stories in the relevant working context, such as Life Design Interviews. Their model is strikingly and pleasingly similar to Steve Dalton’s concept of Informational Interviews and our concept of Conversations of Inquiry.

In each case, the goal is to meet people within an organization and an industry and ask them about their experience so we can learn. These are emphatically not job interviews and must be carefully and intentionally focused on learning, not selling oneself. This series of Life Design Interviews is B&E's concept of networking, which, in their view, is a highly principled and learning-focused journey that is entirely consistent with the approach we have described elsewhere in this series.

The irony, clearly identified by both B&E and Dalton, is that these conversations are the best way to create contacts in the desired working contexts and to make friends with people who may recommend or offer us work.? B&E treat these conversations as prototyping exercises, in a Design Thinking sense, so that by using designer-like skills, we learn about real opportunities and make the connections needed to obtain real work in those domains. In this sense, B&E’s students and clients are “designing” their dream job.

Again, like Dalton, B&E suggest that career seekers should focus on getting as many offers as possible, rather than trying to weed out options by prematurely evaluating job content. Their approach is consistent with the design principle of having as many ideas and options as possible and refining them through experimentation and prototyping.

B&E suggest, as we noted above, that there is almost certainly not a Job Charming just out there waiting for most of us to find. However, by using the networking and Life Design Interviewing approach they suggest, imbued with design principles throughout, they indicate that career explorers have the greatest chance of discovering and then developing attractive opportunities “from the inside,” thus co-creating roles that in time converge to their highest aspirations. Indeed, B&E suggest that this kind of journey may lead to career experiences that are more rewarding and satisfying than anything the seeker might have been able to conceive or describe before engaging in the work. This conclusion is deeply resonant with the designer thinker’s practices of engaging early with customers and users of a product, learning from empathic observation, and continual refinement based on prototyping and direct observation of customer engagement with the product.

As always, I'm ready to support and accompany you as you discern and sketch a path forward to your dream job or career in ministry -- or you take the next step in the longer arc of your ministry journey.

As always, I'm ready to accompany you and assist you on your Tri Cosain career design journeys and all other aspects of your Tri Cosain explorations of inspiration, learning, and career.

Monday, 13 May 2024

Gerald Doyle

P.S. Click here to read Project 52: Week 24: Welcome to Personal Maps

P.P.S. We also look forward to sharing our learnings and practices with our neighbors -- the McCormick Theological Seminary and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago -- as well as others throughout the Association of Chicago Theological Schools and, more broadly, with The Association of Theological Schools ; please message me to set a time to speak.

Resources and inspiration from Steve Dalton:

"You have the ability to grant yourself / all job seekers one networking-related skill to improve results. What do you choose and why?"

"Questions start with when, what, where, who, why, or how. But remember: the best answers come from questions that start with why or how!"

I agree about networking's stigma. I like the term "advocacy building" for job seekers, as it is a bit more specific -- it is more proactive rather than reactive and implies the need to activate (usually) strangers on your behalf. During talks, I used to ask audiences to rate their networking skills, and I found they usually interpreted "networking" as their ability to build relationships with co-workers, which makes sense since it's something they've had to do hundreds of times. The more pressing job search skill is the ability to build advocacy from strangers on demand, but that's something far fewer people have experience doing (let alone proficiency).

"Networking when you don't have the next steps clear in your head is exhausting and frustrating. Knowing what specific outcomes you're seeking from it definitely improves performance. Otherwise, every interaction feels like a waste since there is almost never a this-for-that gain from any single networking interaction. Networking itself is a very broad tactic, not a strategy."

"Schedules/habits are such helpful tools for maintaining momentum, especially during those difficult patches you're almost certain to encounter."

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 job search 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.