Project 52: Week 34

Our invitation and reflection ...

“Collectivity: because “everything worthwhile is done with others” (Moussa Kaba).”

~ as quoted by Mariame Kaba

“What is our freedom if we don’t take care of each other?” asks Erica Woodland, co-author of “Healing Justice Lineages.”

Listen to We Need Collective Healing, Not Commodified “Self-Care”

"If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme." ~ Pablo Picasso

“If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed”― Paulo Freire.

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

Career Accompaniment: Week 34

Welcome to Agile Planning

A Careers Agile Plan

We’ve written separately to outline our idea of Agile Planning in Tri Cosain.? In this article, we’d like to give you a (fictionalized) worked example of applying Agile planning to a career journey.

You will remember that in Agile planning, we typically work on three levels:

• Level 1 - our highest level: timeless goals
• Level 2 - our goals over a medium-term period, very often a quarter or a similar interval
• Level 3 - our goals over the next few weeks, typically two weeks to a month

Let’s imagine a career-seeker in a faith-based context; let’s call her Sarah.

Note: This example applies across industries and functional roles; if you want to talk this through in terms of your lens and vantage point, just let me know.

Suppose that over a period of time, in prayerful reflection and discernment, she’s concluded that at the highest level, she wants to explore becoming a chaplain in a large healthcare facility or a non-profit organization.

So, her Level 1 goals could look like…

• I want to explore becoming a chaplain
• I want to explore working in a large healthcare organization
• I want to explore working in a non-profit organization

Note that these goals are on a large scale and are open-ended in terms of time.

At Level 2, let’s now consider with Sarah what she might do to advance these Level 1 goals over the next quarter (if that is her medium-term horizon)

She might break the challenge down into streams of work that promised to open up the possibilities of her Level 1 goals. To do this, she might use the modules of our career roadmap as a guide. For example, she might seek some medium-term goals in such areas as

• Identifying and researching potential organizational homes, otherwise known as expanding her LAMP list (see related article from Rotman Commerce)
• Seeking out leaders and role models in her areas of interest via social media
• Conducting learning dialogues (we call them Conversations of Inquiry) with knowledgeable people within her chosen areas
• Seeking out potential mentors
• Discussing her ideas, learning, and curiosity with trusted advisers, coaches, or mentors in her chosen areas
• Seeking out and reading relevant articles or posts about her chosen fields
• Joining relevant communities online or virtually
• Following threads of dialogue in her chosen areas

Working with these ideas, she might set the following quarterly goals:

I will, in the next three months…

• Identify three health services organizations and three NGO’s that interest me and add them to my LAMP list
• I will use LinkedIn and one other social media channel to identify ten potential role models or admired leaders in each of the healthcare sectors and groups of interesting NGOs I have identified
• I will seek to have two Conversations of Inquiry in my chosen areas of exploration each month during the quarter and record the learnings in a permanent record, with ideas for follow-up actions and learning
• Between my role models and my COI partners, I will seek to invite one mentor relationship over the next quarter
• Every two weeks, I will seek to hold a thoughtful conversation about my progress and my learnings with a circle of trusted friends and fellow travelers, people I have come to think of as my MasterMind group
• I will aim to spend one hour a week seeking valuable online posts and articles about my areas of interest and spend 90 minutes per week reading those articles
• I will join three online communities in my selected areas in my first month and one a month after that.? I will spend one hour a week reviewing content from these organizations and, at the end of the quarter, decide if they are worth continuing attention.
• I will attend three in-person events during the quarter relating to my areas of interest
• Three times a week, I will follow one thread for each of my main areas of focus (health care and NGOs) and see where they take me
• At the end of the quarter, I will schedule a period of reflection to consider

Note that the Level 2 goals are explicit and quantifiable, as well as being time-bound.? Note also that all the Level 2 goals are directly linked to Level 1 goals and serve to advance them.

We would invite Sarah to make a careful and accessible record of her Level 2 goals so she can review them at the end of the quarter and also so that she can use them, as we will now see, to create Level 3 goals for the next two weeks.

At Level 3, Sarah might choose the following goals for a two-week period, giving herself a fixed time, say 45 minutes, to make the plan for the two weeks.

• Identifying one new entity to add to my LAMP list from either of my main areas of interest
• Spend 30 minutes seeking role models and respected leaders on LinkedIn (or Medium, Substack, or other professional and affinity communities that most closely align with you)
• Work to schedule but not necessarily conclude one Conversation of Inquiry (3 x 30 minutes of effort)
• Spend 2 x 30 minutes reflecting on potential mentors and see what inspiration leads me to
• Have lunch or coffee with as many of my MasterMind group as possible and have two conversations with others from the group.
• Spend two hours over two weeks (4 x 30 minutes)? seeking valuable online posts and articles about my areas of interest
• Spend three hours over the two weeks reading those articles, divided into three one-hour commitments
• Spend 30 minutes looking for relevant communities on LinkedIn. Join the ones I find that look interesting and spend 15 minutes each scanning them for valuable content
• Spend 2 x 30 minutes seeking out relevant in-person events - register if found
• Three times a week, I will follow one thread for each of my main areas of focus (health care and NGOs) for 30 minutes and see where they take me

Notice that all the actions in Sarah’s plan can be achieved in bite-sized chunks of effort, often able to be completed in one sitting of usually 60 minutes or less.

Having sketched out this plan, we would invite Sarah to reflect and assess it. Given her circumstances and context, is it realistic?? Is it too much or too little?? Does it move her along toward her goals sufficiently?? Does it fit with other things she is trying to do?

With a plan in place, we would invite Sarah to create a visible record of her commitments and record the completion of each one as it takes place, both at Level 2 and Level 3.

At the end of the two weeks, we would invite Sarah to demonstrate to herself (and perhaps others like her MasterMind partners) what she has achieved. We would also ask her to reflect on what she has learned, both about her career aspirations and about her process of inquiry. In her record of the period, please look at what she has learned and suggest commitments for the next two weeks.

The two-week cycle can begin with planning as before, referring to the quarterly Level 2 objectives and learnings for the just-completed short cycle.

At the end of a quarter, we would invite Sarah to engage in a reflective practice of noticing and celebrating what she has achieved and what she’d planned but did not achieve. We’d especially invite her to see what she had learned: were her interests what they were before?? Have some interests grown? Some diminished? Where does her interest and curiosity lead her to the next cycle?

At the end of a year, we invite a similar reflection pattern over the longer time cycle. While the Level 1 goals tend to be persistent for many people, if insight and discernment clearly show they need to change, they can be changed at any time. If the big goals change, we consider adjusting the Level 2 and Level 3 goals to ensure that we always focus on things that advance our most important personal goals.

What are the advantages of this kind of planning? Why do we call it Agile?

The advantages are:

• All the goals are consistently joined up: daily work advances medium goals that advance long-term goals.
• Work is continuously broken down into small chunks, each delivering value. By intention, no effort is wasted.
• We continuously “inspect and adapt” in Agile language: we always learn from experience over short feedback loops and immediately put our learning into practice.

We call this Agile because our plans are flexible and respond to change and learning. We do not lock ourselves into patterns of activity that are determined far in advance; we repeatedly apply our latest learning to our current working patterns.

As we noted at the beginning, we have created one fictional example to show how Agile planning is applied to make it real. Your example would vary depending on the nature of your interests, your style of learning and investigation, the amount of time and energy you can commit, and the stage in your career journey where you find yourself.

As you might expect, technology can help with Agile planning, but though it is helpful, it is optional. Like anything digital, paper-based tools can work well in this practice, from spreadsheets to work boards to relational databases to specialized Agile planning tools.

As always, I am ready to accompany and support you and others in exploring your Agile career exploration plan and all other aspects of career plans, choices, journeys, and opportunities.

Monday, 15 July 2024

Gerald Doyle

An additional resource:

Truthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues. Since our founding in 2001, we have anchored our work in principles of accuracy, transparency, and independence from the influence of corporate and political forces.

Movement Memos: A Truthout Podcast with Kelly Hayes

• Let This Conversation With Mariame Kaba Radicalize You

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 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.