Project 52: Week 38 (8/12/24)
Gerald Doyle
Human Centered Design and Innovation: "You know, I believe it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous. Yes, much better. People forgive each other more readily and become more humble, ..." Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Our reflection and invitation ...
“If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product [or service] to do?”
“Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
“Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely to realize our need for one another.”
“A person is a person through other persons.
“A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, walk, speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.”
― Desmond Tutu
We are delighted to continue with a year-long offering as part of our Career Services initiative. ~ Gerald Doyle
Project 52: Week 38
Welcome to Burnett & Evans: Getting Unstuck
Occasionally, at moments in our lives and careers (all of us), we feel “stuck” on our career journeys -- and our ministry.
We are not making the progress we want, and we may feel trapped in our current situation, unable to break through current limitations or blockers to get (back) into flow toward our career visions.
As readers of this series will know, we are big fans of the work of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, as captured in their book Designing Your Life. Burnett and Evans (B&E for short) devote a chapter in the book to “Getting Unstuck.” Here below are some summary points. We do recommend reading the book in its entirety for those who feel so-called.
As with many topics, B&E advocate approaching this problem as a designer would. They suggest that designers often reach points where they feel “stuck.” In this context, they suggest two crucial reframes:
“Dysfunctional belief: I’m stuck.
Reframe: I’m never stuck because I can always generate many ideas.
Dysfunctional belief: I have to find the one right idea.
Reframe: I need many ideas so I can explore any number of possibilities for my future.”
B&E also point out that “stuckness” is often the result of embracing an “anchor problem” - one that seems so large and intractable, for any reason, that it seems to defy solution.? Confronted with an anchor problem, B&E suggest two approaches: reframing the big problem by focusing on a smaller, more achievable version, and, in a related way, breaking the big problem down into small increments that can be practically achieved.
They give the down-to-earth example of Dave Evans trying to create for himself the ideal workshop in his garage - and still have room for his cars. Dave struggled with this anchoring problem for years until, by reframing and incrementalizing, he accepted the challenge to clear out the garage by hiring a storage room for his extra stuff and starting with small “baby steps” to create the workshop he wanted around his cars.
B&E write, “The big move here is to get rid of the image of the perfect garage (or your desired outcome, parenthetical ours) and reimagine a different result or steps along the way. If Dave keeps the picture of his old, perfect garage (the solution) pasted on that refrigerator door in his mind, he’s never going to get anywhere because it’s too hard. Too hard doesn’t work.”
To create lots of ideas - ideating, in the language of designers - B&E recommend mind-mapping. They suggest taking ideas from a “Good Time Journal” (see related article in this series) or choosing one or more themes that would appeal to our career vision. B&E suggest great sources of inspiration include thinking of times and circumstances that create high engagement, high energy and flow for us.
Some of you will be old hands at mind mapping. Still, for those unfamiliar, in a mind map, we tend to put one idea in a small circle in the middle of a (physical or digital) page and then let our imaginations flow to identify related ideas or actions, each connected to the central idea by a line.
We can continue to find ideas or actions linked to the first round of expansions until we find the page covered with a connected network of newly created ideas or possibilities.? B&E suggest that when the first mind-map iteration is done, we can connect a few of the most appealing ideas from the page - B&E suggest the best ones will tend to “jump out at you” - to begin to draft an idealised, imagined job description that would incorporate those ideas. Exploring that image can help us to get unstuck.
To explore this new option, B&E suggest creating low-cost, safe-to-fail experiments and prototypes (see related article) that would lead us toward the latest idea in creative ways, consistent with our career vision.
In a Tri Cosain context, we agree: we suggest conducting Conversations of Inquiry (see related article and our book) as prototyping exercises to explore the newly discovered options, and incorporating those experiments into our career-exploring Agile Plans (see related article).
In pursuing this kind of journey, B&E suggest, “As a life designer, you need to embrace two philosophies:
1. You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from
2. You never choose your first solution to any problem.”
We hope these practices will be helpful to all of us when we feel stuck on our Tri Cosain career journeys.
As always, I'm ready to support and accompany you on this and every aspect of your Tri Cosain exploration. In particular, he is happy to share examples of these practices in action and to help you create versions that will work for you on your career ministry journey at CTU.
Monday, 12 August 2024
Gerald Doyle
Additional Viewing and Listening Resources:
[Consider how Clayton Christensen's approach will help you become "unstuck."
| Animated Core Message
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 ) as a consultant in their Higher Education and Career Services practice.
Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more about:
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.