How to Craft a Career in Times of Crisis
And why you should adopt the mindset of a stone sculptor
In our modern society, work constitutes a defining element of our identity. This is especially true in knowledge-intensive economies. Introduce yourself to someone new and you will probably start with your name, maybe where you come from, and then your profession.
Some see work only as a job or source of income, but for the vast majority, work is seen as a career or even a calling.
So the truth is that, for the vast majority of us, work forms a centerpiece of our lives.
As we grow from childhood to adulthood, we dream and fantasize about what we might become. An astronaut, a police officer, a nurse, a doctor. Work is often the theme when children play together and experiment with different roles.
Sadly, we gradually lose this ability to dream and play with our possible future selves.
In fact, career choices can frequently become agonizing moments in our lives. We want to reduce uncertainty, have it right, please the expectations of our family and friends, ensure a good income, safeguard career growth prospects, feel inspired, etc.
Needless to say that when it comes to your career, certainty and making the right choice are elusive goals.
Crises emerge, the economy turns east or west, new technologies develop — and, with these, jobs come and go. In fact, a recent study by the OECD shows that about 50% of our jobs are vulnerable to automation.
As the American writer, Allen Saunders, once said (later popularized in a song by John Lennon): “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”.
So how should we go about career choices?
In management scholarship, we often talk about “sense-making”, a concept introduced by Karl Weick in 1995 to illustrate how decision-making is far more contextual and enacted than a purely rational process. This is nicely captured in the following story, told by Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorti, of a small military unit that got lost in the Alps.
“The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit into the icy wilderness. It began to snow immediately, snowed for two days, and the unit did not return. The lieutenant suffered, fearing that he had dispatched his own people to death. But on the third day, the unit came back. Where had they been? How had they made their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm, and then with the map we discovered our bearings. And here we are. The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. He discovered to his astonishment that it was not a map of the Alps, but a map of the Pyrenees”, Weick (1995)
Of course, this group would have done better with the good map, but the point of the story is that a wrong map is probably better than no map at all. It serves as an instrument to understand reality and focus your efforts while you are enacting and experimenting.
If you couple this with a good attitude towards failure and a reflective ability to learn, your understanding of yourself and your context will improve (your map will become better), increasing your chances of success. This, in our view, applies equally to your career.
We are not saying that we should not plan our careers, but as General Eisenhower once said: “plans are nothing, planning is everything”.
Planning should be part of your process of experimentation and not meant to bend life to your wishes. This is especially true in these times of unprecedented volatility and uncertainty.
So here are, in our view, the five main pillars of a bulletproof career in these times of uncertainty (well, we actually think these pillars always apply anyway, as careers are always uncertain, especially at the start of your professional life):
1Embrace a possibility mindset. Just like Carol Dweck (2016) explains, having a growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset), in which failure is seen as an opportunity to learn, is critical for success. By possibility mindset, we also mean that even in the most severe crisis, you can detect opportunities and that you should also try to recover your childhood ability to dream about your future.
2Approach your career choices as sense-making rather than decision-making. Karl Weick’s groundbreaking work on sense-making puts career choices in another perspective. Hindsight is 20/20, but while you are in the flux of everyday life, your ability to enact and learn iteratively is what will determine your success. Remember that a bad plan is still better than no plan at all, provided you act and learn with it.
3Dare to experiment. You cannot tell about what you like if you don’t try different things. Great architects and designers understand the importance of experimentation and prototyping. Things on paper (e.g. job descriptions) are just incomplete and even sometimes displaced representations of reality.
4Execute relentlessly and with persistence. While we suggest that you have an open mind to embrace novelty and failure, it does not mean that you should take your decisions lightly. Once you commit to a job, internship, or even just a small project, go deep and immerse yourself fully into it. Only then you can extract real learning and grow further. It’s OK to look back and say “I failed”, but only as long as you can also say “but I tried my best and learned a whole deal about me and the world”.
5Spend enough time in mindful reflection (alone or with peers). This is important to learn from your experimentation (you don’t want to make the same mistake twice) and to take conscious note of your drivers and allergies. This is how “sense-making” becomes a muscle to increase your chances of success, as the ever-evolving map of your career becomes clearer. Have open and honest conversations with colleagues, ask for feedback, write down your thoughts.
In summary, we think career-making is much more like a craft. A metaphor we like to use is that of stone sculpture. The artist does not build the sculpture from the ground-up linearly, but instead gradually chops off pieces of stone until the image emerges from within the stone.
The same happens in our careers.
We are more in a process of realizing what we don’t want (chopping off pieces from a sculpture), instead of moving blissfully throughout our lives from success to success.
The artist starts with an image but that image evolves as the stone responds with its unique structure and texture. And as you progress, the image of your career becomes clearer and your work will be more refined… until the day you feel the need to build a new sculpture.
Follow us on Instagram @ungapcareer to stay up-to-date on our Career Crafting programs
References
Dweck, C. (2016). What having a “growth mindset” actually means. Harvard Business Review, 13, 213–226.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (Vol. 3). Sage.
