Earlier I mentioned a book, Designing Your Life, that I was using to help me move forward after losing my dream job. Some of you were eager for me to share more about it. So here is the first in what I hope to be an ongoing series of Book Club posts.
I’d never heard of design thinking before a colleague recommended this book a couple years ago. Now I appreciate its relevance and broad applicability. Life Design has a lot to teach us about how to approach our so-called ‘problems’.
To recap, in that earlier post I wrote:
The principles of design thinking that the book presents include: Be curious. Try stuff. Reframe problems. Know it’s a process. Ask for help.
And that’s pretty much where I left things.
Now I want to pick up where I left off. What does each of these principles mean? What does each of them look like in practice? How are they all related? I want to try to unpack them a bit more here.
Be curious. I used the word curiosity as one of the hallmarks of the life and work of Alex Trebek, mentioning the fact that the game show Jeopardy! privileges questions over answers. This is actually an important foundation for design thinking. ‘Designers love questions,’ the book’s authors write. ‘Curiosity makes everything new. It invites exploration. It makes everything play.’
Ever wonder why a counselor, a coach, or a mentor is so often helpful to us? It’s because they’re asking questions. Questions elicit information and help us see with new eyes. They also help us see our situation without emotion clouding our judgment.
Zen Buddhism has a term for this posture of openness and lack of preconceptions. It’s called shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind. Questions matter because the possibilities are always multiple, if not infinite. There’s never only one solution to the problem you’re considering, whatever it may be.
The principle of try stuff is really putting the principle of being curious into action. ‘Designers try things. They test things out. They create prototype after prototype, failing often, until they find what works and what solves the problem. Sometimes they find the problem is entirely different from what they thought it was.’
‘Designers embrace change. They are not attached to a particular outcome, because they are always focused on what will happen next – not what the final result will be.’ Designers call this posture a bias for action (an eminently google-able phrase – try it sometime).
What if our question-asking led directly to experimenting? What if we embraced failure instead of fearing it and trying to avoid it?
Reframe problems is the third principle of life design. ‘Reframing is how designers get unstuck. Reframing is essential to finding the right problems and the right solutions.’ A reframe is also called a pivot.
‘In life design, we reframe a lot. The biggest reframe is that your life can’t be perfectly planned, that there isn’t just one solution to your life, and that that’s a good thing.’
What do we gain when we let go of the idea of ‘just one solution’? As I learned when I conquered the hill near my new home, letting go isn’t the same as giving up. We give up when we stop asking questions, when we stop trying stuff, when we stop pivoting.
The fourth principle of life design is know it’s a process. ‘For every step forward, it can sometimes seem you are moving two steps back. Mistakes will be made, prototypes thrown away. Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.’
Gee, didn’t I just say something about this? Life is messy and complicated. It’s what happens to us when we’re busy making other plans.
‘The last mindset of design thinking,’ ask for help, ‘is perhaps the most important. What this means is simple – you are not alone. The best designers know that great design requires radical collaboration. It takes a team. Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people.’
When my job disappeared at the end of June, I was forced to ask myself the very real, relevant and practical question, What do I do next? I knew I had to come up with something quickly, because my need for income didn’t go away.
My bias for action meant that I started a job at UPS just ten days later. I had no idea whether I’d be any good at it or enjoy it. I needed something, and this was it. I told myself that I would just keep trying to do the next right thing. That has led me to my current 30-day trial period as a full-time package car driver.
At the same time I also started reaching out to others in my professional network, asking them for help. That help has taken many different forms: a job lead, a network referral, a word of encouragement or affirmation, a reminder that I’m not alone. Radical collaboration helped bring this blog to life as I’ve sought to reframe my problem away from career and identity and toward income generation and portfolio diversification.
I have no idea if my current path is right for me. I’m always second-guessing myself. But I give myself plenty of grace, because I understand that it’s a process and that I am figuring this out. I can’t screw it up. I just keep moving forward, one step at a time.
This is just a taste of the book Designing Your Life. I strongly recommend it as an excellent resource for anyone who’s stuck or is just trying to figure it out. And that includes most of us – now more than ever.
