A creative approach requires innovation.
Do you believe we have separate lives at work and home? Can personal and professional life be isolated from one another?
I think they both work together in tandem. I am the same person at home as I am at work. I live one life with one set of values and one way of living and working.
So why not let our home and work lives benefit from one another? Why not use the tools from our business and personal lives interchangeably? Can we feasibly analyze and plan for our future careers using the methodology of Design Thinking? To answer this, let’s first outline exactly what Design Thinking is.
There are several definitions for Design Thinking, but the one I find easiest to understand is ‘a human-centric approach to identifying opportunities or solving problems’. It has a framework, principles, and even a dedicated toolkit to guide us through the use of design thinking skills.
IBM Design Thinking methodology is visualized with a ‘loop’. This loop represents the continuous cycle of the stages: ‘observe, reflect, make’. Even after the third stage ‘making’, the cycle repeats This allows you to change your mind, fail, and repeat the cycle as needed, providing us with a simple and flexible framework.
Observe
How can we solve problems or identify opportunities if we don’t have the full picture? This is where we can begin to deeper understand ourselves. Asking the right questions and practicing keen observation are key in that stage.
While applying Design Thinking to our future careers, consider the kind of person you are. Like the companies, we all have our own value propositions. Fortunately, there are a few tools to help us with our observations.
One of these tools is Simon Sinek’s ‘Golden Circle Theory’. The theory provides an explanation as to why some people and organizations are able to differentiate themselves successfully. The theory begins by asking ‘Why do you do what you do?’ and then asking ‘How’ and ‘What’. In his book ‘Start with Why’, he explains the model in detail.
The Japanese concept of ‘Ikigai’ is another approach we can use in the observation stage. This approach focuses on four questions: What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? And what can you be paid for?
At the intersection of these questions is your ‘Ikigai’ (‘your reason for being’, your ‘Why’).
Another simple tool to get to know yourself better is by keeping a mood journal. While seeking answers to the above questions, my journal helped me immensely. I realized I had been so busy thinking about the next meeting, the next event, or the next day, that I had stopped living ‘in the moment’. Focusing on the present gave me clues to answering these questions and helped me to identify my values, purpose, and needs.
Reflect
The second phase in the Design Thinking loop is to ‘reflect’. In this phase, we articulate what we learned and identified, clarify what is important, define the problem, and start to generate ideas.
In your future career, this is where you will discover your challenges, your strengths, and your limitations.
Diagnosing your challenges is crucial. Suppose that you are a teacher. Feeling unhappy, you want to make a career change but are unsure which field to enter. Reflecting on the questions above will guide you to the core of your dilemma. In the end, you may find out that teaching nurtures your values and purpose, but the administrative tasks that come with it make you unhappy. Or you may discover that teaching really doesn't fulfill your values at all and that you want to consider other options.
Make
Finally, the ideation of creative options and careful testing prior to making a bold move are key in Design Thinking. If you decide to quit teaching and start your own online business, you’ll naturally want to test it first. By testing, I mean to figure out if your alternate option is really what will make you happy.
For instance, one of my friends quit her full-time job in a company to open a Kindergarten. She likes children very much and enjoys spending time with them, so she thought this would be her dream job. Yet she quickly became unhappy. There was much more operational work than she had anticipated, and due to the noise level in the Kindergarten, her migraines got worse. The problem is that she did not test her strategy before taking action. If she had consulted with some Kindergarten owners before deciding to start her own, she may have realized that it was not a good path for her. ‘Make’ is the third dimension of the loop, where we test our ideas. We may fail and need to go back to the observation stage again, but in doing so, we may also discover some of our hidden needs. And so the ‘loop’ goes on like this in a continuous cycle.
This loop reminds me of the impermanence of life; its flow and movement. Even if I feel that I am on the right path, I still occasionally remind myself to ‘stop and think’. I ask myself the same questions and see if my answers have changed. Am I still engaged in what I do? What are my possibilities moving forward? Approaching these questions through the lens of Design Thinking helps us to innovate. So why not use it to innovate our futures as well?