Our colleagues in the "hard" disciplines of architecture,
industrial engineering, and urban planning use the principles of whole-system
design, lean thinking, and radical resource productivity to design
sustainable buildings and communities. I have found that my most productive
and satisfying work as a career consultant has implicitly followed
these principles. The next step is to learn from our successes and
increase our ability to design careers that sustain the human spirit.
Whole-system career design. Clients come to us because
they are distressed, whether by job loss, impending graduation, overwork,
or growing dissatisfaction. Distress often restricts their ability
to imagine solutions more specific than "a job" or "less
stress." Applying our career development expertise to these limited
objectives usually means repeatedly responding to our clients’ fears
and objections ("I’m too shy to do informational interviews.
Why can’t I just send out my resume?"), and expending a lot
of our own energy to get clients to take baby steps. Our efforts may
result in incremental improvement in their work lives, just as adding
insulation may increase comfort in a badly built house, but they are
unlikely to learn how to wisely steer their own careers.
Whole-system career design means working with our clients to create
career solutions that address multiple issues, designing careers which
support people’s whole lives by restoring their energy, encouraging
their creativity, and making it possible for them to also attend to
the other things they value in their lives, such as family, health,
and community.
Some years ago a young
attorney consulted me. She worked for
a corporation that had included her in
a formal mentoring program for promising
young women. The mentoring program was helping
her recognize that she didn’t feel entirely
at home in big business. She researched career
options and identified non-profit fundraising
as much more satisfying for her. But she didn’t
think she could afford a pay cut, since she
was committed to supporting her husband’s
graduate studies.
Whole-system design starts
with the end in mind and designs to create
the desired result. When obstacles appear,
rather than assessing them in isolation, it
looks for solutions that work for the whole
system. I might have told my client, in view of
the apparent obstacle that corporate law pays more
than fundraising, "Then let’s see what
we can find within your corporation that would
at least be more satisfying than what you’re
doing." Instead, I suggested that she and
her husband look at their total income and at their
savings and plan together for the next several
years.
Her husband suggested that he slow his studies
and take on more consulting gigs to produce
income. Shortly thereafter, one of her informational
interview contacts asked her to apply for
an open position at a large university, where
fundraising salaries are relatively high.
She applied, was offered the position, accepted
it, and has since been promoted.
Lean thinking is about eliminating
waste. Taiichi Ohno, of Toyota, defined waste
as "any human activity which absorbs
resources but creates no value." Rethinking
value is critical in reducing waste. In career
development as in manufacturing, understanding
value entails asking customers about the experience
they want and then providing that experience.
When we assist clients to identify what they
value most, and to distinguish their best
work from the many other valuable kinds of
work in the world, they are better able to
proceed with wise career investigation and
decisions.
Two years ago, my former
client’s husband
consulted me. He was shortly to complete his
MA in a rather academic field, yet he was
not certain he wanted to teach at the college
level. He wondered whether he really wanted
to complete a Ph.D, even though in some ways
that seemed the easy pattern to follow. He
now enjoys teaching in an independent high
school, and he and his wife are among my best
referral sources for new clients.
Wasted human energy, satisfaction, and creativity
can be subtle to discern, yet we have all seen
the greater value created when people acknowledge
doubt and dissatisfaction and do both the inner
and the outer work of seeking what they truly want.
Whether they change jobs, change careers, or change
their attitude toward work, relationships, community
activities, or leisure, their lives and hearts
are enlarged by rethinking value, and they bring
more to everyone they interact with.
Radical resource productivity means
receiving the same or greater output by expending
fewer resources. For people at work, the scarce
resources are time and personal energy. A
business consultant says, "I have become
quite passionate about telling other people
that they can in fact get paid for what they
love. . . . For a long time I thought it was
almost selfish or some kind of a character
defect that I only wanted to do what I wanted
to do . . . and it really wasn’t until
I began to work as a consultant that it got
to be okay, that I realized that . . . it’s
okay to just step out and make a business
around what interests you the most. . . .
There’s another piece of it. It’s
also easy for you." The ease she speaks
of is characteristic of flow states. It is
enormously productive, including sparking
more energy and more creativity for the worker,
thus magnifying productivity even more. It
is a "positive addiction," a pleasurable
state that humans naturally seek to access
repeatedly. When work and career produce flow,
they enhance relationships, health, spiritual
practice, and other areas of life where flow
can also exist, creating a synergy that maintains
itself. Balance becomes a result of flow,
rather than a result for which we must thrive.
Working with clients in this way produces
the same synergy for us as career practitioners.
We become more productive and happier as we
become more and more accustomed to the experience
of flow. Sustainability is the opposite of
burnout and the antidote to subtler losses
of joy and enthusiasm. It enables people to
experience work, in the words of Kahlil Gibran,
as "love made visible."
I am indebted to Natural Capitalism, Creating the
Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L.
Hunter Lovins (Little, Brown and Company, ©1999) for introducing
me to concepts of sustainable design and sustainable engineering.
