🏁 Waiting to set career goals

🗣️ Supporting subscribers, be sure to sign up for our “Leaping over the waterfall” Q&A happening today: register here.

What if we’re approaching our careers backwards?

At work I’m trying a framework called Strategic Doing for a new project. It’s designed for loosely connected networks to start addressing complex challenges. The other week I led a group through these Strategic Doing practices to get us to our project idea:

• Generate a bold and surprising question about the type of world we want our work to make possible;
• Identify the assets we can immediately put to use without needing permission;
• Link those assets to develop project ideas;
• Select one project that we think has the biggest potential for impact and would be the easiest to do;
• Set outcomes for the project to test our assumptions and decide whether it’s worth pursuing.

That last step — outcomes — is when we finally started talking about concrete goals. In career terms this would be the traditional five-year plan.