🏁 Waiting to set career goals
What Strategic Doing and 'Recalculating' reveal about the five-year plan
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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.