Blind trial and error, and the resulting adjustments (adjustments which retain the “best” or “fittest” characteristics, selected by survive-ability in [the specific] environment), can create complex, ingenious solutions to all sorts of systems problems.
“Evolution never looks ahead. It can’t plan the best way to travel from Point A to Point B. Instead, small changes to existing forms arise by genetic mutation, and spread within a population to the extent that they help organisms respond more effectively to current conditions.”
– The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt
Unless you’re a character in The Walking Dead tv series and the world has gone the way of the apocalypse, you can often choose which environment (surroundings, people, attitudes) you want guiding your development.
Testing and Learning
“Research on how adults learn shows that the logical sequence — reflect, then act; plan, then implement — is reversed in transformation processes like making a career change. Why? Because the kind of knowledge we need to make change in our lives is tacit, not textbook clear; it is implicit, not explicit; it consists of knowing-in-doing, not just knowing.[5] Such self-knowledge has a personal and situational quality; it comes from social interaction and involvement in a specific context and with specific people, not from solitary introspection or abstract information gleaned from theoretical, general-purpose personality profiles.[6] It can be acquired only in the process of making change.“The test-and-learn model for making change is based on theories suggesting that learning is circular, iterative: We take actions, one step at a time, and respond to the consequences of those actions such that an intelligible pattern eventually starts to form.[7 ]The self-knowledge needed is neither an ‘inner truth’ nor an ‘input’ that might light the way at the beginning of the process; rather, it is tangible information about ourselves relative to specific possibilities — information that accumulates and evolves throughout the entire learning process.
“Of course, in any career change, deeper identity questions need to be resolved. Gary, for example, had to acknowledge that his insecurities had kept him from making his own career choices and that, as a result, his path was more the product of his parents’ expectations than of his own interests and preferences. Although this was an important realization, it was not going to help him figure out how, and in what specific arena, he wanted to become his own person. A profound awareness of a problem or a growing dissatisfaction isn’t enough: To make progress, Gary had to improve his ability to envision alternatives; to get a feel for himself in the contexts and situations he was considering; to test possible selves in situ, not just in his mind.
“Management guru Henry Mintzberg once contrasted what he called ‘planning’ and ‘crafting’ strategies. When we think of planning, he argued, we think of a person who ‘sits in an office formulating orderly courses of action derived from a systematic analysis that precedes implementation.’ Crafting is completely different, involving ‘not so much thinking and reason as involvement, a feeling of intimacy and harmony with the materials at hand, developed through long experience and commitment. Formulation and implementation merge into a fluid process of learning through which creative strategies evolve.’[8] The more unfamiliar the new possibilities, the more necessary it becomes to learn about them through direct involvement rather than planning. Because so many new ideas and bits of information surface once we get moving, spending too much time up front figuring out ‘the plan’ wastes energy. As table 2-1 shows, the contrasting models for reinventing ourselves spring from a different set of assumptions and promise not only different means, but also different ends.
Table 2-1: Contrasting Models of the Reinventing Process
“As we will see in the following section, the plan-and-implement sequence cannot lead us to a new working identity because its underlying view of the nature of identity and how it changes is flawed. A linear plan-then-implement sequence presupposes an existing, fully formed self that gets exchanged for a new and improved model, one that might have been known from the beginning. The test-and-learn sequence rejects the notion of a preexisting entity waiting to be discovered; it recognizes that a person and his or her environment shape each other in ways that can produce possibilities that did not reside in either at the start.[9]“
[5]Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
[6]Ikujiro Nonaka, “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation,” Organization Science 5, no. 1 (1994): 14–37.
[7 ]Edgar H. Schein has talked about this as the distinction between “planned change” and “managed learning” in “Kurt Lewin’s Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom: Notes Toward a Model of Managed Learning,” Systems Practice 9, no. 1 (1996): 27–48.
[8]Henry Mintzberg, “Crafting Strategy,” Harvard Business Review 65, no. 4 (1987): 66–75.
[9]See Richard L. Daft and Karl E. Weick, “Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems,” Academy of Management Review 9, no. 2 (1984): 284–295, for a discussion of the distinction between discovering and creating possibilities.
– Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, by Herminia Ibarra
and fix formatting issues someday.
