Sometimes you see it coming and can mitigate the mess and sometimes you step smack into it! Either way, shifting is messy, inconvenient and demands your immediate attention.
My shift happened in October 2014 in an executive conference room at Time Warner. I was sitting at a table in front of a whiteboard - that I had populated the week before - with slides and notes of the businesses’ future strategic plan. I somehow thought I’d miraculously dodge the long anticipated layoffs that our CEO claimed would “future proof” the company.
I thought wrong.
That layoff rocked me back on my (high) heels as a mom, wife and sole breadwinner. My plans needed a major pivot!
Over the following months, I experienced the transition that no amount of coffee chats or blog posts can prepare you for. When you leave a long-term career community, you lose structure, relationships and status built over decades. I now know how my Dad must have felt on the day after he retired. I did the blissful things you’d expect: sleeping late, taking long walks, going to the gym…learning to cook. But I had been hard-wired after 25 years to work in a certain way. In an office, with a team, the structure of an outlook calendar was my security blanket.
That time gave me the space to think about my professional experience and more importantly, work that I loved and was great at, work that mattered. I have been in the business of growing businesses for decades. Why not apply some of the tools I’ve built to get me out of this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) situation? I immediately thought of Design Thinking, my go-to creative problem solving process.
For over a decade, I led the thinking and built the teams focused on strategy and innovation inside big companies. I had the incredible privilege of working with some of the best advisors in the business to grow brands like TBS, TNT, TCM and – later - Spanx. I had coached teams successfully using innovation and design thinking practices to generate ideas, vet and launch new businesses. The tools were amazing!
One guiding principle of innovation and design is …”you don’t know what you don’t know”.
Design Thinking encourages you to check your ego at the door. Approach business challenges with humility and learn as much as you can as fast as you can before investing time and money. It is liberating, practical and low risk. Design thinking helped me solve problems creatively and collaboratively.
What I didn’t realize is that I had been organically applying tools of design thinking to get unstuck in many areas of my life. I became the nerd who walked around waving my sharpie in the air claiming, “There is no problem that can’t be solved with post-it notes”!
I used it to launch five new businesses inside my company…
I used it to plan dozens of speeches, talks and lessons.
I used it to plan a home renovation.
I used it to name my child (more on that in another blog post!)
What if the tools I used to coach product managers could be used to design a life?
To design MY life!
I came across the quote “Building is thinking. Designers build their way forward” in the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
For years, I’ve coached teams to stay nimble with their innovation plans – to be ready for inevitable pivots and plot twists. Now it was time for me to build my way forward in my own life.
To learn more about my Life Design, visit https://www.springboardstrategy.net/life-design.