Have you ever asked yourself, "How can I make a real difference on meaningful problems throughout my career?" If so, you're not alone. In our complex world, where challenges like income inequality, healthcare access, and food security loom, many of us yearn to align our professional lives with creating positive change. This framework was designed for those looking to identify hidden or overlooked opportunities to create positive change through their professional lives.
You’ll use this framework to reframe your career path, aligning your skills and passions with solutions to some of the world's most intractable problems. Whether you're a recent graduate, mid-career professional, or someone looking to pivot, this framework creates a thoughtful pause for reflection.
Defining Career Impact
The Austin Center for Design (AC4D)’s mission exemplifies this approach for defining career impact, reframing creative roles in design to address complex societal challenges known as “wicked problems.” As you progress through this framework, you’ll reflect on how your unique skills and experiences can contribute to making an impact on the wicked problems that matter to you most.
Understanding Wicked Problems
Wicked problems are multifaceted, dynamic challenges that lack clear-cut answers. AC4D employs a design-driven approach to undertake societal challenges. Our students have delved into a variety of wicked problems and their solutions emphasize the importance of understanding the human aspect of issues faced. [Link to student case studies/past projects]
Activity 1
Choose a wicked problem that resonates with you and create a mind map to explore its complexities. This exercise will help you understand the interconnected nature of these challenges and identify potential areas for impact that matter to you. Example
- Take a blank sheet of paper and write your chosen problem in the center.
- Draw branches out from the center, labeling each with related factors or sub-issues (e.g., for climate change, branches might include "carbon emissions," "deforestation," "policy barriers").
- From each branch, draw smaller branches and note specific challenges, observations, or thoughts.
- This activity should take no more than 10-15 minutes, but it will begin to reveal the problem’s many facets.
Self-Discovery and Impact Alignment
To create meaningful change over time, it's crucial to align your personal values and skills with societal challenges you care about. The design process can broaden your perspective and uncover new possibilities for impact.
Activity 2
Use the framework to guide you in this second activity. Acknowledge your beliefs, identify limiting emotions, and desired future states. This self-reflection will guide you towards a more impactful career path.
Generating Alternatives
With recognition of the more difficult emotions surrounding your beliefs, you’ll intentionally broaden away from this, ideating a more ideal future state. Use provocations to challenge your assumptions and generate innovative alternatives.
Activity 3
The goal for this activity is to generate as many ideas or alternatives as you can around the positive emotion you identified in the previous stage.
Optional: Use the provocation cards to help spark ideas. Take one provocation card and pair it with a pattern you identified while generating as many alternatives as you can in 3-5 minutes. If the provocation card doesn’t spark anything for you, move on to another one.
Next, find the patterns or themes in the alternatives you’ve generated and name them. It will be helpful for you to describe it as an action so that no matter what alternatives the pattern represents, you'll be able to maintain the openness and leave room for other ideas that could fit into that group.
Strategies for Professional Innovation
In this last activity, you’ll prototype and test the alternatives you’ve generated.
Putting our alternatives into practice means changing the context in which we've been confronted with limiting or negative emotions so that we can create the opportunity for movement towards a better future state.
This approach helps identify both immediate steps and long-term strategies for career impact.
Activity 4
Take the patterns you identified in Activity 3 and map the alternatives into the different contexts where you can envision the alternative being tested. This will help you visualize and refine your career alternatives, making them more concrete and actionable.
Once you've mapped your alternatives, identify two you can put into practice right away and one that you can reach for long term (in the next 3-6 months) using the prompts on your framework.
Ongoing Reflection and Iteration
The journey towards an impactful career is ongoing and requires continuous reflection, innovation, and courage. By aligning your skills with societal needs, you can create a career that not only fulfills you but also contributes to solving complex challenges.
As you continue on this journey, keep prototyping solutions and reimagining your career. Share your insights and experiences on the provided Padlet platform, fostering a community of like-minded innovators committed to positive change.
Start small, stay curious, and never underestimate the impact you can have through your day-to-day professional choices.
