"Designing your life is a wicked problem."
(Bill Burnett and Dave Evans: Designing Your Life - How to Live a Well-Balanced, Joyful Life)
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If you are here, then you are most likely either interested in Future Design and wicked problems, or you want to Design or Redesign your Future, and having discovered just how wicked a problem it is, you need some help doing so. The importance and necessity of Future Design and the number of individuals who can benefit from it is foregrounded by the number of universities, such as Stanford, that offer Life Design courses. In addition, some coaches, such as myself, offer Future Design Programmes in response to the need that multiple clients bring to coaching: designing a life that is meaningful, enjoyable and sustainable and/or overcoming a life challenge that is so significant it calls into question the life that they have been living. But, what is Future Design and what makes it a wicked problem? And what is a wicked problem anyway?
What is Future Design?
The quick answer
Future Design is a process that supports you to Future-Proof your life by applying design thinking and integral coaching to the problem of creating a life that is meaningful, enjoyable and sustainable. Design thinking and Integral Coaching are methodologies that focus on human needs in order to design solutions that will meet those needs. In the case of Future Design, the primary needs that we focus on are meaning, enjoyment and sustainability over the course of our lifetimes.
The detailed version
By applying the principles of design thinking, future designers are able to answer the big existential questions (such as Who Am I Really? and/or What Does It All Really Mean?) and practical questions (such as What Should I Do Every Day to Make My Life More Meaningful, Enjoyable and Sustainable and/or What Job/Career is Best for Me?) Future designers answer these questions by applying the key principles of design thinking: ambiguity, curiosity, innovation and iteration.
Future designers (aka people like you) apply the principle of ambiguity by acknowledging that there is more than one way of understanding the problem of life design, and more than one viable solution to it. Future designers, therefore, use their curiosity to understand the problem and reframe it as needed, as well as to research multiple solutions to the problem. Future designers embrace innovation by making things. The types of things that future designers make are not products, but rather small actions (called prototypes) that allow them to test the ideas they have about what will make a better life or a new life that is both enjoyable and sustainable. Finally, future designers iterate. This means that they repeat the processes involved in defining the problem, creating solutions and generating testable prototypes of their life or aspects of it until such time as they arrive at a satisfactory solution.
Future Design also applies the principles of Integral Coaching. Integral Coaching is a methodology that has human development as its primary goal. It acknowledges that humans are multi-faceted beings whose lives unfold across multiple Streams of Being, i.e. cognitive, emotional, physical, relational and spiritual. Integral Coaching supports individuals to explore and integrate these Streams of Being by offering opportunities for compassionate inquiry that yield opportunities for focused action. Integral Coaching also acknowledges that moving from insight to action requires support, and so the process is both highly supportive and encourages participants to identify the further support they need and who can provide that support.
Of course, there are other characteristics that future designers need to apply too, and I help you explore these in the Future Design Programme. For now, though, let’s consider why Future Design is a wicked problem.
Why is Future Design a Wicked Problem?
The quick answer
The wickedness of a wicked problem does not refer to how ‘bad’ a problem is. Rather, firstly, the wickedness of a problem refers to how complex it is. Secondly, and as an outcome of its complexity, the wickedness refers to how difficult it is to solve the problem. Therefore, Future Design is a wicked problem because it is a complex problem that is difficult to solve. The complexity and difficulty of Future Design means that it can be approached from multiple perspectives (it can be understood in different ways) and can have multiple solutions.
The detailed version
The term 'wicked problem' has its origins in the domain of social planning, where it was defined by social scientists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, and was generalised to problems in other contexts by Jeff Conklin, president and founder of the CogNexus group. A wicked problem (such as designing your future ) is challenging to solve for a number of reasons, such as:
A wicked problem is not well understood until after a solution to the problem is created and tried. The better life you can live is only properly understood once you begin living a version of it.
The problem has no stopping rule (i.e. there is no clear point at which the attempts to solve the problem should end). It is always possible to keep generating better versions of your life.
There is no right or wrong solution to the problem. Rather, solutions to wicked problems are 'better or worse'. There are no universally applicable criteria that tell you what form your better life must take. Rather, your better life is a function of what will satisfy you.
There is no limitation on the number of possible solutions to the problem. You are free to decide which version of your life best suits you. and you might, indeed, generate multiple versions of a better life.
Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique. All individuals, including you, bring multiple and differing needs and wants to the problem of Future Design.
Every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem. Your need to design your life or redesign it is linked to other problems, such as having to earn money, or needing to improve your skills so you can compete in the job market or finding more meaning in multiple aspects of your life.
The Better Life that is Meaningful, Enjoyable and Sustainable
The complexity of Future Design is therefore, firstly, a result of the ambiguity of the goal that we set, i.e. meaning, enjoyment and sustainability. In other words, what is meaningful and enjoyable and constitutes sustainability for you, will be quite different from what is meaningful, enjoyable and sustainable for another. So, it follows that before we can start Designing Solutions to our problem of creating the better life and before we can begin Doing Stuff that will create meaning and enjoyment and be sustainable, we need to understand Who We Are so we can understand What We Need.
So, Who Are You?
The quick answer
Disciplines such as psychology describe personal identity (the Who You Are question) as the sum of factors such as our personalities, values, interests, aspirations and talents. In turn, psychology helps us learn more about these by providing us with models, frameworks and tests that give us more insight into each of these factors, and how they influence each other to generate the unique individuals we are.
The detailed version
In my Future Design programme you will have an opportunity to explore your personality characteristics, values, relationships, physical health and recreation activities. You will also have an opportunity to explore your interests, before setting life goals (aspirations) and creating opportunities to meet those goals. In other words, we use the results of personality, values, interests and/or aptitude tests to help you identify what is most meaningful, enjoyable and sustainable a life for you, and what you need to do to create or recreate that better version of your life. We use those results to match Who You Are with What You Want to Aim For (Your Aspirations), and What You Need to achieve those aspirations.
And, What Do You Want to Do?
The quick answer
Once you have more insight into Who You Are and What You Need, you will be in a better position to generate ideas about how to design or redesign aspects of your life, i.e. What You Want To Do. If your Future Design problem relates to more meaning in your Work Life, then you’ll be able to use the results of your inquiry into who you are to identify work that better aligns with your core needs and competencies. If your Future Design problem relates to multiple aspects of your life, then the action you take will necessarily need to include all these aspects.
The detailed version
A single life contains multiple ‘lives’ or aspects of experience. Six major aspects of our lives are:
Work
Financial health
Personal growth (including Personality & Values)
Relationships
Physical health
Recreation/leisure
Depending on what life problem you bring to Future Design, you will focus on all or some of these aspects of your life. The overriding principle of Future Design, though, is that what happens in one part of our lives inevitably impacts another part. Therefore, when facing a life crisis during adulthood or, as a youth, when you are designing a life that will work for you in adulthood, you inevitably need to consider multiple aspects of your life and take action in more than one of these domains of experience. The ideas that you generate are of course only the second step in your Future Design or Redesign process. The next step is to create ‘prototypes’, i.e. small actions that you can take that will help you learn more about the viability of the ideas you have about how to improve your life.
So, What Do You Need to Do?
The quick answer
Get help from others and test your ideas about how to live a better life by creating small actions that simulate the conditions of a new life. So, for example, if you decide that you want to become a historian because you are interested in history, then you can test this idea by a) speaking to historians about what they do every day, b) job shadowing historians, and c) doing one or more of the tasks that historians ordinarily complete. By doing this, you will gain more insight into whether or not that career is what you thought it would be, and will give you what you need.
The detailed version
Testing the ideas you have about how to create a better life is perhaps the most important step in the Future Design process as it is here that you get information about:
what it takes to make the better life happen,
whose help you need to make things happen, and
whether or not the solution you thought about can give you the results you need.
Whether you are being coached or seek to design your future on your own, you will need the help of others because all aspects of our lives benefit from others’ input, whether in the form of more or different ideas, emotional support or practical help. So, one of the first things you need to do is Define What Types of Support You Need. The next action is to Get the Support You Need. Thereafter, you will Design Actions to test how you are able to improve or actualise the quality (meaning, enjoyment and sustainability) of life you seek. Of course, depending on the scope of your Future Design problem, you will be designing actions for one or more areas of your life. The overall goal of this step in the process is to learn. So, once you’ve completed the action/s, it is time to reflect on what you learnt.
So, What Did You Learn and What Does that Mean?
The quick answer
Testing ideas gives you information. The information it gives you is, broadly speaking, how viable the idea is, i.e. can it give you the results that you need? If the answer is yes, then you have successfully completed your Future Design process, and can continue to do more of the same. If the answer is ‘no’, or even ‘somewhat’, then it is time to generate new ideas that incorporate what you learnt.
The detailed version
The reality of idea testing is that you almost always learn something that you didn’t predict. And, while this might feel frustrating, it is actually incredibly useful. For now, you are armed with information that you can use to:
generate new ideas / solutions, and
refine the actions you must take to test those ideas and solutions.
In Future Design, this can mean that we generate new ideas and solutions a few times before we are satisfied with the results, i.e. before we develop a solution/s that will generate sufficient meaning, enjoyment and sustainability in our lives. However, as we refine each solution we will already begin to experience the benefits of even partial solutions in aspects of our lives. For, after all, growth is an incremental process that happens over time, and Future Design is ultimately about growth in multiple aspects of our lives, including, most importantly, our selves.
If you are interested in Future Design, then reach out to me so we can discuss how I can support you. Alternatively, read about the Future Design programme on my website.
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