In a volatile, unpredictable and global marketplace, building a career that will offer challenge, security and financial reward is a tough job. We all know that the traditional organization with its built-in career ladder and inherent support system is dead and gone. As a result many people are at a loss about how to manage their career in this world. Furthermore, the financial debacle and the recession have played total havoc with most people’s ideas about job security and left many with more career fears than they have ever experienced.
Yet it is possible to reframe your career in such a way that you can anticipate a much higher batting average than most people have seen over the past few years. Karl Weick, a name familiar to very few in business, is an immensely respected, highly relevant thought leader for the very issue most organizations face: how can you have success in a world of chaos and complexity.
What makes Weick so useful is that he’s thought deeply about how to perform and succeed in an age of complexity. He knows as well as anyone how to manage the unexpected.
Uniquely, he has stepped outside the business world and studied organizations where the potential for error and disaster is overwhelming, including nuclear power plants, firefighting crews and aircraft carriers. The flat deck of a carrier has been called the most dangerous four and one-half acres in the world: “acreage filled with up to eighty jet aircraft, some of which at any one time are being fueled with their engines running, or having armed lethal weapons attached to their wings, or being launched off the front of the ship by two million horsepower catapults that accelerate the 645,000 pound plane to 150 miles per hour in three seconds, or are being recovered simultaneously at the back end of the ship by what amounts to a ‘controlled crash.’”
The aircraft carrier may be the most unpredictable and dangerous environment in the world. Yet, the team of officers and sailors has learned how to manage this highly unpredictable environment.
Weick takes the ideas he has learned and applies them to the 21st century organization. My own expertise tells me that the same set of ideas can be applied judiciously, thoughtfully and helpfully to the 21st century career.
Borrowing from Weick, I believe that the hallmarks of 21st century career success are the following key characteristics:
- Preoccupation with failure—One of the most serious issues we face is the drift into automatic processing. Success will mean that we pay attention to small career errors and maintain awareness of the liabilities of success.
- Reluctance to simplify interpretation—When you know that the world you face is complex, unstable and unpredictable, it’s important to see and understand as much about that world as possible. That means we must all do nuance and reject simple ideas.
- Sensitivity to the local—For your own success and survival it’s imperative to pay constant attention to your firm’s front lines. We’d all better know damn well what our customers think of our firm, how our competition’s chasing us, what the industry is doing, and how well our company is really faring in the marketplace.
- Commitment to resilience—No system is perfect, and no career is perfect or safe. Career success will mean that you’re going to make a firm dedication to creativity and innovation—and learn how to execute to those demands.
- Deference to expertise—we’ll need to consult different resources, bypass many career systems, perhaps ignore the traditions of human resource groups, reinvent ourselves and own up to calamity when it comes our way.
Reading this sounds pretty grim. But I must confess that I find it all terrifically exciting. We’re not bound by the past, and we can create the future.