Creating Your Unlikely Innovative Career Path
I'm going to explain my mentorship framework in the context of my career. I'm going to connect it my Applied Innovation framework. Let's get delusional, then get to work.
Our first shared delusion is going to be about your career. Everyone’s 5 year plan is a delusion. It exists in the second foundation of my Applied Innovation framework. It hasn’t happened yet and will not happen unless you make it real. In the first foundation, the real world, there are acceptable delusions and delusions that make you sound crazy.
If you’re a Senior Data Scientist and your 5 year plan is to become a Principal Data Scientist or a Lead Data Scientist, you’ve created an acceptable delusion. Almost anyone you talk to can see you working within their constructs to get there.
If I’m a Shoe Salesperson and my 5 year plan is to run a Software Development Team, I have a lofty but respectable delusion. Aim for the stars and no matter what you’ll go far. My delusion falls into a construct even if the timeline seems unrealistic or the path is difficult.
I’m a Senior Leader running a cross functional technical team and my 5 year plan is to use data at scale to model customer behaviors. In 2010, that was unacceptably delusional. In 2015, that was a legitimate career path.
Looking back, most people wish they saw that coming. First foundation constructs limit available career paths. There is a risk associated with taking an unstructured career path. The further outside established paths we go, the greater the risk.
Let’s talk about becoming delusional about our careers in a risk management framework.
The Purpose Of Career Delusions
The delusions of the second foundation allow us to see a version of our career outside of first foundation constructs. Those constructs exist for good reason. Our careers happen in the first foundation, in reality. It’s great to dream big if there is a construct for achieving your 5 year plan.
When I mentor someone, step 1 is to get them to open up about what they actually want. We guard our delusions because we understand the risks. As children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is answerable with anything. President, CEO, Astronaut, or ‘I want to cure cancer’ are all accepted from a 5 year old. They are encouraged.
If your 35 year old Uber driver says they are going to cure cancer, they are delusional. When I mentor, I must build trust to get people to open up. When they finally do, their delusion is typically not what they really want.
The constructs of the first foundation limit options to what’s available. The first foundation tends to make people choose what someone else wants for them, not what they want for themselves. My second step as a mentor is to treat people like they were treated when they were 5.
“No really, what do you want to do? Stop telling me what your boss, your company, your family, your whatever, want you to do and tell me what you actually want to do.”
Much of what a mentor does is give permission. I am an enabler. I reveal options and paths to goals that were always there. My success as a mentor and enabler comes from my ability to remove constructs which have become prisons.
A Dollar Store Walt Whitman
Steps 1 and 2 of my mentorship process are stolen from Whitman. Anyone who works in self-help, innovation, futurism, etc. is a dollar store Walt Whitman. As a poet, he revealed the false constructs of the first foundation and replaced them with his own first principles.
Great poetry is a guided dissociation. Once we finish reading the poem, we provide the connection back to the first foundation. We internalize those first principles and act on the discoveries we come to. Poets were the first self-help gurus and life coaches.
The Dollar Store Walt Whitman of the world sell theater without advertising the risks and limitations. They are pure enablers and that’s dangerous.
Think about someone who lives in the second foundation, a neurodiverse person. Enabling them is obviously dangerous. Living detached from the first foundation is an unacceptable delusion. The longer the detachment lasts and the further from reality a person gets, the more damage they can do to their life.
They lose the wall between dissociation and reality. They act out their second foundation delusion in the first foundation. The same thing can happen with neurotypicals if they fall too deep into the self-help cycle. People spend more time investing in the self-help cycle or innovation cycle than they do making their delusion real.
Too many Dollar Store Walt Whitman make it sound easy because if they reveal the risks, you won’t buy their book or video or whatever.
A Risk Management Framework
I’ve sold theater for the last decade. I got asked in one of my strategy classes, “Is Data Science theater?”
“Yes. However, we do something different. Data Science functions. It does not work. We build an evidentiary support for when our models will work. We advertise where they begin to behave unpredictably. We build risk management frameworks to deal with unpredictable scenarios. If there’s value in model functionality and acceptable risk, we deploy the model to production. Then we continually improve it. We fill in valuable gaps in functionality. We stabilize around valuable use cases.”
Every project I have ever started that resulted in significant value started out as a delusion. Every novel model and unique dataset did not exist before I built it. We call that proving out the technology or proving out the business model.
I did not know all the steps in advance. I had to figure it out along the way. My career was no different. Yours isn’t either.
Career plans do not work. They function. Building a career path that anyone else can build has limited value. Building a novel career path around emerging opportunity has a much higher value. The further outside of first foundation concepts you go, the more risk you incur and must mitigate.