“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” ~ Jim Rohn
I should have known that my life’s journey would not have a normal trajectory. After all, if there is one way to describe me, it would be that I like to think and do things a little differently. I am intrigued by people with out-of-the-ordinary ideas and like to combine it with other ideas to create something better. I wish I had realised earlier on that I can also apply my innovative behaviour to my own life… For the most part I have followed the roadmap my parents had passed down to me, i.e. get an education, find a job, work hard, get married, and have children. For years and years, this roadmap was considered the definition of a good life. However, I can’t follow this roadmap anymore, or pass it on to my children. Rapid and dramatic changes are considered the new normal in life in the 21st century. The worst part is that there are no roadmaps. However, every challenge is an opportunity when you think creatively. There are no roadmaps, so you have to create your own. At the LEAP Academy, we don’t give you a roadmap, but what we do, is show you how to apply a design process to your life to approach this new world with creativity and courage.
Design is no longer exclusively the domain of certain professions. Today, we follow a more expansive view. Nigel Cross, in his book ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing’, says, “Everything we have around us has been designed. Design ability is, in fact, one of the three fundamental dimensions of human intelligence. Design, science, and art form an ‘AND’ not an ‘OR’ relationship to create the incredible human cognitive ability”. Through science you find similarities among things that are different, through art you find differences among things that are similar, and through design you create feasible ‘wholes’ from infeasible ‘parts’. The ability to redesign your life for self-innovation, i.e. to recreate your life and work into new feasible ‘wholes’, is a critical skill. We need to be able to transform ourselves numerous times over our lifetime, as our existing selves will simply become obsolete.
Thinking like a designer, when you redesign something, you have to deconstruct it and then reconstruct it again in a different way. Say, for example, you want to redesign a chair. First, you will have to take the chair apart and then, you will have to assemble it again, but this time, differently – also taking away and/or adding new parts if needed. On The LEAP Journey, we follow the same approach, as can be seen in the diagram illustrating our Triple Diamond Redesign Process for Self-Innovation below. We first help you to understand your constructed self and delve deep to find the real and deconstructed authentic you. We then help you to rebuild or reconstruct yourself by taking away and/or adding missing qualities, and through purposeful work, realise the best “you”. What we at the LEAP Academy are essentially doing, is using what is known as “design thinking”; a methodology used for quite some time by designers to solve complex problems, and finding desirable solutions for clients.
Authenticity is at the heart of The LEAP Journey and its redesign process. By using design thinking, you make decisions based on what your future self (your persona self) should authentically be instead of relying only on data on your present self (your perception self). You therefore make bets based on your intuition (artistic ability) instead of sensing (scientific ability) only. We believe that a fulfilling and relevant life is an achievement that is only possible if you live your best authentic “you” and not the “you” the world wants you to be. On The LEAP Journey, we help our clients unearth their authentic selves and enhance it. We support the view as expressed by the English teacher David McCullough Jr. in his commencement speech to a Wellesley High School’s graduating class titled ‘You Are (Not) Special’ and repeated in his follow-up book with the same title, that you should “Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world”.
Design thinking is an iterative, not a linear process to problem-solving. It requires you to intentionally seek out different perspectives, knowledge, skills and experiences and have them work together to create innovative and practical solutions for complex problems. It is also human-centric as it has empathy and co-creation at its core. The ‘Design Thinking Model’ by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University and its five stages of Empathise, Define (the problem), Ideate, Prototype, and Test is widely used. Elements of this model are included in our Triple Diamond Redesign Process for Self-Innovation.
The traditional design process involves four distinct stages, namely Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver which maps the diamond shaped flow of divergent followed by convergent modes of thinking, that designers use. The frequently used Double Diamond model developed by the British Design Council indicates that this happens twice – once to confirm the problem definition and once to create the solution. The LEAP Journey’s redesign process, however, has a third diamond in the middle representing an important additional design step for self-innovation. In our process, a possibility definition stage follows the problem definition stage and precedes the problem-solving stage. Thus, the design thinking modes of divergent followed by convergent thinking occurs not twice but three times in the Triple Diamond Redesign Process for Self-Innovation. This also aligns with The LEAP Journey’s three phases of Self-Discovery, Self-Cultivation and Self-Innovation.
Step 1: DISCOVER and DEFINE who you truly are
The first of the triple diamonds marks the start of the process. With this step, you gain an empathic understanding of yourself and of your present situation and motivation. You look deep and wide and set aside your own assumptions to discover who and what you really are. After analysing your observations you synthesise them to find your life’s purpose (your WHY) as well as identify those dimensions that need work in order to live a truly fulfilling and relevant life.
Step 2: DREAM and DEFINE who you might become
This step represents the second diamond in which you envisage and build an image of your authentic future self (your WHAT), build capacity, and identify specific problems in the way of achieving this end. The overlaps between this and the adjacent design steps indicate that they don’t take place totally independently of each other, but that the insights gained from the one phase informs the next.
Step 3: DEVELOP ideas and DELIVER projects for finding the best way to leap and become your future self
In the third diamond, you are ready to start generating leap ideas. You’ve come to understand yourself and your needs in the Self-Discovery phase, you’ve analysed and synthesised your observations into a vision of your future self in the Self-Cultivation phase, and concluded with a list of specific problems that stand in the way of realising your future self. To solve the specific problems (the Self-Innovation phase) you will perform leap experiments (i.e. identify LEAP ideas and take on LEAP projects) to discover HOW to realise your future self or then, self-innovate or live your enhanced authentic self.
For self-innovation, all three the design steps are needed. Omitting the diamond on the left can result in solving the wrong problem, as there is no real understanding of the self. Omitting the diamond on the right can result in not making the right kind of leap for self-innovation, as there is no opportunity to generate and test leap ideas. Omitting the diamond in the middle will result in someone being less motivated to work toward realising the future self. Empirical work suggests that for realising the future self, a link needs to be maintained between the present and future self. When the future self seems similar to the present self, when it is imbued with realism and vividness, and when it is seen in positive terms, people are more willing to make sacrifices today for achieving self-innovation in future. By adding the in-between step to imagine the future self, the link between the present and future self is maintained which makes it more achievable. Some transformational coaches advise their clients to image/emulate a future third person (a distant self) who is viewed in positive terms, e.g. a hero figure. People often feel similar to (or at least want to feel similar to) those whom they hold in high regard, and they like and respect people with whom they feel similar. This approach, however, is not always successful as it can create a distance between the present and future self.
Strategists sometimes divide the world in two overly simplified flavours — strategy and implementation. The truth is, between plan and execution, there’s an important “design layer”, which we would argue is very important in the process of moving from your imagined future self to your realised future self. In our Triple Diamond Redesign Process for Self-Innovation, this design layer lays within the third diamond. In his book ‘Design of Everyday Things’ Don Norman argues that “design thinking” is worthless on its own, what you also need is “design doing”. With design doing, he is in essence referring to this design layer and the stages of developing, fast prototyping, demonstrating and testing the ideas generated by design thinking.
One of the most powerful means of affecting personal transformation is when people can directly, tangibly, and emotionally experience some of the future consequences of their actions today. In this design layer, possible solutions are implemented through real-world experiments (leap projects), and, one by one, investigated and either accepted, improved and re-examined, or rejected based on experience and insights gained from other people. At the end, a better idea of the constraints inherent to self-innovating and the problems that are present is obtained, and a clearer view of how you would behave, think, and feel when leaping from your present to your future self. In the process, you rigorously test the leap ideas using the best solutions identified while performing leap projects. Since the three step redesign process is an iterative process, the results generated during the third step are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform how you understand yourself, your situation, how you think, behave, and feel, and to re-imagine your future self. Alterations and refinements are also made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of what it entails to self-innovate as possible.
Many transformational coaches neglect the design layer between imagining and realising the future self. Perhaps because it is not well understood or grossly underestimated in what it takes. In bringing your future to life, it is important that you can actually touch, see and feel it’s potential. Such an immediate and close encounter forces people to ask the right questions, questions like: “What are the implications of living in a world where I am judged merely on what I do?” or “Who may claim ownership to my talents and what might they do with it?”. What our clients are learning through such experiments and the people they engage with, is that creating that concrete experiences can bridge the disconnect between today and tomorrow.
On The LEAP Journey, you cannot help but also think like a designer and apply design principles to self-innovate yourself. Design thinking is at the core of effective strategy development and organisational change, but at the LEAP Academy, we also apply it for successful personal transformation. We show that design thinking should be at the heart of learning experiences for authentic progression. Unlike many transformational programmes we also bravely focus on design doing and the design layer in the process of moving from an imagined future self to realising or becoming the future self you are meant to be.
References:
Cross, N. (2006). Designerly Ways of Knowing. London: Springer.
Hershfield, H.E. (2011). Future Self-continuity: How conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice. The New York Academy of Sciences. Volume 1235, Issue1, Pages 30-43.
McCullough Jr., D. (2014). You are (Not) Special (and other encouragements). New York: HarperCollins.
Norman, D.A. (2013). Design of Everyday Things – Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Basic Books.
