What makes our LEAP unlike any other? Part 6: We understand that “we” is stronger than “I”

I realised very early on that as a strategic innovator and change maker I would not always be liked or accepted. I am also an introvert and knew that I was never going to be the charismatic one, or one of the boys or girls. I accepted this a long time ago. I always felt content just knowing that my former colleagues remember me for the positive changes I’ve made and for putting my work first at all times. The problem, however, is that by keeping others at a distance you are easily misunderstood, while you are also missing out on valuable perspectives and opportunities to give your unique gift to the world. We need each other. You cannot leave your mark in this world if you are not willing to team up with other people, especially when you are self-innovating, i.e. redesigning yourself to leap in life and career.

Designers believe in radical collaboration, because they know that true genius lies in a collaborative process. This is equally important when we are in the process of redesigning ourselves. The reason is simply that together we are always stronger. Redesigning yourself is essentially an act of co-creation. On The LEAP Journey, we use the design thinking methodology when co-creating; which requires a completely different mindset from “strategic planning”, “career development” or even “life coaching”. One key difference is the role of community and the necessity of connections. According to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, authors of the book ‘Designing Your Life’, if you’re the sole architect of your brilliant future, then you conceptualise the whole idea and you heroically bring it into being – it’s all about you. When you are redesigning yourself, however, it is about your life, but it’s not all about ‘you’, it’s all about ‘us’. It’s not that you can’t do it yourself; it is that the design aspect in redesigning yourself is intrinsically a communal effort. Burnett and Evans reason that every step you take to create your way forward and leap, relies on the contribution and participation of others. The insights you gain, the ideas you generate, and the opportunities you create are not presented to you or gathered for you by others on your behalf, they are co-created with you in collaboration with the whole community of players you engage with while on your journey. All the people you meet, engage, or converse with on your journey are in your design community. A few of these people will become your core collaborators and play a vital and ongoing part in redesigning yourself, but everyone matters.

In fact, including those people in your design community with whom you do not have a close relationship with, can prove to be of even greater value to you in the process of redesigning yourself. Mark Granovetter in his classic article on ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ found, that we all have different interpersonal connections or ties in our social networks. He distinguishes between strong and weak ties. Strong ties are characterised by deep affinity, e.g. family, friends or colleagues. You know your strong ties well and probably got their numbers on your phone and interact with them on social networks. When you converse with them, it is a 2-way conversation and the information flows freely. Weak ties, in contrast, might be acquaintances, or a stranger with a common background. Once a year, you may send them a birthday wish or a Christmas message. If you give them a call, they might be surprised to hear from you.

People frequently interact with their close friends, so they form a cluster of strong ties in which the available information spreads quickly. There is a tendency to stay with similar people called ‘homophily’. This means that individuals are eager to connect with people who are similar to them, resulting in the utilisation of similar information. In contrary, weak ties have less interaction and they are dissimilar; so, they use different and new information. Weak ties are also crucial in binding groups of strong ties together. They bring circles of networks into contact with each other, strengthening relationships and forming new bonds between existing relationship circles. They might have information that is mutually beneficial to each other, but more importantly, weak ties encourage sharing of information across different groups. Therefore, although strong ties have a main role in sharing similar information, the role of weak ties is much more significant in spreading novel information, which is crucial in a redesigning process.

The people in your design community play different roles, even sometimes more than one. Burnett and Evans refer to four groups of people who will each perform a different role. You will need all four of these groups when you are on The LEAP Journey. Firstly, you need Supporters. They are usually strong ties. They are the go-to people you can count on to care about your life; people who are close to you and whose encouragement will help keep you going. They are mostly your friends, although not all your friends will be supporters. They are people who will give you usable and honest feedback, e.g. on how they see you, for you to discover who you truly are. This group may range from two to a hundred, depending on your personality. The second group is Players. They are actively participating in your redesign process; especially when building prototypes and executing your leap projects. They do things with you, like co-workers in the traditional sense, and are mostly part of your weak ties. Thirdly, your design community should include Intimates. They are strong ties and include your immediate and close extended family members and your closest friends. They are the ones most affected by your redesign and are the most influential in this process. Finally, you should have a LEAP Team who directly helps you in the redesign process. They are usually weak ties and the people with whom you will discover and grow yourself, develop the details of your LEAP projects, and who will help track your progress. On The LEAP Journey, your LEAP Team are the LEAP Academy facilitators/coaches as well as like-minded individuals in the LEAP Thinker community. By sharing insights and stories, other LEAP Thinkers might also end up connecting and collaborating with you.

It is important, however, that you choose wisely who the core collaborators in your design community will be. Through experience I’ve noted, as Michelle Gibbings does in her book ‘Career Leap: How to Reinvent and Liberate Your Career’, that there are three types of people that you will come across in the process of redesigning and innovating yourself: the Takers, the Fakers and the Makers. Takers are those people who will say and do anything to get what they want. Everything they do is to further their own ambitions. Fakers are people whose words and actions don’t match. While they may act as though they are helping you, they work only for their own interests. Makers are progressive, and take action and step up for the good of all. They have integrity and are sensitive to the needs of others. They act in a balanced way when giving and taking. Watch out for the Takers and the Fakers. Fakers and Takers operate from a scarcity mentality and thus compete for what they believe to be scarce resources. They also find it very difficult to show empathy, i.e. to put themselves in other people’s shoes.

According to Brené Brown, bestselling author and TED speaker – and now in everyone’s living room with her Netflix special ‘The Call to Courage’ – empathy is “feeling with people” rather simply feeling for them. Empathy, she says, “fuels connection”. Feeling what the other party feels, and knowing their pain points, thoughts, and needs, is the hallmark of successful collaboration, that will most likely result in a “win-win” and not a “win-lose” situation. Makers show empathy and seek “win-win” situations, and that is what you need. On The LEAP Journey, we advocate for collaboration, because we believe that in the new world of work, collaboration will drive you forward more effectively than competition. We embrace an abundance mentality that supports the idea that there is enough for everyone, because each person’s journey is unique and will thus not be replicated exactly like another person’s journey. We also encourage showing empathy. In his studies about the social behaviours of animals and how it translates to society, Frans de Waal, in his book ‘The Age of Empathy’, found that even though competitive, selfish behaviour is often explained away as instinctive, thanks to evolution and “survival of the fittest”, humans are, in fact, equally hard-wired for empathy.

De Waal also investigated the concept of reciprocity and found that it too is an innate quality. Like animals, humans benefit from this. You know, I scratch your back, you scratch my back. It’s easy to get caught up with what you need and what other people can do to help you. If you want to successfully leap forward in life, you should, as Adam Grant advices in his TED talk ‘Are you a Giver or Taker?’, become a Giver. A Giver is someone who thinks more about what they can do for others than what others can do for them. Robert Cialdini, author of ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’, also emphasises that we have an innate desire to help those who help us. We like to return favours. This means that if you do something nice for someone, they’ll usually feel obliged to do something for you. If you want a great design community to help you take a leap, you must first be prepared to help others. This is a prerequisite for building connections that work for you, not against you.

Be careful, however, not to be the wrong kind of Giver. As a Giver myself, I did not always understand this. According to Adam Grant’s research, it turns out that Givers are at a disadvantage across a wide range of occupations, because they sacrifice their own success to help others succeed. This is because they are so busy helping others that their own work or results suffer. From surveying 30 000 people across the world from different cultures, Grant found that Givers are both the top and lowest performers. He initially discovered the “worst” performers in engineering and the medical profession were the Givers. Digging deeper, Grant learned that in fact, Givers’ generosity of spirit and behaviour is in fact what enriches workplaces, both in terms of revenue and profits, and customer and employee satisfaction. Put simply, they add value. So “givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way”.

Grant favours hiring more Givers, as they do not follow the norm as Takers do. However, he advises that we should be Givers of a certain kind. There are two types of Givers: ‘selfless’ Givers and ‘otherish’ Givers. Selfless Givers are the ones who drop everything to help people all the time, which means they tend to fall behind on their own work. Therefore, they usually end up at the bottom of the success ladder (though they’re still happier people than Takers). On the other hand, otherish Givers are smart and strategic about their giving. While they’re just as much givers as the selfless Givers, they’ve learned to successfully navigate a world with Takers, so others don’t take advantage of them.

The world is obsessed with lone geniuses. We admire the outstanding talent of an artist, present the Nobel Prize to an individual scientist, and laud a visionary CEO. Yet these lone geniuses, who also include genius designers and innovators, rely heavily on their collaborators, i.e. they achieve their results not only because of their own efforts, but also because of the contributions of others. Having a design community are the key reason that design thinking works in the design process, and is just as relevant in the process of redesigning yourself. Even though ‘you’ are the starting point, your redesigned future isn’t in ‘you’; it’s in the world, where you will discover and co-create it with others and where you will leave your mark. The ideas, possibilities, roles, and forms that you will end up living, do not actually exist anywhere in the universe right now. They are all waiting to be invented, and the world out there, is the source. Most importantly, it lies untapped in the hearts, minds and actions of others – many of whom you’ve not met yet.

We are in agreement with Burnett and Evans that a big reason why so many traditional approaches to personal transformation are unsuccessful is that they’re based in the false perception that you (and you alone) know the answers; you have the resources, and you know the right passion to follow in order to have it all. These approaches are in the same category as those who say that you should simply set some good goals and go get it. At the LEAP Academy, we do not agree with this, as we understand that we co-create with others when we self-innovate. Simply put, we understand that “we” is always stronger than “I”.