Getting unstuck — How to develop an odyssey plan with impact (Part 2)
Start thinking like a designer
In part 1 of this Substack series I covered how to map out three odyssey plans for 5 years; a current path, a what if path and a wild card path. You may have come up with so many ideas during the odyssey planning session that you want to capture these on a vision board and through mindmapping too. This is great as it provides even more scope for the final odyssey plan that you are going to put together next. I will cover vision boards and mindmapping in another post.
This final odyssey plan is a combination of the three plans that you developed previously taking the following design thinking points by IDEO into consideration.
You are aiming to set up your odyssey plan for five years at the intersection where design thinking lives, so ask yourself is the plan feasible, desirable and viable. This will help you to include elements of your three previous plans that excite you and that you can start working on.
The IDEO site and Designing Your Life site offer additional resources that will help you dig deeper into the design thinking methodology and how you can use this approach in work and life. Essentially by challenging you to use divergent and convergent thinking through odyssey planning there will be a wealth of ideas generated that you may not have considered before.
To think like a designer requires dreaming up wild ideas, taking time to tinker and test. The designer’s mindset embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity. And most critically, design thinking keeps people at the centre of every process.
You can now see how the initial three Odyssey plans challenged you to dream up a range of ideas and inspiration.
We are now going to prototype the final odyssey plan you have developed from the three previous examples, taking on board your learning as a life designer so far. There are several ways to do this and it is useful to have a dyl coach to work through the process in a safe space to unpack learning and how best to prototype your plan.
If the plan is radically different from your current life path it can make family, friends and work colleagues question why you would want to step off this path. This can be unsettling and uncomfortable, as change often is. At this stage you are testing out what it would be like to live the new life plan for the next 5 years and not actually doing it.
The best way to prototype your future plan can be broken down into three simple steps;
Get curious
Talk to people
Try stuff
Find someone who’s already doing what you’re interested in, who has your preferred life. These people are already living your future. See if something in those conversations resonates and confirms that you’re moving in the right direction.
Find ways to try on that life for size. You need both conversations and “lived experiences” to help you decide, Bill Burnett explains. “An experience will tell you something that a conversation can’t,” he says. “But both are important mechanisms for coming up with ways to prototype your way into the future to see if it’s going to fit for you.”
By thinking like a designer you see possibilities and also are able to establish ideas that may not work for you by gaining insightful data from talking to people living your potential life.
The next blog will cover how a creative portfolio career could be the right choice for you now.
If this series of blog posts has been helpful or raised any questions do let me know through my website or here on Substack.
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