The ABCD of Careers

My friend Dougald recently told me about "Asset Based Community Development", which put very simply means starting with the assets in a community already and assessing how it can provide for its own needs, rather than starting with what's missing and making the local community dependent on central assistance.

I really like this concept. I like local emphasis, and I like the faith in people that lies at the heart of it. And I've also realised that I've been doing my own personal version of the same philosophy for myself.

Dougald is also, in his spare time, an anti-careers advisor, and we speak from time to time about our own career paths in all their peculiar twisty-turny glory. And I've come to the conclusion that I've actually been doing Asset Based Career Development. Here's my first stab at a 3-step guide:

Rule 1:
Go with the flow. Career planning is hugely overrated: sometimes life has a way of guiding you into the right place at the right time. The trick is to do lots of different things and pay attention to what you find the most fun, the easiest to do, to what gives you energy. Soon you'll find that there are some things you can do almost effortlessly, there's just a natural "flow" to them. If people won't pay you for doing them, do them in your spare time and monetise it later. And don't do stuff you hate because it will "get you somewhere later" - only suckers do that. If you don't enjoy the process of the work you do, you're either in the wrong business or you're being exploited. Career planning is hugely overrated - just do lots of stuff and follow what works for you.

Rule 2:
"If you want an interesting life, find the thing that's growing fastest in your community and join it." When I left university, my dad told me that quote, paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw I think. So I went to work in the internet. I often wondered why the hell I was working in technology when I had a history degree and didn't really like computers, but after a few years I realised I liked learning new things, working with intelligent people, designing from scratch, overseeing projects from start to finish, and producing something of value to other people at the end. And with the internet swiftly becoming ubiquitous, suddenly I had lots and lots of options. I couldn't have found this out if I'd had a plan. In fact, how could I have had a plan for my career ten years ago? My current job didn't even exist back then.

Rule 3:
Follow the people, not the money. When I was younger I wanted to be a barrister. Then I met barristers. I wanted to be a filmmaker. Then I met filmmakers. Meanwhile, in my personal life, I did stuff I enjoyed with people I liked spending time with. I met activists and social innovators, educationalists, researchers, radicals and open source hackers. And I had a lovely time hanging out with them and having interesting conversations. Eventually, my friends and I started School of Everything, and I've become a "social technologist" working in "innovation", "changing the world". Which is lots more fun than being a management consultant, and actually turns out to be pretty well-paid too.

I'll be refining this methodology over time - Dougald, Tessy, Anthony, anyone out there have anything to add? But for now, from a more sociable angle, here's my current mantra that I think should be posted on the wall of every careers office in the land:

The most important factor when choosing a career is whether you like the people you work with.

Don't pursue some abstract career plan. Do the things you enjoy, with the people you enjoy, and then work out how to pay for it later. To live life the other way round is just plain silly.

A Professional Society

This blog is concerned with those activities which reinforce human sociability and social relationships, and how they relate to professionalism, money and our social and natural environment. Let's look at the first of those terms now.

We all have our own interpretations of what it means to be "professional". Etymologically the word implies a public declaration that you are skilled at something, so the word is at root a social creation, a term which defines the quality of relationships between individuals, and between an individual and society. In the Victorian era - that great bastion of objective standards - the word came to take on a second meaning, that of being the antithesis of amateur. Amateur itself of course derives its meaning from a love of something - so we might mischievously conclude that, for those poor Victorians, professionalism was the opposite of love.

To me the word "professional" implies one thing in particular: that an activity is being done to a standard that is worth paying money for. A professional is someone who works to agreed standards and in doing so qualifies his/her services as worthy of remuneration. Doing something "professionally" implies quality, but (and this is the nub of the matter) this quality is defined only in relation to money. The term is useless for describing skills that are not worth paying money for. You cannot, for example, be a professional friend.

It is important to have standards, of course. Professionalism, like money, plays a key role in establishing trust between strangers, which has been the key engine for the growth of our civilisation since the industrial revolution. I trust that my doctor works to the standards I expect because he is professional, just as my shopkeeper trusts that I am worthy of buying his goods because we share a currency system. But surely we are losing something if our only quality standard for judging others is defined in relation to money? Are there not other things which are valuable in our interactions?

Doing things for love is the lifeblood of our community: we build cathedrals, help our neighbours, put on amateur dramatics and play with our children - not because we're good at it, but because we enjoy it, because it's needed, because it brings us closer to the people around us. If we see all this excellent social activity as somehow sub-standard because it isn't worth paying for, we risk creating a society that values work over social life, and the creation of financial value over the creation of social value.

I therefore propose that sociablism might act as a useful term to help define the quality of an activity in another way: a sociable act is one that enriches the lives and strengthens the social relationships of those involved. In a financial context, sociable activities may earn us money as individuals, but they also create value for our wider community and enrich our lives and relationships at the same time. We are all social animals at heart, and the things we do should reflect this innate sociability if our society is to meet our basic human needs. So when I evaluate the work that I and my associates do, I now judge myself against two standards: did I meet the standards expected of me by others, and did I attend to the human relationships involved at the same time? Did everybody involved profit, materially or socially, from this exchange? And did we bring all the people affected materially or socially by the transaction into the process?

I believe if we can begin to bring this additional consideration into our professional lives, the twin engines of money and commerce will start working to enrich our communities and cement our social ties, and help us tackle the increasing social exclusion, social isolation and social poverty of all. I also think that standards that promote the value of amateur activities will empower all of us to act for ourselves, rather than relying on a priesthood of professionals to provide what we need. There is often more value in an activity than the quality of its direct outputs. But more on this later...