Career “planning” In “VUCA world,” occurs in rapidly-shifting conditions, defined by the U.S. Army War College as volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environments,

As a result, it is difficult to meaningfully respond to the interview question: “What are your career plans for the next five years?”, and one can question the value of this inquiry in any assessment situation.

Planning is most suited to relatively certain circumstances when processes and decisions are linear, argued Stanford’s Kathleen Eisenhardt and Behnam Tabrizi.

In contrast, frequently-changing or uncertain conditions like VUCA world, require improvisation, frequent testing, and revision.
These approaches are applicable to rapid changes in economic, political, and technology changes that affect career paths.

Applicable skills used in Agile software development include iterative exploration, rapid prototyping, and experimentation, and can be applied to navigating emerging career paths.

University of London’s Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson offered this forward-looking, cross-functional perspective in Future Work: How Businesses Can Adapt and Thrive In the New World of Work,

Related calls for flexible career “planning” and rethinking a linear upward career trajectory have come from Deloitte’s Cathy Benko, Molly Anderson, with Anne Weisberg of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in their model of The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work.

-*When have you found it more useful to “improvise” instead of “plan” your career?

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©Kathryn Welds