To advance your career, you may want to think like a designer

According to Gallop’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 Report, 60% of people feel emotionally detached at work and 19% feel miserable. Post-pandemic, many people are showing signs of disengagement and unhappiness at work. Are you one of them?

Fortunately, anyone who feels disengaged, stuck, or unfulfilled at work, can use design-thinking to reframe their career and take small actionable steps towards engagement.

Often used by product designers, design-thinking is an iterative way to problem-solve to drive innovation. While not without its problems, design-thinking focuses on trying new things and iterating, rather than extensive thinking and planning. When it comes to our careers, many of us get stuck in a thinking and planning mode because there is inherent risk in changing jobs, and the safety in a job we know can be comforting. What’s more, most people don’t know where to start if they are dissatisfied. People often think that if they want to find higher satisfaction, the only option is to quit their job. But this is often unrealistic. The solution is to adopt a design-thinking approach. 

In their book Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie write that “Design starts with a tentative solution and expects to improve it through experimentation.” 

And, according to Stanford Design Lab professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, design-thinking embraces the mindset that mistakes are learning opportunities and are essential to finding the better way. 

Authors like these—and most design-thinkers—use the following five-step process. Here’s how to apply the design-thinking process to your career.