Frameworks to Thoughtfully Choose the Ideal Career
Our daily lives are the cumulative effect of hundreds of small decisions we make constantly. These decisions encompass everything from what you choose to wear today, what you’re eating for your next meal, and what you’ll watch on tv tonight. Generally speaking, decisions like these come pretty easily, and we rarely agonize over the small choices we constantly make throughout our daily lives.
However, significant and high-risk decisions, like choosing a career path, can sometimes be challenging. That’s to be expected: making career decisions is an emotional process with potentially significant financial considerations.
Complex decisions, like choosing a new job or career direction, often have several shared traits: You may have many desires (with some conflicting), the risks and outcomes are hard to predict, and the information you need to make the decision is unavailable or incomplete.
While there is no one “right” way to make a big decision, thankfully, there are proven decision-making strategies and frameworks you can use, either individually or, more likely, in conjunction with each other.
Check out the seven strategies below – each with a unique point of view – to find the ones you can use to help you choose the best new job/career path for you.
Reducing Dimensionality
Science has found that human beings are wired to make less-than-wise decisions. Cognitive research has shown our brain often uses a mental ‘short-cut’ system to simplify decision-making, but these shortcuts often are not in our best interests. The question then becomes: How do we overcome these innate predispositions and make better decisions?
Complex decisions are often challenging because they contain an overwhelming number of ‘evaluation criteria’. The more evaluation criteria we consider, the more choices we must make.
Compounding the problem, evaluation criteria sometimes conflict, and a ‘positive’ change in one ‘negatively’ affects another. Trying to optimize all the evaluation criteria simultaneously can quickly get overwhelming.
It’s a common belief that when you have more information, you’ll be able to make a better decision. While that’s true to a certain point, it’s possible to have TOO MUCH information.
Our brain assumes all information is valuable and helpful, and it can overestimate the missing information’s value. It’s a trick our brains pull on us that we must counteract.
Research has shown that having more information doesn’t necessarily lead to better decisions but can create unmanageable complexity and shift our focus away from what’s most important.
To make the best decision possible, you need enough of the right information.
A good initial approach when making a complex decision is to reduce dimensionality (e.g., the number of evaluation criteria). And the best way to reduce dimensionality is to eliminate less essential criteria aggressively.
Here’s how you can do that: Resist the urge to list and look for everything you could possibly want in a new job/career path. Instead, consider just the most important criteria to you.
Weight Your Key Criteria
Another issue with a list of key criteria is that it can make all the factors you have listed appear to have equal weight & importance when in reality, even some key criteria will matter more than others.
To counteract this, use a more nuanced approach. Beyond simply listing the key criteria, we recommend that you use a rating system by adding ‘weight’ (or indicating a priority) for key criteria that are most important to you.
This adjustment will help you understand the relationships between your different desires and needs for your new work.
Don’t Trust Your Gut (Without Testing It)
‘Listening to your gut’ is probably the most common approach to decision-making. It’s how many people make most decisions; if we used an exhaustive, complex decision-making process to decide what to eat for lunch, we’d never get anything else done.
Instinct (or gut reactions) is your subconscious brain matching current inputs with what it has seen in the past and making a quick, shortcut decision.
Our brains are fantastic at collecting vast amounts of data and making impulse decisions. For many simple decisions, you can trust your instinct.
However, when it comes to highly complex decisions, the very brain that helps us make rapid decisions and move forward with life can misguide us into making bad decisions.
Our instant decision-making process is often known as the “reptilian brain” or “System 1 thinking”. When you rely on intuition or ‘gut feel’ to decide, your mind processes all of the information you possess automatically, quickly, and without awareness of any details.
Intuition and instinct are why humans survived on the savannah: when we thought we saw a lion, our brains didn’t take time to work through the details. It told us to climb the nearest tree fast.
The disadvantages of intuitive decision-making, however, are more profound than most people realize. Many scientific studies have shown that people who make intuitive decisions (e.g., doctors making diagnoses, managers hiring staff, etc.) achieve much less consistency than they generally suspect.
Instant reactions, fight-or-flight instincts, and all the shortcuts our brains use can show up as cognitive biases in decision-making. And, as a result of our instant decision-making brain and its biases, we may discard a better option.
Don’t get us wrong – emotions, hunches, and ‘gut feelings’ should not be overlooked or ignored because they DO have a role to play in making good decisions. But the trick here is to use your emotions as a tool, rather than making a big decision entirely based on how you feel on a first hunch or gut feeling.
When researching different career options, unless there’s a clear reason to rule a job idea out immediately, take enough time to learn about it and evaluate it against the key criteria you created using the strategies recommended in the Reduce Dimensionality module. Learn about the skills, abilities, and knowledge you would use in that role. Think about how each job aligns with your motivations. Examine if the role exists in fields and industries that appeal to you. Consider how a career in that field would impact your professional and personal life five years from now… and ten years from now.
More than 100 studies have led to the same important conclusion about making complex decisions; If you follow a sound decision-making process, you’ll have a better chance of achieving your goals than if you just choose because it ‘feels right.’.
Beware of The Giant Spreadsheet
We cautioned about relying too heavily on emotional and gut feelings in the previous strategy.
In this strategy, we want to write a caution about the opposite extreme: ignoring your gut and relying on a ‘precise’ spreadsheet calculation.
We love spreadsheet formulas. But the simplicity of creating a spreadsheet and entering data also can make it tempting to distill a complex decision into some mathematical formula and take the ‘humanness’ out of the decision.
A spreadsheet formula can be straightforward, and using ‘weighted’ sums is easy. Decisions made this way seem ‘precise’ and mathematically elegant.
However, this decision-making approach is problematic because it overly simplifies a complicated decision by diminishing highly complex information into a number and throws out all gut intuition.
While we do not want to rely solely on them to make a complex decision, intuition, and gut feelings can play a valuable part in helping us make an intelligent decision. Numerical models create a false sense of precision and delude us into trusting the models. Our intuitive brains are good at pattern-matching against past experiences and predicting the future, and we should consider them in balance with our ‘data analysis’.
Attain Distance
Newton Baker was one of the most interesting men ever to serve as U.S. Secretary of War. He was an avowed pacifist when he took the post in 1916. After the United States entered World War I, Baker’s leadership won the respect of Democrats and Republicans.
So how could such an accomplished and admired man conclude he’d be perfectly safe standing on the bridge of a battleship while the country’s best pilots attacked it with bombs?
Baker made an error in judgment that can happen to even the best decision-makers. Many educated people in the World War I era believed that no gnat of an airplane could sink a battleship. Worse than guessing wrong, Baker’s big mistake was holding his beliefs with utter conviction without considering whether the available information justified the depth of that conviction. Baker knew with total – and unjustified – certainty that small planes could not sink large battleships.
General Mitchell’s squadron of tiny planes, however, demonstrated its power and promptly turned a supposedly unsinkable ship into a permanent part of the ocean floor. (Don’t worry about Baker, he had returned to being a private citizen and a successful law practice).
Baker’s error illustrates two decision traps:
Wise decision-makers make sure they have accurate information before making their choices.
Here are two additional strategies that can help you gather and use accurate information when you make an important decision:
1. For complicated psychological reasons, we seem to make clearer decisions when we are deciding for others instead of ourselves
One of the most effective techniques for deciding is to ‘attain distance’ by imagining that you are helping a close friend to make the same decision you’re facing and framing your advice as though it was being made for a friend.
This concept, called ‘self-distance’, was found to result in more mature “wise reasoning,” and overall better decision-making.
Take a moment to imagine that someone close to you has come to you seeking counsel about choosing a new career path. As the wise adviser, what information would you want to have? What criteria would you tell them is important? What information would you tell them to ignore? What information would you advise them to reconsider or confirm?
From the position of an outsider looking in, you may be able to gather more relevant and accurate information to help you choose the best career for you.
2. Better Yet, Ask a Detached Outsider for Their Perspective
In an analysis of 50 years’ worth of judgment and decision-making research published by Harvard Business School, one piece of advice for making a difficult decision that came up repeatedly was to get an outsider’s opinion.
Sometimes you need more than just a sounding board - you need advice. Asking someone else for their opinion typically works best when you’re considering doing something that you’ve never done before and when you know someone who’s experienced in that domain.
The researchers found that talking to those detached from the decision has three main benefits:
1. Reducing your overconfidence about what you know
2. Reducing the time it takes to make the decision
3. Increasing your chance of success
We all have our personal biases when faced with a decision. We want to believe one way is right even if the information doesn’t stack up. Instead of staying impartial, we look for information or opinions in line with our own.
The power of the outsider comes from escaping the cognitive biases we fall victim to when making complex decisions.
When we research job and career options, we build models in our heads of how those options will work out. These models get ‘tested’ when they meet reality and sometimes don’t survive.
One way to get around this problem is to look for opposing or disconfirming evidence, especially when we’re already heavily biased toward pursuing a particular path.
One good solution is to conduct informational interviews. An informational interview is an opportunity to gather insightful career recommendations and job-search advice from qualified professionals by asking the right questions.
We highly recommend using informational interviews to ‘reality test’ your thoughts and assumptions about job ideas that appeal to you. Unlike a job interview where a company employee asks the questions and the conversation is about the employer’s needs, in an informational interview, you get to ask the questions and the focus of the discussion is about your career needs.
To help people learn everything they need to know about informational interviews, we recommend checking out www.InformationalInterviewArticles.com.
Conduct a Risk Analysis
Whatever career path you choose, you’ll likely make a decision that involves an element of risk.
Risk comprises two parts: the probability of something going wrong and the negative consequences if it does. Risk Analysis is a process that helps you identify and manage potential problems. To carry out a Risk Analysis for your career options, take these steps:
After you identify the value of the risks you face, you can start to look at ways of managing them, such as:
Amazon is renowned for its product development and innovation process, which they aptly call “working backward.” Before launching a new product, product managers conduct a ‘pre-mortem process’ to anticipate what might go wrong… and they identify pre-emptive solutions.
As the ‘Product Manager’ of your career, we recommend conducting a ‘pre-mortem’ analysis of each risk for the job and career ideas that appeal to you to identify pre-emptive solutions.
Integrated Thinking
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind simultaneously and still retain the ability to function.”
Psychologists call this ‘integrative thinking.’
Integrative thinking is the ability to constructively face the conflict of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one over the other, generate a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.
In a complex decision, there will likely be conflicting choices with no clear resolution. Instead of choosing between them, it may be possible to find a solution by combining and experimenting with them.
It’s like solving a problem with a spacecraft in flight. Consider a scene in the film Apollo 13 when the astronauts encounter a crisis (“Houston, we have a problem”) with no clear solution. A group of experts is put in a room with a mishmash of materials—bits of plastic and odds and ends that mirror the resources available to the astronauts in flight. Leaders tell the team: This is what you have; find a solution, or the astronauts will die. None of those experts knew what would work. Instead, they had to let a solution emerge from the information and resources they had at hand.
While it doesn’t typically have the same dire life and death consequences as Apollo 13, when you’re choosing a new career path, you may have limited resources and information and face conflicting goals and criteria with no clear resolution. It’s a new situation with unpredictability, flux, and risk. There may be no obvious or perfect solution.
When you’re deciding on your career path and facing a seemingly impossible decision, instead of limiting yourself to a “yes” or “no” choice, be like the NASA scientists and brainstorm and experiment with the information and resources you have to potentially uncover a new and better solution.
Accept Uncertainty
Author Steven Johnson discussed his book Farsighted: How We Make Decisions that Matter the Most in a podcast discussion with Malcolm Gladwell. In the interview, Gladwell asks Johnson if the decision-making strategies described in his book can apply to something like choosing your career. Johnson acknowledged that there is tremendous uncertainty in any decision with long-term consequences.
When making a big decision, the question is not how we can have absolute certainty that we’re making the best choice. Instead, we must acknowledge the uncertainty and address what is predictable and controllable and what is unpredictable and out of our control.
As professionals who have worked with thousands of people to choose a new career and watched them grow professionally, we’ve come to recognize and believe there is no such thing as one “right” decision.
Rather, a satisfying and rewarding career is a perpetual series of decisions that make the original decision “good” or “bad.”
The initial decision itself, while very important, is not the end of the decision-making process but just the beginning. When choosing a new job and career direction, you want to make the very best decision you can at that time. After you make that big initial decision, all the subsequent choices you make during your career will largely determine your ultimate success, satisfaction, and happiness.