Stuck? The Next Step is Unintuitive, but Guaranteed to Move You Forward (Step 3)
Arriving at Pulau Ubin, Singapore, 2015
When I climbed off the ferry onto the dock at Pulau Ubin, an island off the coast of Singapore, I stepped from 2015 into roughly 1945. Along with my colleagues, I hopped on a bike and started pedaling into the heart of the island. As we rode, we drifted further back in time. We passed lush tropical greenery, spotted small bungalows, and saw nary a car.
Our destination? The home of a singer-songwriter from Singapore. She’d been living on the rustic island for months, and we wanted to understand what life was like for her.
Our purpose? To inform our work with a big tech company whose name you would know. They were asking, to paraphrase, how to create the conditions for flourishing in the workplace. This company had so many benefits already for its employees: on-site food, access to mundane services like dry cleaning, amazing speaker series, exercise classes. What else could they add?
Pulau Ubin, 2015
I was a director at prestigious global design firm IDEO, and our job was to help enhance the employee experience for this company.
Our trip to Pulau Ubin was part of the design process, called design research, which is a way of looking at and learning directly from the world.
Here’s what we found there and why it matters for you, if you’re stuck on anything in your life.
When we arrived at the singer-songwriter’s abode, sweaty but energized from the bike ride in the tropical heat, we stepped into the simplest of lives. She resided in something called a Kampong, where she had her own small, private space, but much of her space was shared with other families. She had regular duties, like cleaning the outside latrine. And the only electricity was from a generator that sounded like a bull-horn, which she noted was a sound incongruent with deep thought. So she ended up living her life according to the sun and the cues from nature around her. Her alarm clock – and this is probably my favorite story she told – her alarm clock was the moment in the morning when no birds chirped and no insects whirred. It was the absence of sound that woke her. I’m sure there’s a deep metaphor in there.
Inside a Kampong bedroom
A Kampong open-air kitchen
But here’s the aha moment: after she showed us around her home and described her routines to us, we sat down to chat about her work. She said that while living in a place where her working hours were limited by the sun and the chores and the effort of existing in a place without modern conveniences, she’d never felt more productive or accomplished more. The clincher: she also never felt better.
This was the insight we needed to help that famous tech company rethink how they supported their workers. To their question of what do we add, our unexpected answer: it’s not what they add, but what they remove.
How we guided them from there is a story for another day, but what I wanted to convey today is the power of design research: looking out around us with a very specific question in mind is profound. I’ve been a designer and design leader for 15 years, and design research has been pivotal in helping us design solutions for life’s vexing problems. Not once has it failed me in all those years.
Which is why it’s the next step in The Art of Getting Unstuck programs (after uncovering Core Needs).
When I work with individuals, I call it Design Inspiration and I guide them through gathering inspiration from their pasts and from others around them.
If the question is What is next for my career?, I ask my clients to create a colorful pirate’s-treasure map of their past experiences related to their careers. I encourage them to mark highlights and lowlights and pivot points. What happened at each step? What mattered about it?
Then, I ask them to look around them at people in their lives that they envy or admire or even are jealous of in this realm (in this case, career). With those people in mind, I encourage them to reflect on what it is specifically that piques their interest, and why they care. In other words, I guide them to draw out what matters.
When I did this for myself around the question Where is home when I can live anywhere?, I reflected on this: Where have I lived and what’s mattered to me in the past? The themes that came up surprised me. I’ve lived in cities my whole adult life, but as it turns out, I felt best in places where exercise was easiest and I could step into nature without planning or forethought. It was only by reflecting on my past and the people around me with that very specific question in mind, that I came to the realization that I needed things my logical brain never would have listed.
Similarly, someone contemplating what’s next for their career might ask: Where have I thrived at work or volunteering in the past? Or someone who is trying to repair a relationship might ponder: Where have I built strong relationships with others?
At the same time, they can ask a question of the present: Who inspires me with their career today? Who has relationships I admire right now? Or for me, with home, Who is living in a way that I envy?
This isn’t just nostalgia or envy: it’s harnessed wisdom. By peering behind us and around us with a very specific question in mind, we see things we wouldn’t otherwise see. And it's those very things that provide us the clues to our first steps out of the swirl of stuckness.
So, if you’re stuck on anything in your life, start by looking back. I’ve created an activity sheet to help you get started.
And if you need more support, reach out: I run programs and private coaching about The Art of Getting Unstuck, and I’m here to help.