Having spent most (the first six years I focussed on eating) of my life trying to figure out how we best decide what to do for work, I have, fifty-nine years later, developed some opinions about the field of career counselling. A field that is much like myself and many of my clients, larger on good intentions than results.
This is the first of a series of articles describing why it would help to view the most important decision we make in life as the most important decision we make in life.
The field of career development (planning, exploration, decision-making) became outdated on January 1, 1983 with the birth of the internet and the world of work transcending from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Our unfortunate discipline, evolved from the Industrial Age’s reliance on people taking jobs, did not even last long enough to get a decent title (Careerology, Careerism, Careeratics?).
What happened to it? And – is there a need to revive it?
That is the focus of this article.
5 Stages
What has happened is that our approach to work has evolved through five distinct stages that are commonly identified as: Hunting/Gathering; Agriculture; Industrial; Information; Imagination.
Successfully transcending from one stage to the next involves including all that was good about the previous stage and moving on from all that has become redundant. This causes an acceleration of growth. It took 990,000 years to move from Hunting/Gathering to Agriculture.
Due to the momentum of all that was learned from those two stages, only 11,780 years to move into the Industrial Age. With the momentum of three ages behind us, it was only 203 years for the Information Age to arrive. 38 years later it looks like we are leaving that behind as we, uh, ‘zoom’ into the Age of Imagination. Short descriptions of each of these stages are provided in the following table.
It is important to realize that one age is not better than another but the newer age, dependent on the previous ones, is necessary for human evolution and, subsequently, survival. You can spend the rest of your life studying the accuracy of that previous statement. For the sake of this article, I am asking you to go along with it for now.
Evolution of Work
| Date | Stage | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Million BC |
ForagingAnother method of work begins, and the cycle of the harvest can be relied upon for survival. Security is achieved and there is now a lifestyle, other than nomadic, added to one’s choices. Strategic planning also begins, but it will take another twelve-thousand years for the consultant to evolve |
Survival |
| 10,000 BC |
AgricultureHunters and Gatherers live in a survival mode, roaming from place to place, following their four- legged supplies. |
Security |
| 1780 AD |
IndustrialPressure to produce more goods for more people results in the creation of the world’s first factories in England (burdening the poor English with an inflated sense of self-worth). The concept of ‘job’ – having someone pay you to achieve their goal – arrives. The industrial age not only leads to a whole new system of production but also to a required improvement in social relations – teamwork. |
Wealth |
| 1983 AD |
InformationalWe are now in the process of transcending this stage that led us from a job-based economy to one based on knowledge. As Peter Drucker (the strategic planner we forecasted would appear) observed, “The knowledge-based organization requires that everyone take responsibility for that organization’s objectives, contribution and, indeed, for its behaviour as well.” This evolutionary shift requires a strong sense of self to participate in as we are now achieving our own goals. |
Integrity |
| Maybe Last Week |
ImaginationFuturists and researchers have been forecasting an imagination-based economy for the last twenty years or so. We are now seeing how the computer technology developed in the information age is being used to present our innate creativity. This involves shifting from external information (what we learn) to internal information (what we know). |
Survival leads to Security. Survival + Security leads to Wealth. Wealth + Integrity leads to……..? |
My conclusion, taken from reading my own table, is that matching someone’s personality and interests to a job may have been somewhat useful in the seventies and, of course, 1980 – ‘82, but is completely irrelevant now.
My compassionate, empathic response to people who tell me that is usually, “Yeah, right.” Who know, maybe they will find a job that matches their personality even better. The point is – will they being doing work that is improving our lives?
What is required to resuscitate the field of career counselling, hopefully long enough for it to get a real name, is for those of us working in it to understand the shift in focus from wealth to integrity that we are currently experiencing and that many of us are struggling to comprehend.
Wealth
A ‘hierarchically- isomorphic’ approach such as I am applying here to forecasting evolutionary trends focusses on the centre of gravity of each stage. Not everyone did well at surviving the hunting/gathering stage, not everyone achieved security during the agricultural era – those were the goals, the main hope of the time.
The infamous boomer generation grew up thinking that wealth is the reason for work. We worked to amass wealth that would provide us with vacations, bigger homes, remote control drapes, etc. The harder we work, the greater the rewards was our belief. We did not pay much attention to what our work produced or how it affected others or the planet.
Integrity
The Conundrum
Healthy career development evolves in what the American philosopher Ken Wilber terms an ‘actualization hierarchy’. This type of growth is natural: atoms make up molecules, molecules make up cells, cells make up organs, organs make up complex living systems.
What is not healthy are dominator hierarchies where one stage of the growth spectrum attempts to dominate the stages below. In our example if, as almost happened, the industrial age wiped out the benefits provided by the agricultural age then the information age would have never happened. Nor would you and I have. The industrial age work model of a ‘board and a boss’ with ‘employees’ is an example of a dominator hierarchy that could only last so long.
The common mistake of education programs that teach ‘leadership’ classes to people who haven’t yet learned to be students is another. Providing unemployed individuals with funding to run their own business is an example of skipping a stage in the healthy hierarchy. I could go on, and probably will in subsequent articles. Deciding between wealth and integrity is the strongest obstacle to career fulfillment at this stage of our cultural development.
That is because it is not about choosing one over the other, it is about realizing you cannot have one without the other. Even though we all, at some level of our consciousness, seek integrity we don’t all realize that. Some of us get stuck at wealth, fearing to lose it. Others ignore wealth and continuously struggle for integrity.
A few realize that by arriving at their own definition of wealth they will move onto an integrity and purpose filled life. The commonly stated excuse of “I want to make a contribution but I need to make a living” can now be changed to “I will make my contribution and learn to make a living from it”. I have never understood the point of making a cake and not eating it.I have never understood the point of making a cake and not eating it.
Purpose
Plan
To mangle and often quoted and uncredited axiom about dreaming and action:
See you again next week.
Whenever you’re ready, there are three ways we can help you: