In her 2002 article for Harvard Business Review entitled ‘How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career’, Herminia Ibarra criticises the
traditional wisdom on career planning, in which you are advised to reflect in order to establish what you want and then make
concrete plans to achieve your goals. In many situations, especially when you are changing careers, this pre-knowledge may not be
possible. The way you discover what you want for the future is by acting in new ways and exploring new situations.
She proposes an alternative to the ‘plan-and-implement’ approach which involves exploring possible future selves. This ‘test-andlearn’ approach has three main elements:
• Crafting experiments — trying new activities and taking on new roles on a small scale to reveal undiscovered parts of yourself
and explore new paths before you make a major commitment to a new direction
• Shifting connections — developing new contacts in order to explore new worlds, to discover new perspectives on yourself, to
find new role models and to expose yourself to new opportunities
• Making sense — creating new stories about yourself and reinterpreting your previous experiences to uncover new meanings
and trigger transformation
Ibarra, H. (2002). How to stay stuck in the wrong career. Harvard Business Review, December, 40–47.
https://class.coursera.org/career-001/lecture
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