Working Identity – Herminia Ibarra

“Then indecision brings its own delays,

And days are lost lamenting over lost days.

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;

What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As Lucy’s and Pierre’s stories illustrate, the tools at your disposal group into three kinds: experimenting with different possibilities, making new and different connections, and stepping back to make sense of what you are learning along the way.

Both Dan’s story and Susan’s illustrate that working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities.

One of the useful—and difficult—things about experiments is that they sometimes tell us that we were wrong, that we actually don’t love or can’t make a living from what we thought we wanted to do. That’s when it comes time to close doors. It’s harder than you might think.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that “people tend to flirt only with serious things—madness, disaster, other people.” When we craft experiments, we are flirting with our many selves, a serious endeavor because it matters so much to us. The stronger the attraction, the more vulnerable we are to biases that affect how we perceive alternatives. Since we are not neutral about which outcome we prefer, we can fall into the trap of evaluating our experiments with a positive bias, one that encourages us to escalate commitment, even when we have evidence that it would be better to abandon ship or put the pet project on hold. A related danger is inadvertently putting a current work situation at risk. The exploration feels risk free, because we hide it from work associates. But the project becomes all-consuming, and it becomes obvious to everyone around us that our attention is divided.