I previously talked about my 5 Design Rules to Live By, drawn from the design mind-sets from Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Today, I would like to talk about Rule 2 – having a bias to action.

Engineers are typically very risk averse. We’re trained to know what it is we want to accomplish, have a detailed plan, and to deliver something that is fail-proof. Old office culture would encourage avoiding risk and punish anyone whose actions resulted in a failure, thus perpetuating the need to avoid failure at all cost. The result is that we’re not only unwilling to take big risks in our work, but also in our lives. We aren’t even willing to take small risks most of the time.

There is even disparity between men and women. Study after study has demonstrated that after a failure, men are more likely to be able to bounce back and try again than women. Women aren’t even as likely to take the initial risk. When it comes to comparing ourselves against a criteria, for instance in a job posting for a new position, women are only likely to apply once 100% of the criteria have been met, as opposed to men, who would apply once they’ve met 60% of the criteria according to an internal study done by Hewlett Packard. That isn’t to say that men can’t face some of these challenges. However, women are unfortunately far more likely.

What having a bias to action mean?

Designers are equipped to address potential failure by using their bias toward action, meaning if a prototype is met with failure, they simply take the necessary action to modify their approach and then try again. Every failure is taken as a learning opportunity. Sometimes thanks to a series of failed prototypes they end up discovering that the problem has morphed into something new, opening up a new possibility of solutions to explore. Everything is possible to them because they aren’t afraid to adjust course as necessary. In fact, this mindset is one you often see on display in quotes attributed to people such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein.

Quotes such as…

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. -Henry Ford

…and…

A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is NOT what it is built for. -Albert Einstein

…and this excerpt from a 1921 American Magazine interview…

I never allow myself to become discouraged under any circumstances. I recall that after we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed ‘to find out anything.’ I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. We sometimes learn a lot from our failures if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of. -Thomas Edison

…which is often boiled down to…

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. -Thomas Edison

Ultimately the result of taking action is that you grow confident, resilient against failure, and able to overcome the fears of change, big and small. Each of these topics is covered in books, lectures, and research papers at great length, and each really deserves it’s own full discussion which I hope to have in the future, but I will try to scrape the surface as we discuss taking action more below.

It’s not an overnight process, and it’s not like fear and anxiety will never be able to sway you. While some people might be able to move past those feelings easier than others, nerves and anxieties and fears are all signs that we care about something. That isn’t a bad thing. We just can’t let them overpower us and keep us from doing what we want to do.

How do I start?

Let’s first talk about the approach put out there by Designing your Life on how to take action like a designer on life design challenges.

Fail Fast, Fail Often via Prototyping

Designers have a fail fast, fail often approach to solving problems. They are masters at rapid prototyping. The faster you can prototype your solution, the faster you know what works and what doesn’t. The faster you find out what works, the less time and money you waste. Typically in a work environment you’d have data about your problem helping drive the build to your solution. But in Designing Your Life, the idea behind prototyping a “life design” is less about analyzing data from the start (because there isn’t much data for things in our lives that haven’t happened yet) and more about asking good questions to collect data about your options with an open mind. It gives you the chance to isolate a part of a desired experience or the answer to one question and explore it without too much investment. It leaves you open to unexpected opportunities and even builds empathy.

They outline two methods that are the most effective and revealing. The first prototyping method is via Prototype Conversations, or what they call the “Life Design Interview.” It boils down to engaging in conversation with someone experiencing what you are interested in and learning their story, hearing their answers to your questions, and letting those help build you forward. This doesn’t need to only applying to finding a new career: be open to reaching out to others who have knowledge and experiences that can help you with your problem and hearing their views without bias. The second is through Prototype Experiences. These involve finding activities that directly relate to our questions and interests and physically experiencing them through classes, retreats, job shadows, or any other activity you can think of that will address a question you have.

Build Confidence and Overcome Fear

Sometimes taking action requires confidence we don’t feel like we have. We might find ourselves anxious or afraid about what could happen if we say/do a thing. Women are especially susceptible to a pervasive confidence gap.

But one of the almost universally accepted methods of combating the fears/anxieties/lack of confidence is through simply taking action against them. Treat action like a habit. The more action you take, more it becomes habit, and that habit overrides the negative feelings holding you back from action, resulting in easier actionability. In Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection by Jia Jiang, this exact thing happens. Through repeated attempts at seeking out rejection, he actually builds such confidence that the yes’s start coming much more frequently than the no’s.

One way to build the action habit is to simply start small. Give yourself a series of tiny victories. Those tiny victories will build upon themselves over time until you look back and realize that every small step you took brought you a mile down the road.

Spend two minutes doing a confident superhero pose (in the privacy of a bathroom stall if you’d like) to give your brain the boost of endorphins that it needs to tackle an anxiety-provoking action, like a job interview or a presentation.

If you’re on the fence about taking a bigger action, perhaps one that you have put off but know could have a big impact on your happiness or well being, try weighing the pro’s and con’s. What could happen if you do the thing? What could happen if you don’t? What is at stake in both scenarios? You might find that the pro’s for taking action start to outweigh the con’s.

Stop Worrying, Start Doing

Just commit and go for it. Seriously. Having a bias to action means if it didn’t work out we can take it as a learning opportunity and adjust and go again. There is never failure, so there’s nothing to worry about.

How has it helped me?

Working on taking small steps has certainly helped me. For example, I had anxiety about approaching my coworkers at my desk. My supervisor had noted in a performance review that it was an important skill, although it seemed like a small thing. It made you more visible to the team and created an approachable friendly persona. So I picked a task that I could get quick feedback for, and told myself I could have a treat over the weekend (reward of choice = ice cream) if I approached someone at their desk, unannounced, by the end of the week. For some reason, it was a nerve wracking experience. But after taking that first small step, taking a similar action next week didn’t seem as scary. It did not take long for me to become much more comfortable approaching team members at their desks with quick questions and light chit-chat. All it took was a small step!

Creating this blog was also a step toward taking a risk to explore my own development further and allowing myself to want to share my experiences and knowledge. It feels like a bigger step, but it is still a step. My small steps within by adventure into blog writing involve a commitment to posting at least once a week. As I find my tone and become more comfortable with my content and structure, I hope to increase that slowly over time. Little steps!

We can also take for example my husband’s experience with finding a new job, and how little steps can lead to bigger leaps.

There was a time when my husband’s compass consisted of the position that a job was just a vehicle he needed to make money, so that he could have a secure and happy life outside of work exploring his hobbies and spending time with our dogs and families.

But after a time, he began to feel unsatisfied with his current work. The office culture had shifted, and a few management decisions and difficult projects had left his team burnt out and feeling unappreciated for their efforts. Deep down, he knew that he needed a new environment and a new challenge. But at first he couldn’t even bring himself to look for anything else. He would bolster his perceptions of his job by saying, “Well, they’re promising a new project will start soon, so I’ll wait to see how that goes.” “They’re saying we’ll get a raise this year, so I’ll wait to see what that is.” “I was told I’m in line for a promotion to lead a project, so that might be cool.” “A new company might not give me the flexibility that my current job does.” The scary prospect of disembarking for something new was daunting enough that his brain found ways to justify an environment he knew he was unhappy with.

I convinced him to sit down with me and go through in detail one of the exercises in Designing Your Life that I wouldn’t stop talking about called Odyssey Planning to solve his problem. He already had an idea of the activities that would give him joy, but he just needed to add in some structure and get to a plan he could prototype. Between his three odyssey plans (the thing he was interested in right now, the thing he could do if Thing One no longer existed, and the thing he would do if money were no object) we came up with a solid 5 year plan for Odyssey One; my husband builds his game development skills, both the technical graphics/programming side and the artistic story building side, develops his own indie video game, releases it on a popular platform, and then quits his current job to start his own small company when (yes, when) that game brings in some money. We even analyzed and questioned the plans and found that this one gave him the highest amounts of happiness and confidence, and even utilized skills that he had begun to explore in college so it required very little investment.

He didn’t care as much about giving his plans funky names, so I call this one “One Game Company to Rule them All.”

So my husband made the first small step on his Odyssey Plan. He used an idea he already had for a game concept, downloaded some development software, and for about a month after getting home from work he would explore the nitty gritty technical details that he needed to perfect to create a convincing environment. After getting to a point where he had a good foundation of how to use the software and feeling confident in his ability to create difficult effects within the game engine, he purchased some books to work on the conceptual portion of the game. He also decided it was time to move forward with finding a new job. A new challenge and fresh environment at work would give a boost to the place where he would still be spending most of his day.

My husband committed himself to taking another small step by applying to 5 jobs that week to companies that he would research and felt demonstrated good culture, fair pay, and would allow him to develop software for industries different than what he was delivering now. He hit his 5 and continued to research companies for the following week where he would submit 5 more. In the process he found a larger corporation than what he had in mind originally and that is not known for software development. They happened to be advertising for someone with a unique blend of experiences in software, video game graphics, user experience, and even some web and phone development. My husband happened to meet a lot of these skills thanks to his college interests and side development project.

So we agreed, what the heck, apply for it and see what happens. The worst that could happen is he’d hear nothing, which is what we were expecting. As most of you probably know, that’s how it typically goes with big companies and online applications. There’s a lot of rejection and even more flat out silence.

What we didn’t expect is that he’d get called for an HR screening followed quickly by an online/phone interview where he was able to speak to his college experiences and demo his projects, especially his most recent demo he built at home as part of his video game development exercise, via screen sharing and “Wow’d” the developers on the other side (he told me later that they literally said “Wow, you did that?”). The following in-person interview was practically a formality at that point, and the job offer came came quickly. Starting next week, he will be developing digital models for forward-thinking prototypes that are conceptualized to address customer needs of the future. The job is flexible, pays well, has a small but enthusiastic team with a lot of autonomy behind it, is extremely unique, and gives my husband access and ability to grow skills he’s been itching to improve. It couldn’t be better.

My husband noted that after he finally gave his notice at his old job and started talking to his fellow developers, he got a lot of similar reactions that surprised him:

“Wow, good for you. I’d never be able to make a switch like that.”

Without all of those small steps, moving him the mile the needed to go to get to this point, he would have never been able to move past his own risk aversion to get to a position of actual joy in his career.