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#185 - The End Of Pleasant Fictions

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The stories we live inside

Last weekend, I gave a talk at a high school career fair. I was the last speaker, and took the stage at the 43:00 mark here. It was a blast!

Just before the talk I was in one of the side rooms, chatting with students and parents. After introducing himself, a tall, lanky teen asked me what I'd be sharing:

"It's basically lessons from my career that I think will apply to yours, too."
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"How many are there?"
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"Four. Four quick stories, four quick lessons."
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"Four?!! I want one. Gimme one. What's the most important piece of advice?"
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"There is no ladder."

Being forced to distill the 12-minute talk into a one-line meme made me think of The Matrix. The part where the bald boy bends the spoon using his mind. The movie's hero, Neo, watches in awe, and begs for an explanation. The kid just tells him: "There is no spoon."
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The point of the scene is not the spoon.

The point is that Neo has been living a story that isn't true. A story about how things work, what's possible, and what's allowed. The spoon seems unbendable only because the story says it is. But if Neo is willing to abandon the story, the spoon will bend -- and he'll be free.

The career ladder is the same kind of story. A script we inherited from a different time and reality: start at the bottom, pay your dues, work your way up. It's compelling! Coherent. Comforting, even. But it's also a fiction.

Pleasant fictions

I finally watched the speech Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave in Switzerland last week. It's an important speech, and an incredible lesson in clarity, courage and leadership. Well worth your time.

Of course, Carney is a politician, so he covers geopolitics. But the real point of the speech is to call out another fiction: to tell us that the stable, predictable, rules-based order most of us came of age in has already disappeared. For Carney, "There is no world order".

At one point, Carney cites a greengrocer from a Vaclav Havel play. The greengrocer is a Czech shop owner who under communism always kept a sign in his window that read, "Workers of the world, unite."

Carney explains that:

Then, referring to more recent geopolitical events, Carney names the fiction we’ve been living with for decades: not that the rules-based order was ever perfect, but that we could keep acting like it still held:

The career ladder is our sign. Our version of Neo's story. We've been placing the sign in our window, and telling a fictitious work story, for a long time.

I've been writing about work "coming apart" -- fraying, fractionalizing, splintering, decentralizing -- for dozens of issues now. About the way our fundamental trust -- in work, but also in other long-unquestioned institutions like the media, government, finance, and education -- is fast eroding.

This isn't a transition either. These are visible signs of rupture -- and they're accelerating. The distinction matters.

Repair vs. Build

When I started writing TalentStories, I'd often claim that "work is broken". I'd just left the corporate world, and that was how I saw it: flawed, damaged, busted. But broken as it it may be, I rarely use that language anymore.

I realized why after a panel at a conference last year. Execs from Coca Cola, AIG and I sat in front of an audience of HR leaders and took questions about work, leadership and AI; the usual topics.

It was great. But I also came away with the realization that the people I was speaking next to -- as accomplished and insightful as they were -- were fundamentally focused on the old world of work. On a version of work I had come to see not just as beyond repair, but as a drain on the energy needed to build a new and better one.

What we're here for

As a community builder, the guidance you get is to find a rallying call of some kind for the group you're building. It's to draw an "us-vs-them" line in the sand.

I struggle a bit with this advice. Not just because it challenges my inclusive instincts, but because it feels like there's already enough division to go around.

At the same time, I always ask myself:

Do I use my time and energy to repair the old world of work? Something impaired to the point of being almost unrecognizable? Or do I build for the world of work that is quickly becoming our shared reality?

Framed like this, the answer is easy: it's the latter. TalentStories is about building and preparing for the reality we're in, not the one we wish existed.

In fact, Carney's language -- applied to work, careers, and organizations -- could almost serve as a TalentStories north star:

The good news is, you can work in the old world -- and build for the new one. You can build proactively: the skills, the awareness, the connection and clarity it demands. It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition.

And it's time to build. To ditch the ladder and embrace the career reality of a more uncertain river. A long, winding river, with bends we can’t always see around and hurdles we don't always expect.

The work now is resilience: learning to scan the horizon, recover from knocks, steer through rocks. Sometimes going hard, sometimes resting. Sometimes leaning on others to keep moving.

The end of Carney's speech is apt, too, as a reminder for all of us:

Thanks for reading and exploring with me -- and have a great end of the week! 🙏

Aki

P.S. If you want to join the TalentStories WhatsApp community, drop me a line here. Or if you're in Singapore -- come join us in person! We're getting together on Tuesday night next week, and have a couple of slots, ping me for details. 🙌🏻