🗓️ Join us on October 30 at 12pm ET for Design Career Ladders: Fix Them or Throw Them Out? It’s a free panel discussion about how to rethink our approach to career growth—as orgs and individuals. Register here.
Being human is a crash-course in change management—personally and professionally. From independent to partnered. From being cared for to caretaking. From being students to practitioners. From being practitioners to leaders.
Here we are now—as designers, writers, and researchers—collectively facing a cascade of change. And while logic suggests we should be pros at navigating major transitions by now… most of us are deeply uncomfortable here in the messy middle, waiting to see how things turn out.
We distract ourselves by trying to predict what life looks like on the other side. Are we leaning into our strategic skills—or are we outsourcing those to AI? Are we freed up to be more creative—or more technical? Will our roles be more essential—or will we all be utterly unemployable?
The problem with these questions is… they don’t leave us much choice. They leave us trying to mind-read what the industry will find valuable, and how we can contort ourselves to fit it—whether we agree or not.
So I propose we start asking different questions—ones that give us a role in influencing what comes next:
1. What do I want the future to look like?
We exhaust ourselves trying to freeze time—bristling against change or shrinking ourselves to stay safe from it. But what we really need is a vision of a better future that we want to work towards—one that gives us purpose and clarity amidst the churn.
2. What do I want to leave in the past?
We have as much right to rewrite the rules as everyone else right now. That means deciding which beliefs no longer serve us, and which scripts we’ll no longer follow, in service of making our vision of a better future real.
These are questions to ask yourself every day—so even if you don’t have a precise map to what’s next, you still have a compass to follow. Think of combining your answers into a story like this:
I’m saying goodbye to…
In service of a future where…
While we’re all in the messy middle, we owe it to ourselves—and each other—to claim every shred of agency we have. The stories we tell ourselves shape what we believe is possible and, thus, how we act. So let’s stop writing about the hero getting crushed—and start writing about the hero getting what they want.
—Jen
Just announced: The Throughline Opening Showcase
Some of the most inspiring Throughline talk pitches we received were from people answering these questions—so we gathered them up and added a new event to the Throughline Conference: an opening showcase on Thursday, January 28. It’s called New Stories for a New Era, and it’s full of lightning talks from designers who’ve let go of beliefs and behaviors that were getting in the way of the future they want to see.
Krissi Xenakis saying goodbye to trying to prove design’s worth… in service of a future where she’s assumed to be a trusted partner.
Peter Bossio saying goodbye to simply executing work… in service of a future where he’s helping identify the problem actually worth solving.
Hertje Brodersen saying goodbye to design’s obsession with individual exceptionalism… in service of a future where solidarity is our collective aim.
Adriana Harper saying goodbye to keeping a stiff-lip against grief… in service of a future where she uses it to fuel her team’s progress.
Jess Dale saying goodbye to “good” jobs that make us miserable, in service of creating space for the futures we actually want.
These folks aren’t waiting until the dust has settled to start making moves—they’re making them now so that when the dust settles they like what they see: in their orgs, in their communities, and in themselves.
Take their lead. If you’re feeling powerless against all this change, ask yourself what you want the future to look like—and what you might need to let go of to get there. And if you want to do that work in good company, don’t miss Throughline. Early-bird sales end November 8.