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Preserving Optionality: Preparing for the Unknown:
We're often advised to excel at one thing. But as the future gets harder to predict, preserving optionality allows us to pivot when the road ahead crumbles.
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How do we prepare for a world that often changes drastically and rapidly? We can preserve our optionality.
We don't often get the advice to keep our options open. Instead, we're told to specialize by investing huge hours in our passion so we can be successful in a niche.
The problem is, it's bad advice. We live in a world that's constantly changing, and if we can't respond effectively to those changes, we become redundant, frustrated, and useless.
Instead of focusing on becoming great at one thing, there is another, counterintuitive strategy that will get us further: preserving optionality. The more options we have, the better suited we are to deal with unpredictability and uncertainty. We can stay calm when others panic because we have choices.
Optionality refers to the act of keeping as many options open as possible. Preserving optionality means avoiding limiting choices or dependencies. It means staying open to opportunities and always having a backup plan.
[...] Ultimately, preserving optionality means paying attention and looking at life from multiple perspectives. It means building a versatile base of foundational knowledge and allowing for serendipity and unexpected connections. We must seek to expand our comfort zone and circle of competence, and we should take minor risks that have potentially large upsides and limited downsides.
Paradoxically, preserving optionality can mean saying no to a lot of opportunities and avoiding anything that will prove to be restrictive. We need to look at choices through the lens of the optionality they will give us in the future and only say yes to those that create more options.
Preserving your optionality is important because it gives you the flexibility to capitalize on inevitable change. In order to keep your options open, you need diversity. Diversity of perspective, thought, knowledge, and skills. You don't want to find yourself in a position of only being able to sell something that no one wants. Rapid, extraordinary change is the norm. In order to adapt in a way that is useful, keep your options open.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 04 2020, @05:46AM (10 children)
Take a young man who doesn't really know what he wants to do. He works construction, then joins the military, then drives truck, then returns to construction, then runs his own business for awhile, and ultimately ends up in maintenance in the manufacturing sector.
When management looks at such a person, they don't see a broad background. They only see one or two small "skill sets" that are useful to them.
If management finds some use for this individual, management works overtime ensuring that this person stay within the niche they have assigned him.
I suggest that a person with options represents a threat to all the half-wits who put themselves deeply into debt for a college eduation, which they can't use just anywhere. That person who can understand and operate in half a dozen different positions intimidates the young fools who are still working hard to understand their own jobs.
I'm not arguing the premise of TFA, I'm just pointing out that managers fear such people.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2020, @06:17AM
Take a young man, who runs away in 1956. Never manages to outlive that act of cowardice, and so adopts that as a username in the 21st Century. And then proceeds to spew talking points from his ersatz father: Fox News. Yes, it is pathetic, but surely you must feel some empathy for such a damaged human being. And he fantasizes that people with educations fear him? Shirley, Runaway, if you could spell the Words Popertally and overcum you ingrainalized stupidity and recalcitrant idiocracy with sprinkles on top, Runaway. Black People with guns, and no whites around but you. and you seem to have your pants down around your ankles, and have no excuse, no reason, and no come-back to all of SoylentNews, who just wish you would go away.
Run away, if you would.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday May 04 2020, @06:42AM (1 child)
If you don't present to your manager only the facet they need and understand, while keeping the other options to yourself, you missed learning a fundamental... ummm... option.
"The need to know and only that" works both ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2020, @02:27PM
Your manager hired you to work on widgets. The fact that you are capable of working in an argon atmosphere on upside-down bicycles, he doesn't give a rats ass about. He's only the widget manager.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lentilla on Monday May 04 2020, @06:48AM (3 children)
Times might be a-changing. (Although you are spot-on about managers' propensity to pigeonhole capable staff.) For instance - a few decades ago nobody respectable smoked dope. Then it was "puffed but didn't inhale". Then it was "yep, might have done a bit of that". These days it appears de rigueur to tweet whilst whacked out of your tree.
Look around at your average twenty-something and the gig-economy. By the time these folks retire they will have done dozens of jobs, changed careers a couple of times and probably have been retrenched several times. That's the new normal. The days of finish school, learn a trade, complete an apprenticeship and then retire with a gold watch are gone.
I can't say that an average manager will be ever be able to fully appreciate a broad skill-set, but I can say that managers of the future are likely to look at a narrow career focus - and rather than say "time for a promotion" - they are likely to think "what's wrong with this guy?"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2020, @12:01PM (1 child)
The manager got there either by becoming an institutionalized man (or woman) or winning over some institutionalized man (or woman) with MBA sparkles from Haaaaarvard. So I wouldn't put much hope in the manager hiring someone who is good for the business. Similar to China where you need to get with the program however at least there everyone knows it's all bullshit.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 04 2020, @01:39PM
That is sure a very polite way of saying "ass kisser and suck up". Thumbs up!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2020, @12:48AM
Only negro jazz musicians and famous tech CEOs coming down off acid in the year 2000, huh? Mebe time to refresh that browser.
If by retire, you mean 'die,' this is correct.
Maybe it depends on the job, but I think most jobs are largely still only going to look for those skills or attributes that are needed and the heck with the rest. This is one part of the gig economy that is contageous, given current directions. Almost no one is going to care if you are a great gardener or crab fisherman if you're hired for C++, maybe even less so for making sub sandwiches, but it's not very different in the only lens that matters to the job market. A variety of skills or interests (outside relating to the complexity of the job itself) is only useful if the workplace is rapidly changing, creative, or liable to suddent pivots.
Amiwrong?
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday May 04 2020, @12:17PM
This. This is what I have fallen into time and again. All so I could be a team player. And management love it. I regret some of my decisions now -- doing things for others instead of myself. Not growing in ways I should have grown. I'm not saying helping others is bad. Quite the contrary -- we need plenty of that today. I just wish I had redirected my energies in other ways.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday May 04 2020, @04:28PM (1 child)
I've noticed that the people who think everyone else is stupid and laughably thinks his bosses "fear" him is usually just a mediocre employee that doesn't know nearly as much as he thinks he does.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 04 2020, @05:07PM
That is often the case. You see that especially among people who have never been in a management position. In my case, I'm currently serving as a sort of mentor for a young lady who has been crammed into a junior management position. She's not entirely lost, because she's pretty bright - but she does kind of rely on me.
The first bit of advice I gave her? Don't allow MY BOSS to bully her. And she has put him in his place quite well.