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https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/11uDpVJtadfa5xY0I0KUg3pPt1C40qb2u

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Most useful one: https://www.storyboardthat.com/articles/b/johari-window

https://www.mygrow.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/M2_-Johari-Window-Worksheet-.pdf

https://www.socialmobility.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Johari-Window-Model-Exercise.pdf

https://lyssadehart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Johari-Window-Worksheet.pdf

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Molly Wright: How every child can thrive by five | TED

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111學年度大學入學及校內辦理升學作業重要時程

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Students explore their past and see the present to know more about themselves.

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Students explore their past and see the present to know more about themselves.

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Students see the value of their life, education or ...

# data[].attributes.subject
Students see the value of their life, education or ...

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They can explore some topics/themes they have interests in...

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Students do something to change part of the themselves/the world...  (The last month)

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Students do something to change part of the themselves/the world...  (The last month)

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111學年度升大學校內辦理作業時程

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111學年度升大學校內辦理作業時程

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111學年度大學申請入學作業節錄

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The Interactive Companion to the #1 New York Times Bestselling Book

Design the most important project of all: your life. Based on the wildly popular Stanford course that started the life design movement, this notebook, which has a metallic spiral spine, frosted acetate cover, and elastic bellyband allows you to dig deeper into your curiosities, motivations, and skills; define your goals; and track your progress. Work through innovative option-generating tools and exercises, including:

· A Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard tool to reflect on your work/life balance
· Questions to help you articulate your Lifeview and Workview and define your life design Compass
· Good Time Journal pages to log your energy and engagement throughout the day
· Fold-out dotted paper for mind mapping to generate new ideas and getting unstuck
· Worksheets to help you ideate alternate Odyssey Plans for different versions of the future you
· Charts for tracking your Life Design Interviews

Whether you're a recent graduate, mid-career, or contemplating your encore life or retirement-and whether it's time to make that big move or you're just interested in making your current situation a little bit better- The Designing Your Life Workbook is your dynamic roadmap to building a joyful, fulfilling life that always holds the possibility of surprise.

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The Designing Your Life Workbook: A Framework for Building a Life You Can Thrive In

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The Designing Your Life Workbook: A Framework for Building a Life You Can Thrive In [Burnett, Bill, Evans, Dave] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Designing Your Life Workbook: A Framework for Building a Life You Can Thrive In

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https://designingyour.life/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DYWL-Workbook.pdf

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At last, a book that shows you how to build-design-a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage
Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home-at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.

In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

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At last, a book that shows you how to build-design-a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home-at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in.

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The Design Thinking Life Playbook is for anyone who wants to have a fulfilling and joyful future. ItÂs for all those who want to initiate change through self-empowerment and have the courage to think, act, and take advantage of their opportunities proactively.

Whether you want to change your career, form healthier, stronger relationships, or plan the next stages of your life, this book will guide you to something better.

Authors Michael Lewrick, Larry Leifer, and Jean-Paul Thommen are leading design thinking experts in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Michael Lewrick, Ph.D., is a featured speaker and teaches design thinking at various universities. With Leifer, Lewrick co-authored the international bestseller The Design Thinking Playbook as well as The Design Thinking Toolbox. Stanford Professor Larry Leifer, Ph.D., is one of the most influential personalities and pioneers in design thinking. Professor Jean-Paul Thommen, Ph.D., from the University of Zurich, is an expert on leadership, organizational development, and business ethics.

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The Design Thinking Life Playbook: Empower Yourself, Embrace Change, and Visualize a Joyful Life

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The Design Thinking Life Playbook: Empower Yourself, Embrace Change, and Visualize a Joyful Life [Lewrick, Michael, Thommen, Jean-Paul, Leifer, Larry] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Design Thinking Life Playbook: Empower Yourself, Embrace Change, and Visualize a Joyful Life

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Use your names or words to create acrostic poems.

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notes
music
lyrics

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Read Futures Thinking Playbook by Julia Rose West on Issuu and browse thousands of other publications on our platform. Start here!

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The myth of self-discovery: Emily Warren at TEDxClaremontColleges

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111學年度升大學校內辦理作業時程

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111學年度升大學校內辦理作業時程

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111學年度升大學校內辦理作業時程

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Presentation topic:  How can every teenager thrive by 18? / How can I thrive by 23?

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Presentation topic:  How can every teenager thrive by 18? / How can I thrive by 23?

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Follow the example of :
Students are divided into groups. Each group works on one aspect about teenagers.  They share their information together but make their presentation individually.

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1.  他人眼中的自己（interviews、實話實說）
2. Stages of human development
3. Movies
4. Readings
5. Talks/Speeches
6. Presentation

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《認識自我》師大劉滄龍教授部分參考書籍

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《認識自我》師大劉滄龍教授部分參考書籍

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1. Who Am I?: And If So, How Many? By Richard David Precht
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Am-If-How-Many/dp/0385531184

原文：
https://booksvooks.com/fullbook/who-am-i-and-if-so-how-many-a-journey-through-your-mind-pdf.html

2. 我是誰？如果有我，有幾個我？(譯本)
https://www.books.com.tw/products/CN11300122#:~:text=%E5%A6%82%E6%9E%9C%E6%9C%89%E6%88%91%EF%BC%8C%E6%9C%89%E5%B9%BE%E5%80%8B%E6%88%91%EF%BC%9F%E3%80%8B,%EF%BC%8C%E6%9C%89%E5%B9%BE%E5%80%8B%E6%88%91%EF%BC%9F%E3%80%8B

我是誰？如果有我，有幾個我？

參考篇章：

第一部 我能知道什麼？
第4章 三十年戰爭中的一個冬夜：從何得知我是誰？
第5章 馬赫經驗：「我」是誰？

第二部 我應該做什麼？
第12章 我心中的法則：為什麼我應該做個好人？
第13章 利貝特實驗：我可以要我所想要的嗎？

第三部 我可以期望什麼？
第32章 幸福之島：快樂人生是什麼？
第33章 遠方的花園：快樂學得來嗎？

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「認識你自己」、「成為你自己」是哲學家的箴言，也是每個人終其一生都該探究的課題。然而什麼才是「認識自己」？自我是固定的本質還是不斷生成？有「我」的話，是一個還是多個？自我與他人的關係為何？「認識自己」有方法嗎？缺乏終極目標與意義的人生值得活嗎？如何面對自我探索的疑惑、矛盾與困難？甚至可以享受此一探索的歷程？在本課程中，教師與同學互為教學主體，超過一半以上的時間以討論為主，教師負責提供邏輯、自我認識、社會哲學的知識背景並設計討論議題，不論在大班教學與小組討論中，都要儘可能地讓不同的聲音充分表達、彼此對話。沒有權威或趨同的知識與立場，只有真實的意見交鋒與激盪，才能激活深刻的思辨過程。透過分組的討論與小組合作報告，並按照小組成員的共同興趣對特定議題進行較深入的探究，小組研究結果將於期末在文薈廳走廊公開發表報告成果。

第一單元：我能知道什麼？
4. 邀請《邏輯謬誤鑑識班》作者冀劍制教授到班演講「常見的邏輯謬誤與應用分析」。
第二單元：我應該做什麼？
3. 討論主題：關於「同性婚姻合法化」爭議不同立場的對話
第三單元：我可以期望什麼？
2. 指定閱讀文本與討論：《生命中不能承受之輕》，頁321-375。

「認識我們的城市：瑠公圳的過去與未來」展覽，課程中的實驗性探討更將具體落實為在紫藤廬舉辦的「瑠公圳復現展覽」，並催生「瑠公圳復現」的市政規劃。
書目資料及作業規劃
（ 1 ） 書目資料：每週教學進度均需於課前閱讀，並且將閱讀所得寫成心得並運用在報告中。

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「認識你自己」、「成為你自己」是哲學家的箴言，也是每個人終其一生都該探究的課題。然而什麼才是「認識自己」？自我是固定的本質還是不斷生成？有「我」的話，是一個還是多個？自我與他人的關係為何？「認識自己」有方法嗎？缺乏終極目標與意義的人生值得活嗎？如何面對自我探索的疑惑、矛盾與困難？甚至可以享受此一探索的歷程？在本課程中，教師與同學互為教學主體，超過一半以上的時間以討論為主，教師負責提供邏輯、自...

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Brian Little: Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality.

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Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality

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Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality

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1. 你到底是誰？：解開不可思議的人格謎團(TED BOOKS系列) (中文譯本)
https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010779104

參考章節：
第一章    掃描你的人格全貌
第二章    個人計劃：展現人格的日常作為
第三章    個人背景：追求計劃的社會生態
第四章 真誠的迷思：尋求做自己的挑戰
第五章 幸福進行式：可持續追求的核心計劃

2. Who Are You, Really?: The Surprising Puzzle of Personality (英文原文書)
https://www.books.com.tw/products/F013958336?sloc=main

Kindle version:
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-You-Really-Personality-ebook/dp/B0176M3RF4

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Brian Little: Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality

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What makes you, you? Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits -- sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves.

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Q. What is this personality test based on?

A. This test is based on the personality theory created by Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs. It measures your preferences on Myers and Briggs' four dimensions of personality type, as well as 23 more detailed facets of type to personalize your results.

Q. How long is this personality test?

A. The test consists of 130 questions and takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.

Q. Is this personality test really free?

A. You do not need to purchase or register to take this test and view an overview of your results. If you would like, you can purchase a more comprehensive full report for a small fee.

Q. Is this personality test accurate?

A. This test has been researched extensively to ensure it is valid and reliable, using a variety of statistical methods. These results are detailed in the TypeFinder Technical Documentation. Most of our users describe their results as both accurate and insightful. However, it is important to note that no test can determine personality type correctly for everyone-it's essential that you evaluate your results on your own to decide if they describe you well, and research other possible types if necessary.

Q. What will my results for this test look like?

A. You will first see a brief, free report showing the key points from your results. After reviewing your brief report, you then have the option to unlock your full report for a small fee. To see what you can expect from your full report, see this sample report.

Q. How can I access my personality test results?

A. After you take a test, you will have the option to create an account by entering your email address. If you create an account, you can view your test results at any time by returning to Truity.com and logging into your account. We do not email your results to you.

Q. Do I need to complete this personality test all at once?

A. If you've created an account and are logged in when you take the test, your responses will be saved as you go through the test. If you do not log in to a Truity account before starting the test, your progress will not be saved and you will need to complete the test all at once.

Q. Can I have my employees, team or group take the TypeFinder test?

A. Absolutely. Our Truity@Work platform is designed to make it easy to give a TypeFinder personality test to your team or group. See discounted group pricing and learn how to quickly and easily set up testing for your group on the Testing for Business page.

Q. Will this test tell me which careers are best for my type?

A. This test has brief information about the careers for your type, but if you main goal is to find the right career for you, then we recommend you take the TypeFinder for Career Planning, which is specifically designed to help you find the right career for your type as well as your individual interests and strengths.

Q. Is this personality test appropriate for children?

A. None of our tests are appropriate for children under the age of 14. Some of our tests may have mature content, and anyone younger than 18 should only take the test with parental guidance.

Q. Where can I find more information about the 16 personalities?

Q. Can my personality type change over time?

A. If you asked Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Briggs (the creators of the 16 personality types) or Carl Jung (the psychologist whose theories Briggs and Myers studied), they would say no, a person's personality type does not change over time. However, personality psychologists who study large populations have found that shifts in personality do occur over time. Research shows that age and individual life experiences can cause a shift in your personality. However, drastic shifts in personality are unusual, and most people find that changes are small and gradual.

Q. I'm looking for the official MBTI® assessment. Is this it?

A. The MBTI® is the original assessment developed by Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs. The TypeFinder® is based on Myers and Briggs' theory, but is not the same as the MBTI® assessment. Some key differences:
The MBTI® Assessment The TypeFinder®
Q. Are you going to sell my data?

A. . We do not sell your email or other data to any third parties, and we have a zero-spam policy. We carefully comply with applicable privacy laws in handling your personal information. You can read more in our privacy policy.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Myers-Briggs, and MBTI are registered trademarks of The Myers & Briggs Foundation in the United States and other countries. Truity has no affiliation with the organizations publishing or holding rights to the MBTI® assessment.

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This updated and expanded edition of our bestselling TypeFinder assessment goes deeper than any personality test you've taken before. Based on original research into the nuances of personality type, the TypeFinder reveals not only your four-letter personality type code, but exactly how your one-of-a-kind personality profile fits within that type.

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https://www.16personalities.com/

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Meet doesn't work on your browser

To join the video meeting

Visit meet.google.com in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge

To install and use Meet on a mobile device, go to

or the

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Meet doesn't work on your browser To join the video meeting Visit meet.google.com in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge To install and use Meet on a mobile device, go to or the

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還在玩九型人格？十六型職業人格測試 更準確為你挑選合適工作 (附MBTI完整測試) | Cosmopolitan HK | LINE TODAY

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不論是大學新鮮人，還是工作了一段時間的人，對面對挑選工作都會感到困惑：甚麼工作才會適合我？MBTI十六型職業人格測試則是根據瑞士著名的心理分析學家Carl G. Jung (榮格)的《心理類型理論》著成，目前已經成為權威的性格測試，在世界五百強公司中，有80%的企業包括IBM、Disney、Pepsi等都已有MBTI的應用經驗。 MBTI十六型人格測試是甚麼？ ▲瑞士心理分析學家Carl G. Jung MBTI（Myers-Briggs Type Indicator）是一種迫選型、自我報告式的性格評估測試，用以衡量和描述人們在獲取信息、作出決策、對待生活等方面的心理活動規律和性格類型。MBT

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https://padlet.com/leeyts2/xdbnln0qh0xsgcoq

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https://kevan.org/johari.cgi

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1x1PQf3sek

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簡報診斷設計 by凱文設計

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Personality Test:  MBTI: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (16 personalities)

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Personality Test:  MBTI: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (16 personalities)

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.truity.com/test/type-finder-personality-test-new

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Q. What is this personality test based on?

A. This test is based on the personality theory created by Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs. It measures your preferences on Myers and Briggs' four dimensions of personality type, as well as 23 more detailed facets of type to personalize your results.

Q. How long is this personality test?

A. The test consists of 130 questions and takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.

Q. Is this personality test really free?

A. You do not need to purchase or register to take this test and view an overview of your results. If you would like, you can purchase a more comprehensive full report for a small fee.

Q. Is this personality test accurate?

A. This test has been researched extensively to ensure it is valid and reliable, using a variety of statistical methods. These results are detailed in the TypeFinder Technical Documentation. Most of our users describe their results as both accurate and insightful. However, it is important to note that no test can determine personality type correctly for everyone-it's essential that you evaluate your results on your own to decide if they describe you well, and research other possible types if necessary.

Q. What will my results for this test look like?

A. You will first see a brief, free report showing the key points from your results. After reviewing your brief report, you then have the option to unlock your full report for a small fee. To see what you can expect from your full report, see this sample report.

Q. How can I access my personality test results?

A. After you take a test, you will have the option to create an account by entering your email address. If you create an account, you can view your test results at any time by returning to Truity.com and logging into your account. We do not email your results to you.

Q. Do I need to complete this personality test all at once?

A. If you've created an account and are logged in when you take the test, your responses will be saved as you go through the test. If you do not log in to a Truity account before starting the test, your progress will not be saved and you will need to complete the test all at once.

Q. Can I have my employees, team or group take the TypeFinder test?

A. Absolutely. Our Truity@Work platform is designed to make it easy to give a TypeFinder personality test to your team or group. See discounted group pricing and learn how to quickly and easily set up testing for your group on the Testing for Business page.

Q. Will this test tell me which careers are best for my type?

A. This test has brief information about the careers for your type, but if you main goal is to find the right career for you, then we recommend you take the TypeFinder for Career Planning, which is specifically designed to help you find the right career for your type as well as your individual interests and strengths.

Q. Is this personality test appropriate for children?

A. None of our tests are appropriate for children under the age of 14. Some of our tests may have mature content, and anyone younger than 18 should only take the test with parental guidance.

Q. Where can I find more information about the 16 personalities?

Q. Can my personality type change over time?

A. If you asked Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Briggs (the creators of the 16 personality types) or Carl Jung (the psychologist whose theories Briggs and Myers studied), they would say no, a person's personality type does not change over time. However, personality psychologists who study large populations have found that shifts in personality do occur over time. Research shows that age and individual life experiences can cause a shift in your personality. However, drastic shifts in personality are unusual, and most people find that changes are small and gradual.

Q. I'm looking for the official MBTI® assessment. Is this it?

A. The MBTI® is the original assessment developed by Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs. The TypeFinder® is based on Myers and Briggs' theory, but is not the same as the MBTI® assessment. Some key differences:
The MBTI® Assessment The TypeFinder®
Q. Are you going to sell my data?

A. . We do not sell your email or other data to any third parties, and we have a zero-spam policy. We carefully comply with applicable privacy laws in handling your personal information. You can read more in our privacy policy.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Myers-Briggs, and MBTI are registered trademarks of The Myers & Briggs Foundation in the United States and other countries. Truity has no affiliation with the organizations publishing or holding rights to the MBTI® assessment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This updated and expanded edition of our bestselling TypeFinder assessment goes deeper than any personality test you've taken before. Based on original research into the nuances of personality type, the TypeFinder reveals not only your four-letter personality type code, but exactly how your one-of-a-kind personality profile fits within that type.

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https://ohioemploymentfirst.org/up_doc/EFSWOTAnalysisMatching.pdf

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https://templatelab.com/swot-analysis-templates/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1x1PQf3sek

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Four personality styles: Jennifer & Linda Nacif at TEDxLaJolla

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What's changed about where and how we work?

It's no surprise that the pandemic accelerated an uptake in remote working, as workplaces moved to cloud operations and teams worked entirely from home. The success of remote working was such a success for some companies that some, such as Twitter and Google, made working-from-anywhere a permanent option for most of their employees. The flexibility that comes with remote working - be it permanent or a hybrid set-up with some office time - has ensured professionals can recalibrate their work-life balance and also seek opportunities in other corners of the globe, with online conferencing and virtual collaboration transcending geographic boundaries.

For every success story, digitisation and automation has also made human employment in some sectors redundant. A 2021 study from McKinsey found that 25% more workers than previously estimated may need to look at other occupations as their current jobs become automated. Although some jobs have been made redundant, opportunities to transfer skills to a digital landscape have also presented themselves, in fields such as customer service and product management.

These last two years have also seen a 17.4% YOY rise of the 'Gig Economy' , comprising independent freelancers ('solopreneurs') who work on short-term contracts. As the global solopreneur community grows, so too do the collaborative spaces for them to work and network. Our TSH Collab spaces serve as dynamic offices where individuals can network, share their ideas and still reap the benefits of an office environment while working on their individual businesses (you can find out more about our incredible spaces and awesome entrepreneurial community !)

Work values have also changed drastically in recent years when it comes to organisational purpose and the skills that are valued and in demand from employees. Nine in 10 employees believe companies should focus on positively impacting the planet as much as they focus on profit - especially in a post-pandemic world. This impact can manifest in a multitude of ways, from more sustainable operations to giving back to local communities, so long as there's an overarching culture of profit over purpose. (If you're curious about our own sustainability initiatives, you can read about them here .)

We're also seeing a global shift in the value and demand for ' soft skills' - that is, skills that cannot be measured by formal qualifications, but rather experience. A recent study published by the World Economic Forum found that skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility, and resilience will see a surge in demand over the next five years. To meet this demand for future-focused skills many companies have established personal and professional development programs for employees, be it a subscription to e-learning sites such as Skillshare and LinkedIn Learning, to in-person workshops to build confidence and manage stress.

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It's no surprise that the pandemic accelerated an uptake in remote working, as workplaces moved to cloud operations and teams worked entirely from home. The success of remote working was such a success for some companies that some, such as Twitter and Google, made working-from-anywhere a permanent option for most of their employees.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SemHh0n19LA

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5 steps to designing the life you want  | Bill Burnett | TEDxStanford

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How to refrain dysfunctional beliefs- examples

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How to refrain dysfunctional beliefs- examples

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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5245a9c6e4b038b5cbe9a684/t/59b175b23e00bed6f7abd748/1504802227255/Dysfunctional+Beliefs.pdf

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https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-use-design-thinking-to-create-a-happier-life-for-yourself/

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This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
Design thinking is something that we've been working on at the Stanford Design School and in the School of Engineering for over 50 years. It's an innovation methodology that works on services and products and experiences, such as designing a great-looking sports car or a laptop that contains its own built-in mouse.
But I think the most interesting design problem is your life.
I cofounded the Life Design Lab with Dave Evans at Stanford. There, we teach people how to take design thinking - which is both a process and a mindset - and apply it to their own lives. School has taught most of us to be skeptical and to be rationalists, but those aren't very useful mindsets when you're trying to do something new, something no one's ever done before, or something that has no one clear solution. Instead, design thinking says you should start with empathy and lean into what you're curious about.

At Stanford, Dave and I teach a class called "Designing Your Life," which we adapted into the book Designing Your Life, Designing Your Work Life and a set of online workshops. We started the class because we've been in office hours for a long, long time with students, and we saw that many of them were getting stuck in their lives. What's more, they didn't have the tools for getting unstuck.

Now designers get stuck all the time. When I signed up to be a designer, I knew that I was going to work on something brand new, something I've never done before - every single day of my career. So I get stuck and unstuck and stuck and unstuck all the time.

One of the most important ways to get unstuck is reframing. It's one of our most powerful mindsets. Reframing also makes sure that we're working on the right problem. Life design involves a lot of reframes that allow you to step back, examine your biases and open up new solution spaces. Reframing is essential to finding the right problems and the right solutions.

Many people have beliefs about life which psychologists would label as dysfunctional. If you want to design your life, you need to reframe these beliefs. They hold us back and keep us stuck. I'll share three of the most common.
Dysfunctional belief #1: "Knowing your passion will tell you what you need to do with your life."
If you actually have a passion, that's awesome. Maybe you wanted to be a doctor as long as you can remember. Or you knew at the age of 7 you wanted to be a clown at Cirque du Soleil and now you are one.

To investigate this passion idea Dave and I went over to Stanford's Center on Adolescence, which by the way now goes up to 27, and we met with professor Bill Damon. He's studied this question of passion and purpose, and it turns out less than 20 percent of people have a single identifiable passion in their lives. It's a dysfunctional belief. You don't need a passion to start designing your life, and the reframe is "you are OK, just where you are".
Dysfunctional belief #2: "By the time you're out of college, you should know where you're going. And if you don't know, you're late."
Here we asked the obvious question, what exactly are you late for? When I was growing up you were supposed to have married and be on track to start a family by about 25. That's an old-fashioned idea. We know that nowadays people are living their lives much more fluidly, and they are staying in dynamic career motion between the ages of 22 to 35. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, calls these years the Odyssey Years - when we explore many alternative versions of ourselves.

Dave and I don't believe in "should's". The notion that you "should be somewhere you're not" and "you're late" is a dysfunctional belief. We reframe this as "Let's start from wherever you are; you're not late for anything."
Dysfunctional belief #3: "You should try to optimize the best possible version of yourself."
This is a dysfunctional belief that we really don't like. Why? It implies that there's just one singular best and that life is a linear progression towards this singular best. Well, there is no evidence that there is one singular best version of you - we believe there are many, many versions of you and any of them can result in a well-designed life. Our experience is that life is anything but linear. Our reframe: "life design is a journey; let go of optimizing an end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next."

Now that you've practiced some reframing, I'm going to give you five ideas from "Designing Your Life" to try out. They're the ones that people who've read our book or taken our class or workshop told us were the most useful and most doable. After all, Dave and I are human-centered designers, so we want to be helpful.

Designing your life idea #1: Connect the dots

The #1 reason that people say they took our class or read our book is they want their life to be meaningful or purposeful. Dave and I looked in the positive psychology literature and in the design literature and found that there are three important identities that shape our lives: who you are, what you believe and what you do.

If you can make a connection between these three, you will experience your life as more meaningful. To help connect the dots, we do two things. The first thing is we ask people to write about why they work - your work view. What's your theory of work? What's it for? What's work in service of? We ask them to write around a page about this.

The second thing is a little harder to do in a single page, but we still ask people to try and write up their ideas on the meaning of life. Why are you here? What is your view of how the world works - your life view?

When you can connect your work view and your life view together in a coherent way, you'll start to experience your life as meaningful.

Designing your life idea #2: Recognize your gravity problems

There's a class of problems that people can get stuck on, and we call them "gravity problems". By that, we mean problems that are just circumstance, like gravity. You either can't change these circumstances, or you are not willing to do what it would take - these are problems you cannot change.

You probably have a friend you've been talking to for a while, and they're stuck. They don't like their boss, or they don't like their partner, or they don't like their job. However, nothing's happening with that problem. Dave would say, "You can't solve a problem that you're not willing to have." He means if you've got a problem and you're simply not willing to work on it, then it's just a circumstance in your life. It is a gravity problem. The only thing we can do with gravity problems is to accept them.

Once you've accepted that you have a gravity problem and you can't change it, you have to decide: What do you want to do? Is this a circumstance you can reframe and "work with"? Or do you need a "work around" - and do something completely different?

Be really careful about a gravity problem, because it's pernicious and can really get in your way. Accept it and then decide on a "work through" or "work-around" strategy to move forward.

Designing your life idea #3: Brainstorm your possible futures and make three Odyssey Plans

For this idea, let's go back to this idea of multiples. I like to do a thought experiment with my students. I say, "physicists have demonstrated that this multiverse-thing might be real; there are multiple parallel universes that are one right next to each other. Let's say you could live in all the multiverses simultaneously. Not only that, but you'd know about your life in each one of these instances. You could be a ballerina and a scientist and a CPA or whatever else you ever wanted to be. You could have all these lives in parallel, so how many lives would you want?"

I get answers from 3 to 10,000, but on average, most people think they have about 7 ½ really good lives that they could live.

Then I say, "Great! There are more lives than one in you. So let's go on an Odyssey and ideate those other lives. We're going to ideate your future - and you can't ideate just one - you have to ideate three."

There's some research from the Stanford School of Education that says if you start with three ideas and you brainstorm from there, you get a much richer and a wider range of ideas. The ideas are more generative and lead to better solutions than if you'd just started with one idea and brainstormed from there. I also think there's something magical about threes. When we help people imagine three completely different lives, we've found that it can be transformational.

To guide them, we give them this rubric.

Life #1 is the life and job that you're currently living - just make it better. Put in all the bucket list stuff you want to do. Maybe you want to go to the Galapagos or write a book or bicycle across the country. It's your life and your job as you're living it now, but your job goes great and your life includes all the extra interesting things that you've thought about doing.

For Life #2, let's pretend that your job just doesn't exist anymore. The AI and robots have come, and your job has disappeared. What are you going to do instead? What will you do if Life #1 goes away?

And for Life #3, this is your wild card plan. What would you do if you didn't have to worry about money? If you had enough money - not so much that you're fabulously wealthy but enough and to live on - what would you do? And what would you do if you knew no one would laugh at you? Maybe you'd go to study butterflies for a living or be a bartender in Belize. Whatever, it's your wildcard!

What happens when people do these Odyssey Plans is that they realize that these three parallel lives are all pretty interesting. And doable. They also realize there are things, life ideas, that got left behind in the business of life and bring them back into their plans. Sometimes, because of this exercise, folks decide to pivot to an entirely different life plan. Mostly they use this as a method to ideate all the possible wonderful ways that they could live.

Designing your life idea #4: Build some prototypes

You could immediately start executing one of your Odyssey lives, but in the design process, the thing you do after you come up with lots of new ideas is you start prototyping.

The science-fiction writer William Gibson has a famous quote: "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed." To discover this future, we prototype. When we say prototyping, we ask the question: "What would it be like if I tried this possible future in some small an easy to execute way?"

Prototypes help you expose your assumptions. It's easy. You can have what we call a prototype conversation. There's already someone bartending in Belize - she's been doing it for years. You could talk to her and have a conversation about her experience. And rest assured, somebody, somewhere is doing the thing you want to prototype, the thing you're you're interested in. They're living in your future. All you have to do is talk to them! When you have a conversation with them, they'll tell you their story. If you hear something that rings true for you, you can identify that as a potential way of moving forward.

Instead of a prototype conversation you could also try a prototype experience. Dave and I were working with a woman in her late 40s. She was in the middle of her career and a very successful tech executive, but she told us she wanted to move her career from money-making to meaning-making. One idea was to go back to school, get a degree in early childhood education, and start working with kids.

But she said, "I don't know; I'm 45. Going back to school - is that going to work? And I heard about millennials and how they don't like people my age. How do I prototype this?"

We said, "You just have to go try this, it's a prototype experience." We sent her to sit-in on an education class. She wasn't registered, but she just went in and sat down to listen. When she came back to us, she said, "It was fantastic. I walked into the lecture hall. I sat down; my body was on fire. The lecture was so interesting and then I met these millennials, and it turns out, they're pretty interesting people. They think I'm interesting too because I'm going back to school at 45. I've set up three prototype conversations with them!"

The lesson here: We are more than just our brains, and when you have a felt experience - meaning an experience in your body - that's a great way to find out if one of your ideas might work for you.

Designing your life idea #5: Choose well

When many people make decisions, they end up not being happy with them. So many of us have FOMO, the fear of missing out and we worry: "What if I didn't pick the right thing?" Or, "I'm worried about whether or not I made the best decision, and what if I want to change my mind?"

Narrowing down your choices can be quite simple if you understand the psychology of decision-making. After the rational pro-con lists, choosing is about that feeling in your stomach. Pay attention to your felt sensations, the feelings that you experience in your body. Without your emotions and your gut feelings, you can't make good decisions.

After following your gut, you need to let go of all the other options and move on. By the way, this has always been the hardest part for me. But there is evidence that "going all in" is the best way to choose. In a psychology experiment run by Harvard University professor Dan Gilbert, researchers showed five Monet prints to participants and asked them to rank them from best to least.

Afterwards, the researcher said to some participants, "I bought too many of prints two and three. If you want to take one home, you can keep it." With the other participants, the researcher said the same thing but added, "If you don't like the one you picked out, you can come back and exchange it for another one."

Then, they brought the people back a week later and asked them, "Which print do you like now?" they found the people who were allowed to change their minds didn't like the print they took, and they actually didn't like any of them anymore.

Meanwhile, the people in the other group - the ones who were told they could not change their mind - loved their print. They liked it the best and ranked it even higher than before. The lesson from this experiment is that when given the option, the reversible condition is not conducive to creating happiness. So, go ahead and make a good choice, and then make it irrevocable. You will be happier.

Once you get good at gathering, creating and choosing ideas, you also want to make sure you leave room for lucky or serendipitous ideas. Being lucky is about paying attention to the task at hand while keeping your peripheral vision open. It's in your peripheral vision that interesting opportunities show up that you were not expecting. Taking advantage of these opportunities is how we define "luck".

To recap, these are my five life design ideas: 1) Connect your dots to find meaning; 2) Be wary of gravity problems; 3) Do three Odyssey Plans, or three ideations for your life; 4) Prototype everything; 5) To choose well, make your choices emotional and irrevocable.

We know you can design your life because thousands of students, mid-career folks, and folks thinking about retirement have already done it. Two PhD studies have concluded that our class develops higher self-efficacy and lower dysfunctional beliefs in people. And that helps them feels what David Kelley calls "creative confidence". It's been fascinating to watch our students go through the class and walk out, saying, "You know what? I'm guess I am a pretty creative person."

The designing your life idea is pretty simple - get curious, talk to people, try stuff and tell your story. That's how you achieve a well-designed life, one that's generative, constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving and where there's always the possibility of surprise.
This post was adapted from a TEDxStanford Talk. Watch it here:

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How to use design thinking to create a happier life for yourself

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Feel like your life could use an overhaul -- or a few tweaks -- but don't know where to begin? Designers specialize in coming up with better products and better worlds, and you can use their mindset to help you re-envision and revise, says design professor Bill Burnett.

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An exercise Stanford professors developed to map out how your life will unfold removes the agony from major decisions

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One big thing that makes life decisions so...

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https://purposeadvisory.com.au/blog/f/what-are-the-best-resources-for-creating-a-life-plan

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About The Authors

Tristan Scifo

Harry Goldberg

Harry Goldberg

Hey, Tristan Scifo here - adviser, mentor & coach at Purpose Advisory, husband, dad and passionate equipper of people!

You can find out more about me, my experience and background on LinkedIn.

Harry Goldberg

Harry Goldberg

Harry Goldberg

Hi, Harry Goldberg here - adviser, mentor & coach at Purpose Advisory, loving husband and proud empowerer of all whom I engage with to grow and become greater versions of themselves.

You can find out more about me, my experience and background on LinkedIn.

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Tristan Scifo Harry Goldberg Harry Goldberg Hey, Tristan Scifo here - adviser, mentor & coach at Purpose Advisory, husband, dad and passionate equipper of people! You can find out more about me, my experience and background on LinkedIn .

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https://hbr.org/2017/01/are-you-solving-the-right-problems

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In Brief

The Issue

Many C-suite executives (85% of those surveyed) say their companies struggle with problem diagnosis, which comes with significant costs.

Why It Happens

Part of the reason is that we tend to overengineer the diagnostic process- but most problems are faced in daily meetings.

The Solution

Here's a new approach, in the form of seven practices for successfully reframing problems and finding creative solutions.

How good is your company at problem solving? Probably quite good, if your managers are like those at the companies I've studied. What they struggle with, it turns out, is not solving problems but figuring out what the problems are. In surveys of 106 C-suite executives who represented 91 private and public-sector companies in 17 countries, I found that a full 85% strongly agreed or agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% strongly agreed or agreed that this flaw carried significant costs. Fewer than one in 10 said they were unaffected by the issue. The pattern is clear: Spurred by a penchant for action, managers tend to switch quickly into solution mode without checking whether they really understand the problem.

It has been 40 years since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob Getzels empirically demonstrated the central role of problem framing in creativity. Thinkers from Albert Einstein to Peter Drucker have emphasized the importance of properly diagnosing your problems. So why do organizations still struggle to get it right?

Part of the reason is that we tend to overengineer the diagnostic process. Many existing frameworks-TRIZ, Six Sigma, Scrum, and others-are quite comprehensive. When properly applied, they can be tremendously powerful. But their very thoroughness also makes them too complex and time-consuming to fit into a regular workday. The setting in which people most need to be better at problem diagnosis is not the annual strategy seminar but the daily meeting-so we need tools that don't require the entire organization to undergo weeks-long training programs.

But even when people apply simpler problem-diagnosis frameworks, such as root cause analysis and the related 5 Whys questioning technique, they often find themselves digging deeper into the problem they've already defined rather than arriving at another diagnosis. That can be helpful, certainly. But creative solutions nearly always come from an alternative definition of your problem.

Through my research on corporate innovation, much of it conducted with my colleague Paddy Miller, I have spent close to 10 years working with and studying reframing-first in the narrow context of organizational change and then more broadly. In the following pages I offer a new approach to problem diagnosis that can be applied quickly and, I've found, frequently leads to creative solutions by unearthing radically different framings of familiar and persistent problems. To put reframing in context, I'll explain more precisely just what this approach is trying to achieve.

The Slow Elevator Problem

Imagine this: You are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining about the elevator. It's old and slow, and they have to wait a lot. Several tenants are threatening to break their leases if you don't fix the problem.

When asked, most people quickly identify some solutions: replace the lift, install a stronger motor, or perhaps upgrade the algorithm that runs the lift. These suggestions fall into what I call a solution space: a cluster of solutions that share assumptions about what the problem is-in this case, that the elevator is slow. This framing is illustrated below.

However, when the problem is presented to building managers, they suggest a much more elegant solution: Put up mirrors next to the elevator. This simple measure has proved wonderfully effective in reducing complaints, because people tend to lose track of time when given something utterly fascinating to look at-namely, themselves.

The mirror solution is particularly interesting because in fact it is not a solution to the stated problem: It doesn't make the elevator faster. Instead it proposes a different understanding of the problem.

Note that the initial framing of the problem is not necessarily wrong. Installing a new lift would probably work. The point of reframing is not to find the "real" problem but, rather, to see if there is a better one to solve. In fact, the very idea that a single root problem exists may be misleading; problems are typically multicausal and can be addressed in many ways. The elevator issue, for example, could be reframed as a peak demand problem-too many people need the lift at the same time-leading to a solution that focuses on spreading out the demand, such as by staggering people's lunch breaks.

Identifying a different aspect of the problem can sometimes deliver radical improvements-and even spark solutions to problems that have seemed intractable for decades. I recently saw this in action when studying an often overlooked problem in the pet industry: the number of dogs in shelters.

America's Dog-Adoption Problem

Dogs are very popular in America: Industry statistics suggest that more than 40% of U.S. households have one. But this fondness for dogs has a downside: According to estimates by the ASPCA, one of the largest animal-welfare groups in the United States, more than 3 million dogs enter a shelter each year and are put up for adoption.

Shelters and other animal-welfare organizations work hard to raise awareness of this issue. A typical ad or poster will show a neglected, sad-looking dog, carefully chosen to evoke compassion, along with a line such as "Save a life-adopt a dog" or perhaps a request to donate to the cause. Through this and other initiatives, this notoriously underfunded system manages to get about 1.4 million dogs adopted each year. But that leaves more than a million unadopted dogs-and doesn't account for the many cats and other pets in the same situation. There is just a limited amount of compassion to go around. So despite the impressive efforts of shelters and rescue groups, the shortage of pet adopters has persisted for decades.

Lori Weise, the founder of Downtown Dog Rescue in Los Angeles, has demonstrated that adoption is not the only way to frame the problem. Weise is one of the pioneers of an approach that is currently spreading within the industry-the shelter intervention program. Rather than seek to get more dogs adopted, Weise tries to keep them with their original families so that they never enter shelters in the first place. It turns out that about 30% of the dogs that enter a shelter are "owner surrenders," deliberately relinquished by their owners. In a volunteer-driven community united by a deep love of animals, those people have often been heavily criticized for heartlessly discarding their pets as if they were just another consumer good. To prevent dogs from ending up with such "bad" owners, many shelters, despite their chronic overpopulation, require potential adopters to undergo laborious background checks.

Weise has a different take. "Owner surrenders are not a people problem," she says. "By and large, they are a poverty problem. These families love their dogs as much as we do, but they are also exceptionally poor. We're talking about people who in some cases aren't entirely sure how they will feed their kids at the end of the month. So when a new landlord suddenly demands a deposit to house the dog, they simply have no way to get the money. In other cases, the dog needs a $10 rabies shot, but the family has no access to a vet, or may be afraid to approach any kind of authority. Handing over their pet to a shelter is often the last option they believe they have."

Weise started her program in April 2013, collaborating with a shelter in South Los Angeles. The idea is simple: Whenever a family comes in to hand over a pet, a staff member asks without judgment if the family would prefer to keep the pet. If the answer is yes, the staff member tries to help resolve the problem, drawing on his or her network and knowledge of the system.

Within the first year it was clear that the program was a remarkable success. In prior years Weise's organization had spent an average of $85 per pet it helped. The new program brought that cost down to about $60 while keeping shelter space free for other animals in need. And, Weise told me, that was just the immediate impact: "The wider effect on the community is the real point. The program helps families learn problem solving, lets them know their rights and responsibilities, and teaches the community that help is available. It also shifted the industry's perception of the pet owners: We found that when offered assistance, a full 75% of them actually wanted to keep their pets."

As of this writing, Weise's program has helped close to 5,000 pets and families and has gained the formal support of the ASPCA. Weise has released a book, First Home, Forever Home, that explains to other rescue groups how to run an intervention program. Thanks to her reframing of the problem, overcrowded shelters may someday be a thing of the past.

How might you find a similarly insightful reframing for your problem?

Seven Practices for Effective Reframing

In my experience, reframing is best taught as a quick, iterative process. You might think of it as a cognitive counterpoint to rapid prototyping.

The practices I outline here can be used in one of two ways, depending on how much control you have over the situation. One way is to methodically apply all seven to the problem. That can be done in about 30 minutes, and it has the benefit of familiarizing everyone with the method.

The other way is suitable when you don't control the situation and have to scale the method according to how much time is available. Perhaps a team member ambushes you in the hallway and you have only five minutes to help him or her rethink a problem. If so, simply select the one or two practices that seem most appropriate.

Five minutes may sound like too little time to even describe a problem, much less reframe it. But surprisingly, I have found that such short interventions are often sufficient to kick-start new thinking-and once in a while they can trigger an aha moment and radically shift your view of a problem. Proximity to your own problems can make it easy to get lost in the weeds, endlessly ruminating about why a colleague, a spouse, or your children won't listen. Sometimes all you need is someone to suggest, "Well, could the trouble be that you are bad at listening to them?"

Of course, not all problems are that simple. Often multiple rounds of reframing-interspersed with observation, conversation, and prototyping-are necessary. And in some cases reframing won't help at all. But you won't know which problems can benefit from being reframed until you try. Once you've mastered the five-minute version, you can apply reframing to pretty much any problem you face.

Here are the seven practices:

1. Establish legitimacy.

It's difficult to use reframing if you are the only person in the room who understands the method. Other people, driven by a desire to find solutions, may feel that your insistence on discussing the problem is counterproductive. If the group has a power imbalance, such as when you're facing clients or more-senior colleagues, they may well shut you down before you even get started. And even powerful executives may find it hard to use the method when people are accustomed to getting answers rather than questions from their leaders.

Your first job, therefore, is to establish the method's legitimacy within the group, creating the conversational space necessary to employ reframing. I suggest two ways to do this. The first is to share this article with the people you are meeting. Even if they don't read it, simply seeing it may persuade them to listen to you. The second is to relate the slow elevator problem, which is my go-to example when I have less than 30 seconds to explain the concept. I have found it to be a powerful way to quickly explain reframing-how it differs from merely diagnosing a problem and how it can potentially create dramatically better results.

2. Bring outsiders into the discussion.

This is the single most helpful reframing practice. I saw it in action eight years ago when the management team of a small European company was wrestling with a lack of innovation in its workforce. The managers had recently encountered a specific innovation training technique they all liked, so they started discussing how best to implement it within the organization.

Sensing that the group lacked an outside voice, the general manager asked his personal assistant, Charlotte, to take part in their discussion. "I've been working here for 12 years," Charlotte told the group, "and in that time I have seen three different management teams try to roll out some new innovation framework. None of them worked. I don't think people would react well to the introduction of another set of buzzwords."

Charlotte's observation prompted the managers to realize that they had fallen in love with a solution-introducing an innovation framework-before they fully understood the problem. They soon concluded that their initial diagnosis had been wrong: Many of their employees already knew how to innovate, but they didn't feel very engaged in the company, so they were unlikely to take initiative beyond what their job descriptions mandated. What the managers had first framed as a skill-set problem was better approached as a motivation problem.

They abandoned all talk of innovation workshops and instead focused on improving employee engagement by (among other things) giving people more autonomy, introducing flexible working hours, and switching to a more participatory decision-making style. The remedy worked. Within 18 months workplace satisfaction scores had doubled and employee turnover had fallen dramatically. And as people started bringing their creative abilities to bear at work, financial results improved markedly. Four years later the company won an award for being the country's best place to work.

As this story shows, getting an outsider's perspective can be instrumental in rethinking a problem quickly and properly. To do so most effectively:

Look for "boundary spanners." As research by Michael Tushman and many others has shown, the most useful input tends to come from people who understand but are not fully part of your world. Charlotte was close enough to the front lines of the company to know how the employees really felt, but she was also close enough to management to understand its priorities and speak its language, making her ideally suited for the task. In contrast, calling on an innovation expert might well have led the team's members further down the innovation path instead of inspiring them to rethink their problem.

Choose someone who will speak freely. By virtue of her long tenure and her closeness to the general manager, Charlotte felt free to challenge the management team while remaining committed to its objectives. This sense of psychological safety, as Harvard's Amy C. Edmondson calls it, has been proved to help groups perform better. You might consider turning to someone whose career advancement will not be determined by the group in question or who has a track record of (constructively) speaking truth to power.

Expect input, not solutions. Crucially, Charlotte did not try to provide the group with a solution; rather, her observation made the managers themselves rethink their problem. This pattern is typical. By definition, outsiders are not experts on the situation and thus will rarely be able to solve the problem. That's not their function. They are there to stimulate the problem owners to think differently. So when you bring them in, ask them specifically to challenge the group's thinking, and prime the problem owners to listen and look for input rather than answers.

3. Get people's definitions in writing.

It's not unusual for people to leave a meeting thinking they all agree on what the problem is after a loose oral description, only to discover weeks or months later that they had different views of the issue. Moreover, a successful reframing may well lurk in one of those views.

For instance, a management team may agree that the company's problem is a lack of innovation. But if you ask each member to describe what's wrong in a sentence or two, you will quickly see how framings differ. Some people will claim, "Our employees aren't motivated to innovate" or "They don't understand the urgency of the situation." Others will say, "People don't have the right skill set," "Our customers aren't willing to pay for innovation," or "We don't reward people for innovation." Pay close attention to the wording, because even seemingly inconsequential word choices can surface a new perspective on the problem.

I saw a memorable demonstration of this when I was working with a group of managers in the construction industry, exploring what they could do as individual leaders to deliver better results. As we tried to identify the barriers each one faced, I asked them to write their problems on flip charts, after which we jointly analyzed the statements. The very first comment from the group had the greatest impact: "Almost none of the definitions include the word 'I.'" With one exception, the problems were consistently worded in a way that diffused individual responsibility, such as "My team doesn't...," "The market doesn't...," and, in a few cases, "We don't..." That one observation shifted the tenor of the meeting, pushing the participants to take more ownership of the challenges they faced.

These individual definitions of the problem should ideally be gathered in advance of a discussion. If possible, ask people to send you a few lines in a confidential e-mail, and insist that they write in sentence form-bullet points are simply too condensed. Then copy the definitions you've collected on a flip chart so that everyone can see them and react to them in the meeting. Don't attribute them, because you want to ensure that people's judgment of a definition isn't affected by the definer's identity or status.

Receiving these multiple definitions will sensitize you to the perspectives of other stakeholders. We all appreciate in theory that others may experience a problem differently (or not see it at all). But as demonstrated in a recent study by Johannes Hattula, of Imperial College London, if managers try to imagine a customer's perspective themselves, they typically get it wrong. To understand what other stakeholders think, you need to hear it from them.

4. Ask what's missing.

When faced with the description of a problem, people tend to delve into the details of what has been stated, paying less attention to what the description might be leaving out. To rectify this, make sure to ask explicitly what has not been captured or mentioned.

Recently I worked with a team of senior executives in Brazil who had been asked to provide their CEO with ideas for improving the market's perception of the company's stock price. The team had expertly analyzed the components affecting a stock's value-the P/E ratio forecast, the debt ratio, earnings per share, and so on. Of course, none of this was news to the CEO, nor were these factors particularly easy to affect, leading to mild despondency on the team.

But when I prompted the executives to zoom out and consider what was missing from their definition of the problem, something new came up. It turned out that when external financial analysts asked to speak with executives from the company, the task of responding was typically delegated to slightly more junior leaders, none of whom had received training in how to talk to analysts. As soon as this point was raised, the group saw that it had found a potential recommendation for the CEO. (The observation came not from the team's finance expert but from a boundary-spanning HR executive.)

5. Consider multiple categories.

As Lori Weise's story demonstrates, powerful change can come from transforming people's perception of a problem. One way to trigger this kind of paradigm shift is to invite people to identify specifically what category of problem they think the group is facing. Is it an incentive problem? An expectations problem? An attitude problem? Then try to suggest other categories.

A manager I know named Jeremiah Zinn did this when he led the product development team of the popular children's entertainment channel Nickelodeon. The team was launching a promising new app, and lots of kids downloaded it. But actually activating the app was somewhat complicated, because it required logging in to the household's cable TV service. At that point in the sign-up process, almost every kid dropped out.

Seeing the problem as one of usability, the team put its expertise to work and ran hundreds of A/B tests on various sign-up flows, seeking to make the process less complex. Nothing helped.

The shift came when Zinn realized that the team members had been thinking of the problem too narrowly. They had focused on the kids' actions, carefully tracking every click and swipe-but they had not explored how the kids felt during the sign-up process. That turned out to be critical. As the team started looking for emotional reactions, it discovered that the request for the cable password made the kids fear getting in trouble: To a 10-year-old kid, a password request signals forbidden territory. Equipped with that insight, Zinn's team simply added a short video explaining that it was OK to ask parents for the password-and saw a rapid 10-fold increase in the sign-up rate for the app.

By explicitly highlighting how the group thinks about a problem-what is sometimes called metacognition, or thinking about thinking-you can often help people reframe it, even if you don't have other frames to suggest. And it's a useful way of sorting through written definitions if you managed to gather them in advance.

Zinn's story also exposes a typical pitfall in problem solving, first expressed by Abraham Kaplan in his famous law of the instrument: "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." At Nickelodeon, because the team members were usability experts, they defaulted to thinking the problem was one of usability.

6. Analyze positive exceptions.

To find additional problem framings, look to instances when the problem did not occur, asking, "What was different about that situation?" Exploring such positive exceptions, sometimes called bright spots, can often uncover hidden factors whose influence the group may not have considered.

A lawyer I spoke to, for instance, told me that the partners at his firm would occasionally meet to discuss initiatives that might grow their business in the longer term. But to his frustration, the instant one of those meetings ended, he and the other partners went back to focusing on landing the next short-term project. When prompted to think of positive exceptions, he remembered one longer-term initiative that had in fact gone forward.

What was different about that one? I asked. It was that the meeting, unusually, had included not just partners but also an associate who was considered a rising star-and it was she who had pursued the idea. That immediately suggested that talented associates be included in future meetings. The associates felt privileged and energized by being invited to the strategic discussions, and unlike the partners, they had a clear short-term incentive to move on long-term projects-namely, to impress the partners and gain an edge in the competition against their peers.

Looking at positive exceptions can also make the discussion less threatening. Especially in a large group or other public setting, dissecting a string of failures can quickly become confrontational and make people overly defensive. If, instead, you ask the group's members to analyze a positive outcome, it becomes easier for them to examine their own behavior.

7. Question the objective.

In the negotiation classic Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, and Bruce Patton share the early management thinker Mary Parker Follett's story about two people fighting over whether to keep a window open or closed. The underlying goals of the two turn out to differ: One person wants fresh air, while the other wants to avoid a draft. Only when these hidden objectives are brought to light through the questions of a third person is the problem resolved-by opening a window in the next room.

That story highlights another way to reframe a problem-by paying explicit attention to the objectives of the parties involved, first clarifying and then challenging them. Weise's shelter intervention program, for instance, hinged on a shift in the objective, from increasing adoption to keeping more pets with their original owners. The story of Charlotte, too, included a shift in the stated goals of the management team, from teaching innovation skills to boosting employee engagement.

As described in Fred Kaplan's book The Insurgents, a famous contemporary example is the change in U.S. military doctrine pioneered by General David Petraeus, among others. In traditional warfare, the aim of a battle is to defeat the enemy forces. But Petraeus and his allies argued that when dealing with insurgencies, the army had to pursue a different, broader objective to prevent new enemies from cropping up-namely, get the populace on its side, thereby removing the source of recruits and other forms of local support the insurgency needed to operate in the area. That approach was eventually adopted by the military-because a small group of rogue thinkers took it upon themselves to question the predefined and long-standing objectives of their organization.

CONCLUSION

Powerful as reframing can be, it takes time and practice to get good at it. One senior executive from the defense industry told me, "I was shocked by how difficult it is to reframe problems, but also how effective it is." As you start to work more with the method, urge your team to trust the process, and be prepared for it to feel messy and confusing at times.

In leading more and more reframing discussions, you may also be tempted to create a diagnostic checklist. I strongly caution you against that-or at least against making the checklist evident to the group you're engaging with. A checklist for problem diagnosis tends to discourage actual thinking, which of course defeats the very purpose of engaging in reframing. As Neil Gaiman reminds us in The Sandman, tools can be the subtlest of traps.

Finally, combine reframing with real-world testing. The method is ultimately limited by the knowledge and perspectives of the people in the room-and as Steve Blank, of Stanford, and others have repeatedly shown, it is fatal to think you can figure it all out within the comfy confines of your own office. The next time you face a problem, start by reframing it-but don't wait too long before getting out of the building to observe your customers and prototype your ideas. It is neither thinking nor testing alone, but a marriage of the two, that holds the key to radically better results.

The first appearance in print of the elevator problem, to the best of the author's knowledge, was in Russell L. Ackoff, "Systems, Organizations, and Interdisciplinary Research," General Systems, vol. V (1960).

A version of this article appeared in the January-February 2017 issue (pp.76-83) of Harvard Business Review.

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In surveys of 106 C-suite executives representing 91 private- and public-sector companies from 17 countries, the author found that a full 85% agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% agreed that this flaw carried significant costs. Fewer than one in 10 said they were unaffected by the issue.

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Goal-setting is a worthwhile activity at any stage of life, including while you're a student. Learning how to set and achieve goals is a life skill that will serve you well no matter your future plans.

How do you set meaningful goals that you can actually achieve? Many accomplished students and professionals rely on the SMART goal-setting method. This approach defines your purpose and sets clear objectives to establish success.

SMART is an acronym that stands for

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Time-Bound

The SMART Goal Setting Method

According to the Corporate Finance Institute, "SMART goals set you up for success by making goals specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. The SMART method helps push you further, gives you a sense of direction, and helps you organize and reach your goals."

Students can use the SMART method to reach any academic or personal goal by following a few simple steps.

SPECIFIC: DEFINE YOUR GOAL

To reach your goal, it needs to be specific and well-defined. You are much more likely to accomplish your objective if it is clear-cut rather than vague. For example, instead of setting a goal to get better grades this year, you should define which grades you'd like to achieve in which subjects.

Be as detailed as possible. Here are some questions you'll want to answer when defining your goal:

What do I want to accomplish?

What is the purpose of achieving this goal?

Why is this goal important?

What do I need to do to meet the objective?

Who is involved?

Where is it located?

When do I want to accomplish this goal?

Which requirements and constraints are involved?

Are there any obstacles I have to overcome?

MEASURABLE: HOW WILL YOU MEASURE SUCCESS?

Setting a goal that you can measure is crucial because it allows you to track your progress and stay motivated. Having quantifiable data or criteria makes the goal measurable.

In the example above, if your goal is to get better grades, think specifically about what "better grades" means to you. For example, does it mean getting straight A's or bringing up your GPA to a particular level?

You should establish concrete criteria for measuring progress. Ask yourself these questions:

How much?

How many?

How will I know when it is accomplished?

ATTAINABLE: CAN YOU ACCOMPLISH THIS GOAL?

When goal-setting, you should push yourself outside your comfort zone and make goals that will challenge you. But, it's equally important to set goals that are realistic and attainable. Put simply, you must be willing to work to attain your goals, but you must also be able to achieve your goals.

As an example, maybe your goal is to make the varsity soccer team. But you're a freshman, and the coach never allows first-year students to join the varsity team. In that case, it might be a more reasonable goal to shoot for the junior varsity team. This will set you up to achieve your ultimate goal of making the varsity squad in your sophomore, junior, or senior year when you've gained more experience.

RELEVANT: IS YOUR GOAL CONSTRUCTIVE?

A relevant goal is results-focused. It's not just an activity or an exercise. Your goal should help you advance in some way, either academically or personally.

A results-focused approach will help you achieve your goal while ensuring it's a productive pursuit.

TIME-BOUND: WHEN WILL YOU ACCOMPLISH YOUR GOAL?

A goal should always have a defined deadline. Without a timeframe, there is no sense of urgency, and you're unlikely to attain it. As a high school student, you live in the framework of school semesters and years, so these can be suitable units of measurements to judge your progress.

Writing SMART Goals

Perhaps the most critical step in the goal-setting process is writing down your goals. Writing goals down makes them concrete, and research suggests you're much more likely to reach written goals.

When writing your SMART goals, be as descriptive as possible. Forbes explains, "Vividly describing your goals in written form is strongly associated with goal success, and people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish their goals than people who don't."

Here are some tips for writing down your goals:

Use verb-noun structure. Each action item should begin with a verb. (ie. Increase GPA from 3.0 to 3.5 during junior year; Volunteer at the animal shelter 5 hours a month).

Break the big picture into smaller, doable increments with action plans for each step.

Review action plans regularly.

Identify obstacles to success.

Prioritize your goals based on importance to you, both now and in the future.

SMART Goals for Students

Establishing SMART goals allows you to clarify your ideas, focus your efforts, use your time and resources wisely, and increase your chances of achieving your future career and life goals. The process might seem daunting at first, but once you get started, the road map you create with your goals will help lead you down the path to success.

If you'd like more help defining your goals, read this article with SMART goal examples for students.

SOURCES

Barile, Nancy. "10 Tips for Setting Successful Goals With Students." Education Week, 20 January 2015, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-10-tips-for-setting-successful-goals-with-students/2015/01. Accessed August 2021.

Murphy, Mark. "Neuroscience Explains Why You Need To Write Down Your Goals If You Actually Want To Achieve Them." Forbes, 18 April 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2018/04/15/neuroscience-explains-why-you-need-to-write-down-your-goals-if-you-actually-want-to-achieve-them/?sh=798b6a957905. Accessed August 2021.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Career Planning for High Schoolers." BLS.gov, January 2015, https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2015/article/career-planning-for-high-schoolers.htm. Accessed August 2021.

The ASVAB Career Exploration Program (CEP) is a FREE career planning resource available to high schools nationwide. This comprehensive program includes one of the most widely used multiple-aptitude test batteries in the world and an interest inventory complemented by a thorough occupational database all designed to give students an in-depth look at the world of work. To learn more about the program components or how to bring the CEP to your school, click here.

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SMART Goal Setting for Students | ASVAB Career Exploration Program

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Goal-setting is a worthwhile activity at any stage of life, including while you're a student. Learning how to set and achieve goals is a life skill that will serve you well no matter your future plans. How do you set meaningful goals that you can actually achieve?