Brian Hutchison of Walden University, USA (AKA Global Career Guy) focuses on how work and career development impact mental health, well-being, school engagement, and social justice. In this post he reflects on the need for a new approach to careers work informed by humankind design.  

I really like Life Design. In fact, I have visited the d.school at Stanford University and met with the authors of the fabulous book on the subject. I do think that design theory’s problematization of career shackles it to the same issue that other career theories have (for more information, see my academic article on Advocating-Workers-Within-Environment); it does not facilitate career justice.

There is much to say on the subject of career work as justice work but I want to use this blog to identity some of the core features of humankind design that must be considered.

Humankind design

Human beings are designed to seek safety, enough, others, and positive feelings. Homo sapiens are tribal creatures and it is in this type of social unit that these needs were developed. Consider the following:

Safety: Our brains are wired first and foremost for safety. The flight/fight/freeze response was developed in an environment where our cognitive capacities were the primary tool for survival since we were not fast or as fierce as our predators at the time.

In the modern world, these parts of our brains are still ‘triggered’ but by stimuli that are much less threatening than those from that time. Our perceptions of safety in modern life matter, and this includes perceived safety at work.

Social justice career work then must recognize the elements of this design and act accordingly by asking questions such as: Do you feel safe at work? Have you ever felt unsafe at work? How do your experiences of safety matter to your career development today? This particularly applies to people from historically marginalized groups.

Enough: Research from anthropology suggests that hunter and gatherer tribes rarely collected enough food for more than 3 days at any time. Our brains today were designed for an assumption of abundance, or at least enough, as the default mode. The ideas of capitalism promote the opposite of an abundance mindset, instead the ideology’s core value is deficit.

In the modern world, it can feel disorienting or disheartening to navigate employment expectations that are based on a deficit mindset. On-boarding for full-time employment often focuses on retirement planning. I can log in right now and see exactly how much my monthly retirement will be in 20 years based if the markets grow predictably. Gig work and entrepreneurism are oriented to hustle culture where one delivery job is not enough or a £5000 month must turn into £10,000 and that into £15,000.

In justice career work, we need to develop ways of asking about what constitutes a good life? for clients that create answers free of the chains of deficit orientation.  We need to help them analyze systems of work and determine what is enough for them. I would also say we need to frame these questions around the question, “What is too much?” including too much stress, too much time away from family, and too much time.

Others: Our brains are still designed for us to be tribal. We are interdependent beings. We learn socially. We need to give care to the young, the elderly, and the infirmed. This is how we are designed.

Anthropologists estimate that approximately 120 people is the tipping point where our brains lose the ability to operate as they are designed socially. I work as a mental health therapist and see the effect of our modern, non-tribal existence. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness are all around us. We are conditioned, particularly on social media, to not acknowledge how disorienting modern life feels.

I ask all of my career clients during intake, ‘What are the important day-to-day relationships in your life?’ I believe that every career decision must be tested with the lens of our social relationships, especially for workers whose identities have been historically marginalized. Social relationships are as important to survive as they are to thrive.

Positive feelings: We do want to feel good. Back to anthropology; hunter and gatherer tribes typically worked less than 20 hours per week. Language, art, music, dance, engineering, and even love likely arose from our leisure time as we looked to find ways to feel good.

The modern world, with its super sensitivity to time (thank you Henry Ford!) as a commodity messes with our brains! I am amazed by clients who report being exhausted and having no time. Often, the next sentences might turn to addictive type behaviors with social media, television, video games, alcohol, or drugs. It seems we have divorced our ideas about time from our autonomy as experience seeking creatures.

Here is my final take. Social justice is most often construed as a structural project. We strive to create the social conditions in which people can have fair access to resources, compensation, power, and opportunity. This is important.

Yet… there are workers within workplace environments. Humankind is designed to meet specific needs in ways that supersede our modern ideas about work and life. Connecting to these needs is a doorway to developing critical awareness and consciousness about work so that both career service providers and clients can take action to create a more just world.

To learn more about these ideas, check out my on-line courses:

Uncenter Work to Recenter Life & Career Work is Justice Work @ https://careerplanningacademy.com/all-courses/