A frame for life?
Exploit vs Explore and the psychology of turning the inevitable transitions in life into opportunities for transformation.
Whether we like it or not, life is full of change, in fact to say life is change would probably be more accurate.
We seem to have a natural inclination to think things are stable, the idea of ‘Mid Life’ crisis being a perfect example. The notion that outside that wobble in the middle, especially for men, we are quite stable and life is logical.
Robert Feller in his fascinating book ‘Life is in the transitions’ found that firstly the mid life crisis wasn’t a thing at all, just a social construct from a bygone age. He also found that for most of us, most of the time we are in a state of profound change, what he calls transitions. Some are big, what he calls ‘Life Quakes’, others are more like a ripple, but they are as common as they are significant.
They can be chosen: leaving a job, choosing to have a child, moving to a different city, country or continent, choosing to go back to school in later life. They can be forced upon us: a serious medical issue, a partner leaving, being made redundant.
According to his research of 600+ US citizens from all walks of life and life stages, and the analysis done by the Jim Collins team (so the insights are robust), most of us have 4-5 such transitions in our lives and they can last between 2-5 years, if not longer. He estimates that on average we go through one every 12-18 months, that’s a big chunk of our lives.
Whilst transitions are incredibly common, they are often also very difficult, because they can be what Social Anthropologist’s call ‘Liminal Moments’. A time in one’s life when the very fabric of your existence gets questioned: the idea of ‘this is who I am, this is what I do’ is no longer clear. The best way I have found to explain these moments is like stepping from one room into another and having no real idea what’s on the other side. Exciting up to a point but this can also be deeply disorientating.
It’s a time of great potential, it can be the making of us, but it is also a time of great challenge, for two reasons:
Humans, really, really don’t like change.
Don’t get me wrong, we like a bit of change, a bit of surprise (it is known to the the emotion most likely to drive action), but we don’t like change most of the time, because change equates to uncertainty and ambiguity, and humans really don’t like uncertainty and ambiguity.
To give you an idea of quite how much, in a now landmark 2016 study*, researchers presented people with a number of different stressful situations, including getting a significant electric shock, and then measured how stressed this made them (physiologically: pupil dilation, heart rare, skin conductivity and self reported stress). What they found was remarkable: people were significantly more stressed by a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than they were by a 100% chance.
Think about that for a second, people would rather know they were going to get a nasty electric shock, than they would have a 50/50 chance of them getting one. It’s an extraordinary finding.
There’s no agreed explanation of why this should be the case, but for me the most credible explanation is that homo sapiens have a deep rooted need for what is called ‘Cognitive Closure’, the compelling need to feel control over a situation, the desire to feel like things are known. My hunch is that not so long ago, wondering off into an unknown situation was exciting, necessary at some level, but also risky. You want a bit of change but not too much thank you very much.
We also don’t think we can change.
And this brings us to the second problem: we find it difficult to imagine we can change. Nowhere is this more evident than Dan Gilbert’s 2013* study that found that people when looking back on their life, thought it only natural that they had changed, but when looking forward they saw themselves as much more fixed and stable - they didn’t believe they were capable of changing that much, not really.
So, this leaves us with an interesting problem.
On the one side, in any given transition, big or small, we need ‘Cognitive Closure’, for some it maybe easy to find those answers, but for many these are moments that are, by there very nature, times when the answer is not clear, places where what ‘success’ means is not defined. It is simply not obvious what you should be closing around.
For that you require the cognitive opposite: ‘Cognitive Distance’, the ability to step in and outside ourselves to interrogate both what we want to do and who we want to become (which is also, as it happens, the essence of any successful behavior change). Both of these require the ability to reflect in a profound, structured way, what I call ‘Guided Spontaneity’, we’ll dig into this later in the ‘How’ section.
If that is the why, it begs the question, what is the what? Is there a thinking system that allows us to understand and navigate these transitions and how we might use them to transform ourselves for the better?
A frame for life: Exploit & Explore
One of my many hats is as a Strategy & Innovation Tutor at Saïd Business School, Oxford, and you can’t work in that area without facing the most intriguing and challenging paradox at the heart of long term organisational success: Exploit vs Explore. For an organisation to be successful in the long term it must balance two things: Exploiting what they are currently good at, whilst also exploring what they need to be good at in the future, which is inevitably something quite different. Put another way, how do you prioritise exploiting what makes you money today, whilst also prioritising exploration of what will make you money tomorrow? This Explore-Exploit balancing act is both very common and very difficult to do.
Why?
On one side you have something that requires efficiency, optimisation and smaller, more incremental innovations in markets that are known, that are defined, because they are shaped by the ‘dominant design’ of the category, think: four wheels, a drive train and the combustion engine for cars (there were many other competing designs before this became the dominant one, and because of the the electric vehicle revolution, we are witnessing a fierce competition to create a new one). Exploit has a way of being that is about consistency, predictability and the routine.
With Explore, you have something that requires a very different set of skills, a very different mindset and a view of what success looks like. It’s about experimentation and radical innovation, in markets that are yet to be defined, where there is a great deal of ambiguity. Explore has a way of being defined by variance, playfulness and experimentation.
These are not easy bedfellows, in fact they are often the antithesis of each other, left alone they will often try and kill one another.
Put another way, it’s like trying to surf two waves at once, with two very different kinds of boards (one traditional, one a hydrofoil), in two very different swells and also knowing at some point you’ll probably have to jump off one and on to another, but you aren’t sure when.
Tricky.
Turning transitions into transformations.
Whilst this is a particularly difficult balancing act for organisations, it does provide an intriguing way to think about transitions, especially so in terms of careers.
For an individual you have ‘Exploit’: what they have been doing up and who they have been up until now. This will almost always include their source of their value and income, it will be tied to their expertise and their experience. There are a few exceptions, those who are lucky enough to be independently wealthy, but those are rare.
And then you have their ‘Explore’: which are areas that have potential, these could be side hustles, they could be hobbies, they could be long dreamed of goals and aspirations that people just somehow never got to.
For most people I work with (including me and how I have evolved), this frame is helpful on a very basic level because it does three things:
Forces a delineation of what exploit is for them, which is usually quite easy, and then also unpack what things could be in the explore, everyone will have some hunches, some ideas with enough digging.
Provides a practical filter about time and money: it asks, how can I generate income in Exploit, whilst also allowing myself the time and space to explore? It gives financial permission for that person to experiment with another way.
Looks to try and build what I call ‘Capability bridges’ to potential explore options.
In interrogating the 'Capability bridges’ you interrogate areas of interest and look for ways that their unique set of skills, experiences and network can add value in another domain. If someone has gone back to school and done a post graduate course, an MBA for example, this will provide an obvious capability bridge to certain things that weren’t possible before.
This includes digging for meta’s. For skills that may look category, domain specific but are in fact remarkably relevant in other areas. This is another reason to use a system of deep reflection because it can uncover not just insights about your assumptions and ambitions, but also what you are capable of. Without a deeper look, it can be difficult to see.
To begin building these bridges is to start running experiments, to test the waters. It could be a discussion with a friend of a friend, it could be volunteering, it could be part time retraining in a certain field. One filter I find helpful here is another meta: to ask: if I do this, will it help me in my exploit as well? It often does in both a functional way, but also in a more relative way…
There are many cases where after an experiment and more reflection, a persons current ‘exploit’ becomes more interesting. This can range from ‘Perhaps it isn’t so bad after all’, ‘I am even more committed to this than I was, let's do this!’, to ‘There’s something between my current exploit and an explore area that I can now see is easier to grasp’.
This is also a useful frame beyond the career. It can help ask profound questions of who and what you are and want. Where the exploit becomes who you are now, or, were before something happened to instigate a transition; and where the explore becomes who and what you could be in the future.
Whether it’s in a career or broader life transition, the aim is about finding a sweet spot that allows both your exploit - explore to first co-exist and then move, if that’s what feels right and doable, from one to the other.
But as mentioned before, each exploit vs explore journey is only as good as the how to do it…here is the system I first created for the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building Fellowship Programme…