How thinking about the speed of a career can you help create a framework for professional development across any organisation.
Pace layers: that old cliché. If you’ve been to a design conference any time in the last ten years you will have seen a version of this slide:
The diagram illustrates Stewart Brand’s concept of pace layers. It shows the order of a healthy civilisation arranged layer by layer, working down from the fast and attention-getting to the slow and powerful.
You can apply the same concept to the inner workings of an organisation. You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Pace layers show why that might be the case — culture is just above nature in its permanence, and thus moves incredibly slowly, adding friction to anything that attempts to change it.
You can also think of professional development in terms of pace layers. Ambitious staff will want to know where they are, where they can get to, and how to get there. They’ll need a framework which provides a clear understanding of what’s necessary to advance along a particular track. For such a framework to be successful, it must focus on the things which change at the same speed as a career, and consider them in the context of the needs of an organisation.
At Clearleft we identified five levels of pace in the changing requirements of a profession.
From slow to fast we have:
Of these layers it is the Values, Disciplines and Skills which move at the speed of a career. Applied to professional development it is therefore the combination of skills, and competency required of them, which should form a framework to help people judge where they are in their career, and where they should or could get to.
To learn more about how develop and use such a career framework for your organisation, you can sign up for my professional development workshop at Leading Design either in person in New York on Friday 18th March, or online on Thursday 31st March 2022.