Crowdsourcing: Career Guidance for the Daily Improviser

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert quotes the lyrics of the following Doris Day song (you know it … hum along with me):

When I was just a child in school
I asked my teacher, what should I try
Should I paint pictures, should I sing songs
This was her wise reply
Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera sera

As Gilbert points out, this advice is patently unwise - that leaving a choice of career up to chance makes no sense, regardless of the unpredictability of the future.

The real problem here, though, is the feeling that we have to make such a choice in the first place. Couldn't a person apply the And Stance (described in an earlier post) and ask: Can't I be both a painter and a singer?

In the heyday of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his disciples, such an And Stance approach would have been regarded as impractical and pie-in-the-sky. The specialization of functions and professions has forced generations of young people to choose the "one best way" to attain career success, putting aside all childish things. The wise counselor of that era is personified by Mr. Maguire in the 1968 movie The Graduate, whose sage career advice to the confused Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) consists of just one word: "Plastics."

But it doesn’t have to be that way any longer. As I've described, one of the hallmarks of Daily Improvisation is the wearing of multiple hats by one head – Author-Director-Performer, Thinker-Planner-Doer. In his book Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe describes another emerging example of this multi-hatting: An Internet-enabled world in which an individual doesn’t need to follow just one vocational path (hopefully the best one) but can use the And Stance to pursue multiple directions at once.

Howe cites the example of Giorgia Sgargetta, a quality control manager for an Italian pesticides firm who spends her evenings in her kitchen tackling chemical research problems posted on the web by the Internet company InnoCentive. InnoCentive allows Sgargetta – who has a doctorate in agrichemistry but can’t find employment in her field - to do her "day job" as well as pursue her passion for research on a problem-by-problem basis. Through the phenomenon of crowdsourcing, Sgargetta can wear two hats – QC Manager and Research Chemist – at the same time.

So much for the not-so-wise teacher of Que Sera Sera or the “one best way” advice of Mr. Maguire. The Daily Improviser can now look for career guidance from another wise counselor, Yogi Berra, who said:

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”