Career/New Business Planning Process

passion to profit exercise (life change, self-employment, business start-up and development, outplacement and redundancy support, career change, self-determination and independence)

See the Career/New Business Planner page for the full process and detailed template.

This is a creative planning process and template for individuals and for groups facing or desiring career change, especially a move into self-employment or starting up their own new business.

It can be helpful for people facing decisions about new work or business direction, especially to encourage thinking outside of habits and conditioning, at any stage of a person's working life.

This process/template - and the exercises and discussion and thinking enabled by them
- seek to:

Suggest a more satisfying idea of what work is and can be - for employment, self-employment, business start-up, career change, part-time work - any sort of work.
Reduce or eliminate dependence upon an employer for work and financial security. Offer a path - in achievable stages - away from unsatisfying employment, especially if required due to redundancy or an unacceptable work situation (stress, travel, life-balance, or the simple need to be happier, etc). Encourage and enable self-determination, self-reliance, and independence.

It's a simple formula. The numbers are linked to the full template sections on the Career/New Business Planner page.
1 2 3 4 5 6 your passion or passions + your strengths and your preferred working style + some research + shape it all into something that people want + time to grow and develop = your new career or business, your independence and security

In group situations the process and template can be used in many different ways.

For example, subject to time available, encourage people to think through the stages of the process:

consider the meaning of the model for themselves think about their passions (1) consider their strengths
(2) imagine the possibilities of combining these things into a job or service or business consider how to check their thinking (3 - research) consider how these things could be planned into a real job or business activity (4)

The Career/New Business Planner page contains guidance notes within a template tool.

quick paper tower icebreaker (warm-up, creative thinking, and/or teamwork, skills and process analysis)

A quick table-top exercise for individuals or teams, and a quick version of the bigger newspaper tower activity.

Issue a single sheet of paper (A4 or international equivalent) to each group member (or one sheet per team if the exercise is to be played as a team game).

Instruction:

Using the sheet of paper only - no other materials - construct the tallest free-standing structure - in 5 minutes.

Points to review:

Planning and timing - who planned and who ran out of time?
Pressure - what were the effects on people and performance from the pressure of time? Innovation - what innovative ideas were devised? Risk - what observations could be made about high-risk and low-risk methods/approaches? Learning - would each team/individual be able to improve their result at a second attempt? (Almost certainly.) Discuss how and why, and the value of experience. Best practice - if the whole group were to be given the task to build a single tower what ideas would be combined, and what does this tell us about the power of collective ideas? Skills - what skills were found to be crucial for best performance of the task, and could you have guessed what these vital skills would be before the exercise, or did they only become apparent after actually attempting the task? And what does this tell us about the identification of skills (to be developed/taught) for a given task? (If played as a team game) what were the opportunities and challenges in enabling the team to perform the task effectively? Consider and suggest a process which would enable an effective team approach to the task: What elements and principles from this are transferable to normal operations and
team-working? Process improvement - what single tool or additional material (no larger than the width of the paper sheet) would achieve the greatest improvement to the result?