WIN Mind Salon: Embracing the Complexity of a Multifaceted Career
As innovators, our superpower is to embrace and navigate complexity––paving the way for a new future. However, when we look at our own careers, this complexity and ambiguity can feel daunting. Today, being a multifaceted, intersectional professional who can seamlessly weave in and out of a variety of roles is essential, but often difficult when it comes to telling your own story. How might we embrace our hybrid backgrounds and winding paths? How might we tell our stories from a position of wholeness and agency? On August 5th, social designer Melanie Kahl led us through an exciting mind salon to answer these questions.
Melanie Kahl is a multi-faceted innovation practitioner. She believes in the power of community-driven design to shape meaningful organizations, communities, and services. As seasoned facilitator, experience designer, and strategy director in social innovation–– she values crafting design processes that build power, deepen relationships, and spark flourishing futures. Melanie has spent the last thirteen years at the intersection of social innovation and design. She started out studying social policy, business organizations, and leadership at Northwestern and thought she would work in the public sector. She then leaped into the design world where she worked with architects to design and build new school environments and bring design-thinking tools to cross-disciplinary education. She then made another leap, revisiting her roots in social policy and broader social sector innovation, helping to start building a design studio. This led to an opportunity at Facebook where Melanie was tasked with building a $5 million community innovator fund, investing in and learning alongside community leaders who build social change online and off. She also applied and turned down grad school several times, moved to a new city, worked in numerous countries - ‘it sounds so exhausting’, she says.
“When you’re in alignment, it feels magical. And when you’re out of alignment, it feels muddled”
With the rise of numerous creator platforms, we increasingly have people who are “multi-hyphenates” so they are able to produce and wear different hats. Not only does this help them step into many roles that they are able to play and skills that they are able to wield, but it can also be profitable. Melanie claims that ‘one of the reasons why innovation practitioners are able to make these leap frogs is because they dabbled a bit and were naturally curious and intersectional, whether it's Kepler and astronomy, Darwin and evolution, or Michaelango and his beautiful art and technology breakthroughs.’ (Range, David Epstein) Overall, this sounds great but at the same time, being this multi-hyphenate person doesn’t always feel comfortable. It’s one of those mixed bags where “when you’re in alignment, it feels magical. And when you’re out of alignment, it feels muddled.” The problem is that we beat ourselves up about this rather than finding the power in it and centering it.
Melanie has always worked at the intersection of human-centered design, social impact, and organizational strategy; basically helping people come together in new worlds and create good in the world. Former roles she’s played include community-driven innovation leader, facilitator & experience designer, organization & partnership alchemist. She decided that she wanted to become a designer because she realized that she had the ability to solve problems differently thanks to her range of experiences. Checking one box—policy-maker, lawyer, or business leader didn’t fit. She also wanted to change the process to be as creative and participatory and human as problems themselves warranted. So, as Melanie started to find new lenses that clicked together, she started to gain confidence.
“Fitting into a box has always felt uncomfortable. I always felt ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’. But it’s at those intersections where our magic lies.”
Melanie introduces us to three strategies that can help uncover and articulate the multitudes one contains – in a way that is legible to the world. Let’s explore them:
Strategy #1: Embrace & articulate your multi-hyphenate self: Fitting into one box can be stifling there’s power in the multiplicity of your skills and perspective. Instead of trying to find the one right pair of glasses, we actually need to start naming ways in which the glasses we have are the lenses of our different identities. Some are chosen (professional discipline, passions/hobbies, interests), some are given (ethnicity, birthplace, physical qualities, certain family roles), and some fall somewhere in between.
Strategy #2: Uncover insights are your intersections. You are multidimensional. How could a single noun describe your diverse way of being and doing in the world? You must go to the edges, where your perspectives dance with one another. Distinct perspective can uniquely equip you as a practitioner. Identify an intersection that gives you a unique lens or skill set, where your hybrid is a superpower, where 1+1 = 3, creative math.
“We toggle between blazing trails and craving paths, feeling our career is a tangle. The truth is, we’re making our own way.”
The truth is “wisdom often wanders.” To better navigate this world we need to better understand how we make trails, how we move about in the world and make those decisions, and “how the trails make us”. (On Trails, Robert Moor) Calling out those moments of transition in your life and investigating them can be really helpful.
Strategy #3: Capture the wisdom in your winding road. It’s tempting to give our career paths
the veneer of linearity and progression. But here’s the catch—we’re missing the chance to share our power and agency. Embrace the complexity of your path. There are some common patterns in wayfinding: Leaps (risks you try to build something new), forks in the road (decisions that reveal your desires and values), pauses (some gaps and sabbaticals for recovery and creativity), or detours (side hustles, adventure, or significant hobbies.) Finding these wayfinding moments and being mindful about them can be a strategy to find the ingredients that make you more multifaceted.
Melanie reminds us that courage is for everyone. Innovation practitioners are carving a different trail and the blazes they leave on trails signal other people that it’s okay to be here and it’s safe. She leaves us with the following quote by Robert Moor from his book On Trails.
“And so we return, once again, to the essential question: how do we select a path through life? Which turns should we take? To what end? To be able to answer these questions, deftly and with foresight, is what we mean when someone is wise. Wisdom - not intelligence, not cleverness, not even moral goodness, but wisdom - is what guides us through the unknown.”
Some of Melanie’s book recommendations:
Transitions by William & Susan Bridges
On Trails by Robert Moor
Living Beautifully by Pema Chödrön
Rising Strong by Brene Brown
Range by David Epstein
Editorial by Chiara Rachmanis
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