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Rethinking Career Design: How Traditional Education Set Up a Generation to Fail, and How to Course Correct Today | Farouk Dey, Revisited
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- [00:04]
Farouk Dey
Rather than thinking about what you will be in the future, designing your life or life design empowers you to give yourself permission to think about what you're curious about today. Stop asking yourself what you should be in the future. Instead, ask yourself, what are you curious about today? And then experiment with that. The combination of all of these experiments and activities and connections is going to lead you to your ultimate career path. That would be much more fulfilling than if you were to just sort of make a decision about where you will be and then draw a straight line to that. Most of the time, people who use that traditional approach end up miserable in their careers. In fact.
- [00:49]
Dart Lindsley
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley.
- [00:55]
Every so often, I'm bringing back an episode that changed the direction of Work for Humans. These are the episodes that I refer back to all the time. In later episodes, this conversation with Farouk Dey is a natural. Follow on to the recent episode on Life Design with Bill Burnett. In talking to Farouk, I learned that the problem of framing employees as inputs to production runs deeper than our experience in the workplace. Because when we frame ourselves as something that companies acquire, we can fall into the trap of using our education entirely to build ourselves into an attractive commodity for companies, rather than first considering what we really want from work. Farouk is now the president of Palo Alto University, but when I recorded this episode, he was the Vice Provost at Johns Hopkins Imagine center for Integrative Learning and Life Design, where he led the charge to to empower students, teaching them how to design their lives, and redefine the purpose of education itself. In this episode, Farouk and I talk about the Imagine center for Integrative Learning and Life Design, the importance of experiential learning for designing your life, and how companies can implement life design at work to engage employees. We also discussed developing minds over careers, how to construct career your passion instead of finding it changing the outdated career services model of American universities and how universities can give students the highest possible returns on their investment, as well as many other topics. All right, as always, Work for Humans would not be possible without your support, so please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Dr. Farooq de.
- [02:44]
Farooq de Welcome to work for Humans.
- [02:47]
Farouk Dey
Pleasure to be here, Doc. Thanks for inviting me.
- [02:49]
Dart Lindsley
A lot of things came together for this particular conversation to happen, which is that first of all, I interviewed Bill Burnett about his book that he wrote with Dave Evans, Designing your Life and designing your new job. Life, I think is the name of the second one. And we spoke a lot about the philosophy behind the life design approach. And then we talked about how companies might design themselves to support that approach. We got a little bit into that. Then you and I were both speaking in Stockholm at the Future Talent Summit. And I heard you speak and I thought, my goodness, here's somebody who's actually implemented this approach at John Hopkins, knows the practicalities of it. And I was super excited to talk to you. And then I re. Listened to Bill Burnett's interview and he. I realized he spoke about you and the work you've been doing at John Hopkins. So it all ties together. For people who haven't heard the episode with Bill Burnett, can you just do a light overview, if possible, of the philosophy of. Of life design?
- [03:59]
Farouk Dey
Yeah. And of course, there are all life design stories and roads lead back to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I met these two wonderfully creative people when I worked at Stanford. At the time, I was dean of career and experiential learning or education, and I had an opportunity to just sit in their experiment. They were experimenting with this idea of using design thinking, which is used to build products and services on people's lives. And I was really intrigued by that. So, in short, this is how it applies to everybody who is listening. Rather than thinking about what you will be in the future, designing your life or life design gives you permission or empowers you to give yourself permission to think about what you're curious about today. So a good way to that I do this often with people is I tell them, stop asking yourself what you should be in the future. Instead, ask yourself, what are you curious about today? And it's a much more freeing philosophy, but it's also a much more practical one, because rarely do I meet people who are in careers or professions or they're doing things that they had decided on in their early twenties. Often circumstances, opportunities, networks, different situations lead them in different directions. So that's why I think the more practical choice is to ask yourself, first, what am I curious about today? And then experiment with that, build networks around it, and trust that the combination of all of these experiments and activities and connections around curiosity is going to lead you to your ultimate career path. That would be much more fulfilling than if you were to just sort of make a decision about where you will be and then draw a straight line to that. Most of the time, people who use that traditional approach end up miserable in their careers, in fact. So that's what really life design is, and I was fascinated by that. Idea, I thought it just flipped the script. Particularly for college students who come in with these plans that they don't really understand. They think they're going to be doctors or lawyers or engineers or startups or whatever is exciting and hot on TV that day or whatever their parents told them. And I thought that this just flips the script in a way that's much more empowering and realistic and productive. Dave Evans refers to it often as just get curious, try stuff and talk to people. That's really the magic of life design. And when you compare it to the traditional career planning approach, which is have a career goal and then create stepping stones and you know how boring all of that is, I much rather use the life design approach.
- [06:53]
Dart Lindsley
And you wrote one paper about essentially the history of career services. And that history, it was interesting because what career services were even supposed to do has changed over the last century. So can you track that trajectory a little bit for us?
- [07:11]
Farouk Dey
So essentially when you track back how colleges helped students land in jobs and in careers shifted as economic conditions shifted, and typically that happens every 20 to 30 years, you see that there is a major either recession or major paradigm shifts in the economy that create new jobs, that create new industry sectors, and then there are new enrollment challenges in the colleges, and then it creates new opportunities for students. The quick story of this is that when you look back in the early 1900s, the universities were producing a lot of teachers because there was a need for teacher education at the time. So universities used this idea of vocational guidance, basically deciding that these students are going to be teachers and it's creating straight line for them to become teachers. They weren't talking about fulfillment and career happiness or I mean, this was about being practical. The 1950s and 60s, post World War II, we were in a manufacturing economy. There was the GI Bill that brought lots of veterans back to college campuses. And there was a major need or pressure on the universities to literally place these graduates in jobs. And there were. The economy needed lots of workers. So I created these placement offices and basements of academic buildings. Usually it's one or two people who sort of literally have these contracts with companies and literally place people in. So it wasn't necessarily an application or an interview process. It was you're about to graduate with an engineering degree or an accounting degree or that company needs one. Boom. You go into that job. That changed dramatically in the 1970s and 80s when the economy shifted to a service based industry and there was a much more variety of career options. Even though the economy wasn't that Strong and the we were in a downturn, but at the time also I think society was, at least in the United States, what we were witnessing was the rise of this self help culture. You know, there were a lot of self help books, people were talking about happiness and fulfillment a lot more. So these placement offices in college campuses started to turn into career counseling offices. And they started to draw people from the mental health professions to work in those offices to help students answer the question, what should I do with my life? That changed in the 1990s and the early 2000s with the DOT com boom and bust. And there was sort of a rise of networks and employment opportunities on college campuses. You started to see universities do a lot more career fairs and network at night. And it was all about students landing these jobs in these newly created industry sectors. And there was competition for talent. So it shifted from these counseling offices into these networking hubs, if you will. And where we are now is that we're moving more and more towards universities being a lot more accountable for social mobility of their students, particularly students who come from low income or limited income backgrounds who are first to go to college in their families. Underrepresented minorities who traditionally don't do as well when they graduate in terms of lending fulfilling careers with high paying jobs, et cetera. So now these centers are starting to turn more and more into social mobility hubs for these students. So you start to see how the needs of society, of the population of the universities to address the issues that students need make a big difference in the makeup of these offices. You know, what started as a placement office in the basement of a building is now the Imagine center for Integrative Learning and Life Design at Johns Hopkins University where I'm sitting right now. Major difference in about 70 years.
- [11:35]
Dart Lindsley
If you can give listeners a picture of the Imagine center where you're sitting, I can see it in the background. It's lit up, it's bright, it looks very open. What's there and what's activity like in that space?
- [11:53]
Farouk Dey
The Imagine center for Integrative Learning and Life Design opened in the fall of 2022. So just a few months ago. This is brand new, sort of like the latest buzz on campus and I'd say perhaps in higher education too, when it comes to preparing students for after college life and careers. We took a different approach. For the start, what we try to do is not build a career center, but we wanted to build a one stop shop hub for all of the things that help students truly design their lives. So what you have Here are all of the departments that typically help students do the experimentation, the prototyping. So it's experiential learning, for example, undergraduate research is here. The department that connects students with internships is here. Study abroad is here. Experiential learning, student jobs on campus are here. The department that connects also students with mentors and is here, that's alumni mentors, the department that connects students with employers. And then of course we have the Life Design Lab, which was formerly known as the Career center, is also here. So all in all, it's about seven departments, over 52 employees who work in this newly created building. And the number one feature of it is that is the full integration of all of these different resources that are typically fragmented on a college campus. And the fragmentation is harmful to students because they have to have the navigational skills to find them. They're not part of the curriculum. You can literally go through your entire four years as an undergraduate in college and never set foot in any of these offices and never interact with them, still graduate. But if you have the navigational skills, if you have parents at home who remind you to get engaged with these things, if you are lucky, you might coordinate some activities with these. And participation in these types of programs is transformative in not only the academic sense, but also in the life and the career success of students beyond the university life. So what we did is we said, look, we need to make that a lot more integrated into the student experience and we need to make it a lot more seamless and also integrate it in just one building. It's a one stop shop. They have it all here. It's a three story building. The top floor is the main attraction floor, as I call it. It's where we teach classes, we do workshops. It's a living room lounge area for students to hang out. We literally built it as a hangout space, a study space for students. They're not coming here to consume services. And that's also a different philosophy about this, is that we're not building transactional services for students to come and get. We want this space to be a hangout space for them and we just happen to be around them. And as a result, we've increased engagement of students in our activities from 37% to 73%. Now in just four years, we've increased satisfaction from 34% to 69% in just four years. So we've, we're moving metrics in a dramatic way because we put students in the center and we built this building in a way that Just makes it easy for them to get access to all of these resources and they don't have to seek it out, they're just here all the time and we just happen to be around it. The second feature of this building is that none of our team members, none of us has a private office. It's not a shattering idea for most in industry sector, for example, or nonprofit organizations, etc. But in higher ed world, in academia, that's a big deal. People love their private offices and they don't like to give them up. But we gave ours up because we wanted the space to be the student's home. We don't want it to be our home and they come visit us. It's students home and we just happen to be around them. So we're all laptop and cell phone people. I just grabbed a room here where I'm doing this call with you, this podcast with you. So it's a lot more interactive and engaging and you'll have to see it to come and do a tour. So it's a three story building that has a lot of different spaces for student engagement. We have a content creation lab because we recognize that students, as they're designing their lives, they're not really thinking about careers, they're thinking about how they can become content creators, how they can contribute to this new economy, the knowledge economy. And so we have a lab where they can experiment with podcast building just what we're doing now. Or they film TikToks or do videos, or create or write articles. These are some of the new features that are way different from what we had maybe 70 years ago when it was just a placement office, or even 50 years ago when it was just a counseling office. So it's a lot more engaging. As a result of all of this work, 98% of our students participate in experiential learning. So that's internships, that's undergraduate research, that's study abroad. It's all of these things that we believe are essential in the life design methodology. Remember what Dave Evans said, it's get curious. We do plenty of that in this building. Try things out is a big piece of operationalizing life design. So we pulled all of the offices that do the trying things out and then talk to people, connect with people. So we've built those programs that connect students with mentors and with companies and with people so that they can build their networks. That's how we operationalize life design.
- [17:50]
Dart Lindsley
So first of all, from what I can see in the video and what you're Just telling me it sounds like a cowork center. It looks just like co working. It sounds like co working, which is also a very modern way of doing work. One of the things that Bill and I spoke about in the episode where I spoke with him was the need for companies to become a platform for life design. There's a very stark difference between a university's concern for your success in your career and a company's concern for your success in your career. I don't think I've ever seen the level of investment that you made at John Hopkins in a company around helping people to be that platform, to help people experiment with work. I think it's a beautiful thing.
- [18:36]
Farouk Dey
Well, maybe the risk is that, because I've heard that plenty of times is that employees might design their life so well that they design their lives out of the company, out of the organization, and leave. So there is that fear of doing this as an organization and then risking attrition of employees. The reason I know this is because this has worked so well for us, for students, that our university leadership has asked if we can build the same thing for our own employees as a university. And we are. So we are going to be probably the first university, potentially the first employer, that will have a center for life design for its employees. You heard it here first. Not a public announcement. You know, we're in the process of building this, but at some point within the next year or so, we will start announcing this. But I've been working diligently with our human resources to help them build this. And I will tell you that this was an initial concern. The reason we want to do it is because university employees have been observing the success of this for students and are saying, could we have that, too? And all the credit goes to our university president, Ron Daniels, who is visionary and entrepreneurial beyond any university president I've seen who is leaning into it and saying, well, let's do it. Let's figure out how to make this happen. But of course, the conversation led us to, well, what if we do such a good job at this that people will become so curious and so inspired and they start to try things out, and then it leads them to leave the institution and go somewhere else. I think that's a risk worth taking. Personally, I think that would be a good feather in our head. I'd rather have people leave and be grateful that Hopkins was the institution that helped them get there because we invested in them. And the truth is that they may not leave, too. They might be so fulfilled with what We've been able to do for them that they might find opportunities within the university to grow and develop their future. But I'd rather see that than have somebody stay longer and potentially be miserable.
- [20:50]
Dart Lindsley
What if you could increase the proportion of people who are happy at your institution by a considerable degree? What would that do? It could potentially be magical. How did you pitch this idea to John Hopkins? And how is it that Johns Hopkins was in a place where that they could hear it? What is the context from which Johns Hopkins is seeing this, that they said, that's what we want?
- [21:17]
Farouk Dey
Yeah. I was at Stanford at the time and had been working with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans and helping them out and building my own organization, really just trying to catch up to everything that they have developed. And we wanted to link up with them as much as we could. But my dream really was to take what they had built and institutionalize it. I'm not sure that I could necessarily see that the path to really do that at Stanford at the time. I mean, there were plenty of good efforts happening, but to institutionalize it the way that I was thinking it required a big sale job and maybe just some time. Hopkins was at a moment of crisis. And I think that's often what you will see with big transformations, particularly in higher education, is because universities are creatures of tradition, and it's really hard to make big moves and take sort of like big bites at things and take risks like the one we took with bringing Life Design to Johns Hopkins and creating this new division of Integrative Learning and Life Design. I mean, there was just a lot of new things that we were just trying out that normally universities would not just want to do if they're not experiencing big challenges. Johns Hopkins was experiencing a big challenge at the time. It was a moment of crisis. We had sort of an outdated career services model, and there were enough concerns on the ground from students, alumni, and all the way to trustees. So that's the short of the story. And I happen to be ready with a potential solution. So when I got the call, the recruitment call, and we started to have conversations, I shared that. I said, I think that you might be trying to solve the problem the wrong way, if I may. Not necessarily something that I would do as a candidate in any other time, but that was a time where it was appropriate because I felt really confident about the work that we were doing at Stanford. So I made that proposal at the time. I said, if you really want to turn things around, I think that this is what we could do. And I want to just really give the credit to the university leadership, to President Ron Daniels and Provost Sunil Kumar, who at the time, the two of them just took a chance. They didn't have to take the chance, but they took it. And they said, we'll try this out and see what happens. Almost word for word, life design, language, right? Try things out and see what happens. They supported the new vision and the new direction. Of course, what comes with that is a lot of pressure for me to deliver. After that, it was myself and my team and building the right organization and hiring the right people and putting the right pieces in place. It took some time to start to turn things around, but we all knew that we were headed in the right direction. After probably one year. When we started to see the metrics shift, you could feel it even in the air that, I mean, this is without a building. I mean, the building came five years later. That's why I always advise universities that want to make this change. I say, don't start with infrastructure or with budgets. I mean, if you have a consultant who comes in and says, you need to invest all this money in and you have to build out this building and infrastructure, that's the wrong direction. What we did was really put the model in place. We could be just as successful without this building and without some of the funding that we're raising now. So we didn't ask for a huge infusion of funding. We just wanted to reallocate resources in a way that allows for this philosophy to work. And the thing is, it made sense to them and to everybody who I spoke with, including parents. I'd share with you, Darth, that there were some nerves on the ground here about how would parents of students receive the left design message when they're paying all this money to a private school and potentially expecting a return on investment in the form of jobs and salaries. How could someone like me come on stage and say, we actually just want students to get curious, try things out, connect with people, and just trust that things will work out. That's, you know, a big leap and one that anyone would. Would be appropriately nervous about. But I think what we discovered is that parents connected really well with this message because they saw themselves and their stories in that message. I mean, it resonated because they made a lot of sense to them and then allowed for the model to truly live on and for our organization to thrive. So there were just a lot of things that came in place at the same time that made the pitch possible. I probably wouldn't be able to pitch this idea and what we've done any other time in my career, Even with the proven success here at Johns Hopkins, it's so against traditional that it really requires an entrepreneurial university, leadership, entrepreneurial board of trustees, enough crisis on the ground to make people want to change. So the enemy of all of this transformation would be complacency. And I think what worked for us is that we were in a place where we could not afford to be complacent anymore. We were in a bad spot as a premier university that represented excellence in everything that we did. And this was an area where we did not excel. So we were under the spotlight and there was a lot of pressure, and that's what made it possible to try something a little bit more innovative and it allowed us to color outside the lines.
- [27:10]
Dart Lindsley
Can you say something about the mindset that students come in with and how it changes? One of the things Bill and I talked a lot about was what a design mindset is like. And you've spoken a little bit about curiosity, and you've spoken a little bit about what the right mindset is. But what do students come in with that they move away from through this process?
- [27:33]
Farouk Dey
It is typical for a lot of college students, especially college students who are on the high achieving end of the scale, who have done all of the right things and more in high school and throughout their education and have the pressure to make it to the top. Often we see them come to our campus, for example, with I'd call it maybe faulty ideas or misconceptions about how to build a successful career, what they should do in their future, what careers are the path towards success and which ones are not. And they get those messages from their friends and their peers, the media, and a lot of times from their own families. So we have to do a little bit of correcting, busting some of those myths a little bit, and help them give themselves permission to dream again, to imagine, literally to imagine possibilities, to try things out, to take some risks. There's no better time in one's lifetime than when they're in college and they're surrounded by all these resources to help experiment with all of that curiosity. If there's a time in our lives to be curious, this is it on a college campus. And we wanted students to really understand their place in this ecosystem, that they're here not only as a learner or somebody who has to go through stepping stones to get a college degree, but you're surrounded by all of these opportunities to experiment with curiosity, to connect with people to build networks. The life design approach works best on a college campus, works great anywhere else. But on a college campus, you have so much opportunity to do that. So for them to start to think about it from that perspective, rather than choosing a major fairly quickly, which is one of the. There was one element in higher education I could change, it would be that, you know, have students choose missions and vision statements rather than academic major. But that is the system we have. They have to map out to chart out their education over four years. There's the concept of failure and success is something that we have to work with them and to rethink. So now in our orientation for freshmen, we have added the session called Failure is Fine. And it's a panel that I usually moderate and as our president, and we bring either faculty or alumni or a mix of others to talk about how they fail to normalize failure, to say that this is part of the process. You know, at some point you're gonna. You're gonna fail an exam or a class or have to withdraw or just lose a game if you're an athlete or, you know, have to take a step back, there will be speed bumps and there will be bigger bumps, and there will be moments where it feels like the world is closing in on you. And it's important for students to develop those coping skills and to have perspective about that. These moments, as hard as they are, they're great opportunities for clarifying values and goals and mission, and they're great reset moments that could make a big difference in their lives.
- [30:55]
Dart Lindsley
It does strike me that particularly the kind of student that ends up at Johns Hopkins has spent a lot of time thinking about how they look to those around them. How am I going to look to somebody doing admissions? How am I going to look to this particular professor? What am I making myself into as a product that others are going to perceive? And one of the most fundamental things, one of the most fundamental transformations is what is the experience I want to have in my life? And starting to look inward to that and understand what that is by testing.
- [31:41]
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- [32:44]
Farouk Dey
Precisely. You know, and I wish I could say something different, Dirk, but the truth is that that feeling of being, being evaluated constantly doesn't go away in college, particularly in, you know, school like Johns Hopkins, you know, they're still having to perform and in classes and do well in exams, and they feel like they're being evaluated by their teachers and faculty and academic advisors, by the way, their peers. And it goes all the way to the potential employers that hire them for internships or ultimately for jobs, or those who are interested in pursuing more education towards professional schools or graduate schools. They're thinking about that too, is continuing to build their portfolio and their CV or resume. It does not go away. But I think where there is an opportunity is for them to develop more of that second sense that you mentioned of constantly, for them to evaluate their experience here and to leverage it in the appropriate way and to enjoy it at the same time. There is plenty on any college campus, frankly, for them to leverage that experience. I'll just mention a few. You know, athletics is a really good way for students to fully immerse themselves in the college experience and make it enjoyable to not just evaluate it all the time, you know, but that they feel like they can just let their hair down and just be. And allow the networks to develop organically without them having to be strategic about them, that they're building these skills organically without even noticing. The best skills I know I develop are the ones that I realized afterwards, you know, sometimes months or years afterwards that I built that skill, but I didn't go into it with that idea of developing that. So it's great when you have these little punchlines that come afterwards without you realizing that that was the goal the entire time. Co curricular activities, getting involved in student organizations and leadership, being engaged in the arts, just even life in the residence halls is an amazing co curricular experience that helps students be in the experience. So I don't think it's an either or. I think it's an and the constant evaluation doesn't go away. But I think if students develop a coping mechanism and a way to just coexist with that and accept it and understand that that's just part of being a learner and eventually a professional. And when they launch into their careers, they're going to continue to be. They're going to have to worry about how they look to their boss, to their colleagues, even if they're an entrepreneur, how they look to their customers. And everybody's going to have to develop that mindset of managing one's brand to the outside world. But to put that in perspective and also have a really good sense of self and clarifying values and what we're about and being fully present in the experience is truly possible to develop on a college campus.
- [36:04]
Dart Lindsley
One of my guests, Shalini Verma, who came on the show, she was MIT Harvard trained, engineering, director of program managers at Google. She spent the early part of her life performing, essentially becoming what she thought she had to become to be valued in the eyes of her parents, for instance, who she felt were judging. Then she realized through self exploration that really that was something that was holding her back. And she started to build out a philosophy that's made her incredibly successful as a manager and as a leader of being really introspective and developing herself. It's a fantastic episode. It's one of the most popular episodes that we've done. And it started off with her being completely unknown and then speaking about this, and it was super valuable. I'm wondering if this is having any effect on the experience of your faculty. And the reason I bring that up is that I've asked a lot of people this question that you and I spoke about a little bit before the show, which is what job do you hire your job to do for you? And one of the things I've heard from faculty occasionally is that they would love to have students who have a passion for the subject as opposed to having students who are careerist. And we're just using it as a stepping stone to get to money or whatever thing that they're trying to get to. And so I described that to them. I said, well, that's sort of a supply chain problem for your job, which is that the institution that you're working for is not delivering the kind of students to you that would make your experience great here as a member of faculty. And so has there been any noticeable difference with your faculty in terms of how students arrive to them?
- [37:55]
Farouk Dey
Well, there has been a difference not only in that, but also in how faculty engage with an organization like ours. I've been in the in this business for over two decades and what I could tell you is that we tend to sit sort of on the opposite ends of the spectrum and sometimes our fields can be confrontational. And the reason for that is precisely what you said, is that faculty or academics usually frown upon the concept of higher education or university being a vocational training ground for students for jobs. Because faculty and academics go into this field with the passion to develop minds and world citizenship. And they're really thinking far beyond a job. And they see that. I'll just say career centers and universities as offices that often cheapen the value of higher education to a first job and a first salary out of school. So the language of life design as a substitute to career development and career planning has opened a lot of doors for us for not only partnership, but mutual understanding. They love it because we are speaking the same language. Because you know, there's certain points, I agree with them. We don't want to cheapen the value of higher education. These four years of experiential learning and experimentation and developing networks and building friendships and learning all of these skills and acquiring all this knowledge from these world renowned faculty and have being surrounded by all these books and all of this knowledge on campus to only link that to a first job after a degree. However, I think we also all understand that the cost of higher education in the United States makes it really hard to ignore the first job after graduation. So it's, it's easy to say we're going to develop minds, but it costs a lot of money to develop minds for, for these families. And of course they want their return on investment. So the solution of using this label of life design, you know, and moving away from the word career, which has been part of my work in, in this space for a long time. You know, when I was at Stanford, I really worked hard with a team there to move from career to the concept of meaningful work. We even called the office beam just to stay away from that. And here at Hopkins, we really went into this life design option. We threw away the concepts of career, career development, career coaching, all of these things. Transactional services we call the center. Imagine we're doing all of these, all of this important work and we use different language. And it's not only inviting students into the conversation much more easily. Because what we realize is that the word career is also intimidating to students. So faculty frown upon it, students are scared of it, parents want it, we threw that out. We use life design, we don't use career at all. We're integrating all of these different offices that weren't connected to career into this organization. And faculty are into it, and it gives them also language that they use in their own classes, in their own syllabi. Working with students, it's stuff that they get, that it resonates for them and it aligns with their philosophy of what higher education should be about.
- [41:33]
Dart Lindsley
That's fantastic. And I can see how rolling this out to faculty as a program is going to increase their fluency and understanding of what the students are going through, which. It's a beautiful pairing. Do you see that this might ever influence admissions and the kinds of people who you think might be able to get the most benefit out of your institution?
- [41:58]
Farouk Dey
Yes, I do. And as a piece of a much larger puzzle, there are so many things that influence enrollment and, and admissions, but the return on investment is a big one. Now, as I said earlier, the college education in the United States is very expensive. Of course, families are having the appropriate conversations about the value proposition of higher education. And it comes in many forms, but employability and that first job after college, and it's very much part of the conversation. What Life Design does is that it goes beyond that. What we're saying is, yes, and the outcome five years later is even more important. And the outcome for your student 10 years later is much more important. And when we start to talk about 5 years outcomes, 10 years outcomes, 20 years outcomes, we start to talk a lot more about fulfillment rather than having a job. You know, so parents, what they want in the first year after the students graduate is that they want them out of their basements and they want them to have some type of salary and they want to launch. So it's fairly basic. But Life Design gives them the hope that these students are going to be fulfilled and happy and thriving in their careers. A career development approach doesn't do that. Life Design does. So in that sense, I think it's a big selling point. It's a huge value proposition to rethink the value of the entire university. You know, when we talk about only jobs, the university sells the value proposition to prospective students and their families as an early outcome. You know, you graduate six months later, you will have this job with. And that's the pressure that's on them. When you're using Life Design, the university is selling the value proposition of the entire university, not just an office that's going to place their students in jobs. It's saying that we are adopting the value of Life Design as a university, and every member of our community is participating in this. That means it's the faculty member who your students will work with it's their coach. If they're an athlete, it's their friends, it's their ra, it's their academic advisor. You know, it's the entire community. We're using this type of language. So what I'm seeing this now potentially making a big difference is in the liberal arts college space. I had the honor to speak at a conference recently for college presidents of small liberal arts schools. And as you know, they are the ones who are experiencing the biggest challenges in enrollment these days. And they were all so intrigued by this idea of life design rather than employability. Just reframing the college education with this kind of mindset. I'm getting lots of calls from these college presidents to connect and consult with them. I'm visiting one actually next week to help them rethink not just the design of one office, but the full story and the narrative of their university using this powerful language that would make the return on investment much more compelling for students.
- [45:33]
Dart Lindsley
That's very interesting. I'm thinking about my college career, which is I went to college when college was cheap, was $350 a quarter, and I got to study everything. I was there for seven years because it was basically free. All I had to do is wash dishes on the weekends and I could pay for it. And I got to just, you know, try everything. I was a philosophy major, I was a biology major, I was a economics major. I got three classes away from graduating in economics before I said, nope, I think I'm going to be a writer. And so I went on to actually study literature and creative writing. That's what I graduated in. And that is. Talk about a privilege. What an incredible privilege that is. I imagine a situation in which companies could enable that kind of breadth of flexibility. What would your advice be to a company who is saying, you know what, we're going to build a life design center. What would you say to them? When would be your advice? And some of it might be from lessons learned of your own, and some of it might be, you know, for the unique situation that they might be in.
- [46:44]
Farouk Dey
I think my advice would be the same to the one that I give to universities is don't build the center first, but build the model first. May understand what you're trying to accomplish, of course, but build the model first so be really clear about the philosophy and then may prototype with a set of programs or services, maybe hire a couple of people who will experiment with those ideas and start to build programs surrounded by a powerful narrative and let it grow. I think the worst come from Just starting with the center first is that you're going to have a center that's empty. You know, then that is beautiful building without a lot of people in it. For us here at the Imagine center, year round, other than summer, the center is packed with students all the time. Because it's been a building process for five years we've been building this model and making it part of the university culture. So a company that wants to use Life design as an approach to engage employees should start with that. You know, just how do you make your employees really engaged and use the philosophy of Life Design as an approach to educate and engage them and inspire them? Maybe build a small program or a department and then grow it over time. I think once you reach a certain level of capacity, there is a tremendous opportunity to give that model a home and put brick and mortar around it. And brick and mortar is really important. Like I said, I mean, we could do what we're doing without a building. But once we open the building, it has legitimized the work that we're doing. It has given it a brand, it has elevated it. It also gives, it's given it to headquarters. We have this beacon right outside of the building that has the word imagine in there. So it's a symbol, very symbolic, and it's a home. But it would have meant nothing if we built that the first year.
- [48:50]
Dart Lindsley
You may know this, but Christopher Alexander, who was the architect who really, I think, kicked off Agile Design at Berkeley, he wrote a book called the Oregon Experiment and it was about how universities should develop a 20 year plan. And basically he said 20 year plans are bad idea. He says basically, you know, you put down a 20 year plan for what your architectural infrastructure is going to look like. That's totally wrong. You're going to be building for what people don't need. And what he said was you should build incrementally. People should move into the space that you build and then they should say, you know what, this space needs to be modified in this way because our needs are evolving and that the architecture should be incremental and that the architectural design should rise up to meet the need. And so one of the things he held up as one of the best examples of design was Oxford University. So I just went to visit Oxford University. Since I saw you in Stockholm. I traveled over to Oxford because I just wanted to see what he was talking about. I couldn't see it at all by looking at it because I don't think you can see it from the outside. I mean, maybe that's why I couldn't see it. Which is that what makes Oxford work or any kind of thing like that work is what it feels like when you're inside it, not when you're looking at it from the outside.
- [50:10]
Farouk Dey
Precisely. So I mean, you have to have the full experience. The outside gives you a part of the story. And then experiencing it from the inside and then experiencing the actual model and interactions make a big difference.
- [50:23]
Dart Lindsley
And then building as it proves its success, building the infrastructure to support it in the shape that it's developed into, it makes a ton of sense. It's very, very aligned with the whole design agile design methodology and design thinking. It's very, very great. So is there anything I haven't asked you that I should ask you? Like what would you love to tell everybody that I have. That's an answer that I haven't elicited.
- [50:48]
Farouk Dey
Sometimes people ask me what's, you know, so you got Hopkins this far, where do y' all go in next? So maybe we'll go there. So the, the question is, what's next? We're in the middle of thinking about that. It's been five years. We've turned a lot of our metrics around. As I shared earlier, we moved satisfaction from 37% to 69%. We moved engagement from 37% to now 73%. We've closed all of the gaps between we call the haves and the have nots in the out the six months post graduation outcomes. We're really concerned about those particularly for first generation students and for low and limited income students where so we've done really well. There's experiential Learning is at 98% of our students. Our mentoring programs are engaging today. 12,000 students with 6,000 alumni. We started five years ago with practically zero. We have no network. So I mean we can back up our success with a ton of metrics that are really meaningful and these metrics match the vibe on campus. This is sort of anecdotally what people are talking about is that they feel good and it feels right to be in this kind of life design experience on campus. We still have more to do, you know, so 70% satisfaction is still less satisfaction to me. It just looks good when you start from so low. We want to get it up to 80 and 90, of course, and be in the 90s. Same thing with engagement. But we've just come so far. I will tell you that we're really watching the paradigm shifts that are happening now in the workforce with the introduction of artificial intelligence. The acceleration of automation, the changes that are happening today and will continue to happen in the workplace and in jobs. I'm constantly studying the World Economic Forum reports and other reports to see the shifts in skills that are needed. So on one hand we care a lot about how students design their lives conceptually, but also at the same time, part of that is to equip them with the right skills that are appropriate for the future careers and jobs that do not exist today. I think the recent World Economic forum listed that 85 million jobs will be lost by 2025, but will gain 97 million jobs. And that's just two years from now. And COVID 19 has exploded, accelerated these trends tremendously. Universities are not positioned today to give these future workers the skills of the future. You know, their students are getting tremendous academic training, but actual work skills that are necessary for their success. You know, for whether they're soft skills or some of the technical skills. I think we're not catching up to the workforce needs. So what we're looking at is developing a university wide catalog of work skill development courses. And we're already in that process now, but we want to just really formalize it. That I think is the space we want to play in in the next few years is build the skills, work skills pillar that would be added to the education of students so that not only they're getting curious, they're experimenting, they're connecting with people. They're also developing strong skills that are necessary for the future.
- [54:24]
Dart Lindsley
There's a real challenge with the whole skills discussion, which is that the practical skills, the simple skills that can be learned can be learned fairly quickly. Right. I can learn them in a just in time way. And then there's a range of capabilities that students might have which can't be taught. This is what I learned as a writer. There was one, one person giving advice who said writing can't be taught, but it can be learned. He said. So the central challenge of a writing professor, which I was, is to put students into a position where they can learn it, but you can't teach them. So there's these sort of liminal skills in the middle which probably look like that. And then there are some capabilities which are probably. I'm not comfortable quite with the word innate, except this idea that you're talking about talent. I guess I am. I guess that's what I'm talking about. But there are things like, let me see if I like playfulness. Can playfulness be taught? And the love of play, probably, I don't know. Where that level is. But the. Absolutely the most important things that students can learn is the things that are least teachable.
- [55:38]
Farouk Dey
Yeah, I could see that. And a lot of those are learned through experiences. That's why experiential learning is really important. The reason we push experiential learning, you know, the try stuff out element of life design is because it clarifies interests and values, but also it develops skills. And Bill Burnett, Dave, I and all of us who subscribe to the life design philosophy believe that there is no such a thing as finding your passion. What we all believe is that you construct your passion with experiences. First, get curious, you go experiment with it, you get good at it. And then as you get good at it and you get positive reinforcement from the environment and then you start to produce results and it's that rewarding part of you leads you to being incredibly inspired and you invest more time and resources into the task and activity and the work. And therefore you become passionate. You're not born passionate by this, you know, so passionate about these things. Some, maybe one would call God given talents, you know, like singers. I'm not sure if you, if one could ever work so hard to develop their skill to become a singer that they become really good at it or they're just born with an incredible voice that they just have the biology for it that they're able to develop that skill further. I can see that. But for the most part I really believe that most abilities and skills are learned and can be learned. I'm in the business of leadership development. I teach leadership classes. And that's one of the areas that I like to clarify always in my classes is that there is no such a thing as a born, you know, leader with leadership skills that are just innate. It's not in the genesis. I don't believe in that. I don't think science has proven otherwise. So I think what we know is that if you follow a set of formulas and practices and leadership and you get good at it and you read a lot and you have role models and you have mentors and you make mistakes and you improve based on those mistakes and you learn the lessons, you grow to become a good leader. You know, you develop emotional intelligence. It's practice makes perfect type of thing. So that's just one example. So leadership is an important skill for us that we want our students to learn, for example. And we know that that's important in this future of work environment that we're heading into.
- [58:07]
Dart Lindsley
So I'm going to ask my closing questions. One of Them is the question that I've asked a lot of people, which is, what job do you hire your job to do for you?
- [58:17]
Farouk Dey
It's a tricky question. What job do I hire my job to do for me? I think I want to say just on a college campus for a university environment to highly prioritize the process of students exploring and experimenting and figuring out their life paths and then connecting with those types of opportunities. What I mean by that is that in higher education, this area is typically not prioritized at all. It is usually a peripheral service that runs on a shoestring budget that is still in some odd space that university leadership has never stepped foot into and that is mentioned occasionally here and there, that does not have a seat of the executive table. And therefore it is hard to integrate this really important work that relates to the return on investment. I mean, this is ultimately the outcome that these students and parents are paying for when they enroll in the university. And most of the time in higher education, it is not prioritized and it's not there. Unfortunately, at Johns Hopkins it is. But I think what I would hire my job to do for me is to position, properly position this area of life design as a critical element of the university experience with a seat at the executive table, with a direct connection and partnership with other entities of the university in order to ensure that students are successful, all students, regardless of who they are.
- [60:02]
Dart Lindsley
That's a very ambitious thing to do, which is that it's, it's large systems change. And one of the things I'm most interested in is how large systems work and how they affect the experience of individuals within those systems. And so I think this is a shining example of large system transformation to create a different experience for the people who are there. And I wonder, metrics aside, do you get to see it in the eyes of your students?
- [60:36]
Farouk Dey
I do. When I'm on stage at commencement and our president is shaking the hands of students as they walk through the, the commencement stage. And I don't know all of students who are, who are going through that stage, but I recognize several of them and they look at me and I look at them and they, some of them, they wave or they take the time to wave and I could tell that we're making a difference. I especially do when I connect with them months later or sometimes years later as alumni. I've been at Hopkins now for only five years, but I've already been able have had the chance to see a couple of classes go through our life design journey and curriculum and work and how appreciative they are of the impact that has had on them. We hosted an event at Bloomberg in New York City on Monday with Michael Bloomberg, who is one of our alumni at the university. And I got to see a couple of people there who I hadn't seen for a couple of years, who graduated just in the last few years. And they came in with hugs and they were telling me their life design story. And what's interesting is that they're using the life design language. They were like, you would not believe what I did. I mean, one of them said, I was in New York City, but I made the decision to move back to Columbus and give up the big corporate job and go with something startup. It's really risky, but I'm really curious about it. And they're using the language intentionally. So I'm trying it out and I'm taking some risks and I think I can. And so they're really grateful. Plenty of anecdotes like that that make a big difference.
- [62:24]
Dart Lindsley
Fantastic. What does your job cost you? If work is a product that you're buying, what does it cost you to buy that product?
- [62:33]
Farouk Dey
For me personally, I think probably it costs some time away from the family because it does require some travel and just some time away, but I think it's negligible because, oh, gosh, I'm going to answer the question for you, Dart, in a different way. I don't think it could cost me much because I am so fulfilled doing this work. I really am. I think it would cost me a lot if I didn't have this job. I'm just so fulfilled doing this work. I love it. And I think what makes a big difference is that I work in a university environment that gets it. I work for a president who not only gets it, but supports it, or a provost who gets it, who support it. We have partners in the dean's offices in our schools who are absolutely behind this idea, and we've hired a stellar team that absolutely gets it. So they make it all worth it. So the cost is just really negligible. I'm having the time of my life.
- [63:35]
Dart Lindsley
I've never actually heard it said that way, and I love it, which is it would cost me something to not have this job. That is really the highest praise. That's a fantastic praise for the role. How can people learn more about you and about what you're doing?
- [63:52]
Farouk Dey
Well, I invite everybody to check out our website, Imagine JHU Edu. I have a vision chat series on YouTube and podcast also, just like you in fact, I'd love to return the the invitation and have you on on my show in the near future, Dart, if you will.
- [64:13]
Dart Lindsley
I'd love to.
- [64:14]
Farouk Dey
So it's called Vision Chats. You can find it on YouTube and I'd love for people to log in or whatever you, you get your podcasts and I invite people to just reach out via LinkedIn or Twitter. Those are the two platforms that I use a lot if they have any questions. We put everything online because we have a sharing spirit here. We don't feel like we have to hide anything. We're happy to share it if it helps others. It also gives us an opportunity to learn a lot about what people are doing. So as I said, I frequently engage with schools and in consulting projects or in speaking engagements at conferences, and it gives me an opportunity to learn a lot in that process. So reach out. We'll do this together and there are some things that we figure it out and others we're trying to figure out and we'll. We'll learn all together.
- [65:10]
Dart Lindsley
Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [65:13]
Farouk Dey
Thank you so much for inviting me. Have a wonderful day.
- [65:19]
Dart Lindsley
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.