Designing Forward: Finding Meaning When Work Changes

Redundancy is one of them.

One day you’re part of the rhythm of an organisation. You know the people, the meetings, the history behind decisions and the small, unseen things that keep everything moving. Your calendar is full. Your contribution feels clear. Your identity, if you’re not careful, quietly becomes entwined with your job title.

Then, sometimes with startling speed, all of that changes. I’ve found myself standing in one of those moments. After many years working in communications and marketing for a not for profit, I now find myself asking a question that millions of people are asking, particularly those of us entering the second half of life:

What comes next?

It’s a question made even more pressing by the age we’re living in. Artificial intelligence is reshaping professions that once seemed secure. Career ladders are giving way to portfolios of work. People are living longer, changing careers more often and discovering that retirement is no longer a single destination but another season to be designed.

For many, that uncertainty feels unsettling.

For Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, it presents an opportunity.

As the directors of Stanford University’s Life Design Lab, Burnett and Evans have spent years helping people navigate life’s biggest transitions. Their books Designing Your Life and Designing Your New Work Life challenge one of the assumptions many of us have carried since childhood – that somewhere out there is one perfect career waiting to be discovered.

Instead, they suggest something wonderfully freeing. A meaningful life isn’t found. It’s designed. Drawing on the principles of design thinking, they encourage us to approach our lives less like engineers following a blueprint and more like designers creating prototypes. Designers don’t begin with certainty. They begin with curiosity. They expect to experiment, to learn, to adjust and sometimes to fail.

Or, as they would put it, they don’t really fail at all. They gather data. That simple shift changes everything.

Most of us have been taught to think of careers as straight lines. We study, we specialise, we work hard, we climb steadily and eventually we arrive. Real life rarely follows such tidy plans.

Things happen: Organisations restructure, technology disrupts, health changes, families grow and dreams evolve.

Sometimes the path we imagined simply disappears beneath our feet. When that happens, our instinct is often to ask, “What have I lost?”

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Burnett and Evans invite us to ask a different question.

“What might I build from here?” - That question has stayed with me.

Redundancy has a way of exposing how much of our identity we’ve invested in our work. It’s uncomfortable to discover how quickly we answer the question, “Who am I?” by describing what we do.

It’s one of the first things we ask strangers: “So, what do you do?”

Rarely do we ask, “Who are you becoming?”

I wonder if that’s the better question?

Modern culture celebrates busyness as a badge of honour. Productivity has become a virtue. Careers have become identities. We measure ourselves by promotions, performance reviews and LinkedIn updates, quietly believing that if work is going well, life must be going well too.

But what happens when work changes? What happens when the title disappears?

Perhaps those moments, painful though they are, become invitations to rediscover a deeper source of meaning.

Burnett and Evans often remind readers that you can’t think your way into a new life.

You have to build your way into one. That to me is profoundly hopeful.

Meaning isn’t usually discovered while sitting still waiting for certainty to arrive. It emerges through movement, through conversations, through experiments.

Through saying yes to small opportunities that slowly reveal larger directions. Designers call these prototypes. That feels particularly relevant in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

Much of what we’ve associated with professional expertise is becoming automated. AI can draft reports, analyse data, generate presentations and answer questions in seconds. The technical skills that once defined careers are changing faster than many of us can keep pace with.

But meaning has never been something technology could generate. Machines can process information but they can’t make sense of suffering. They can produce words, but they don’t have lived experience.

That’s why I find myself thinking increasingly about wisdom rather than knowledge.

Author Chip Conley describes the second half of life as a transition from accumulating intelligence to offering wisdom. Younger generations often bring fresh technical skills and new perspectives. Older workers bring something equally valuable – judgement, perspective, emotional maturity and the ability to recognise patterns that only decades of experience can reveal.

Wisdom travels more slowly than information, but it usually sees further and can offer something hard to replicate — perspective, encouragement, discernment and hope.

I’ve begun to wonder whether that’s what meaningful work increasingly looks like. It’s less about proving ourselves and more about helping others flourish.

Less about climbing another rung on the ladder, more about becoming the kind of person others instinctively turn to when life becomes complicated. The person who carries perspective can listen well and whose presence makes a room calmer.

Those people have always been the most valuable people in any organisation. Not because they knew everything. Because they understood people.

Is a career path ever predictable? Maybe we need to stop asking whether we’ve fallen off the path. And begin trusting that the path itself is still unfolding.

For years I’ve helped organisations tell their stories.

I’ve worked alongside churches, leaders and communities to find the words that connect faith with everyday life. I’ve written about mission, justice, hope, culture and the changing world around us. It has been work I have loved because, at its heart, it has always been about helping people recognise where God is already at work.

Losing that role has inevitably raised questions.

Not simply, “What job comes next?” but, “What kind of contribution am I now being invited to make?”

They’re different questions. One is about employment. The other is about vocation.

Perhaps this next chapter isn’t asking me to become someone entirely different. Perhaps it’s inviting me to become more fully myself – to write more deeply, to mentor more generously, to consult more intentionally and to keep exploring the place where faith, culture and work meet.

I don’t know exactly what comes next. The truth is, very few of us ever do.

Burnett and Evans remind us that a well-designed life isn’t built on certainty. It isn’t the reward for making all the right decisions or following the perfect career path. It grows through curiosity, generosity, experimentation and the willingness to keep taking the next faithful step.

Perhaps that’s what this season is asking of me. Not to have all the answers or to map out the next ten years.

I’ve spent much of my career helping others tell their stories. Maybe this next season is an opportunity to tell my own.

And perhaps, in doing so, to encourage others who find themselves standing at unexpected crossroads, wondering whether their most meaningful work is behind them.

I don’t believe it is.

I think some of our richest work begins when ambition gives way to wisdom, when certainty gives way to trust and when careers become callings once again.

Maybe that’s what it means to design a meaningful life.

Or perhaps, in the language of faith, it’s simply another name for grace.