Designing a Better Work Life—For All

There is an abundance of guidance available today to improve your work life: books describing how to boost your happiness and fulfillment; coaches and retreats facilitating intensive introspection; meditation apps waiting to be tapped during your coffee breaks. 

Some of these tools are useful, and we’ll be exploring them with a critical eye in The Life I Want.

Right off the bat, the problem we see with many of them is that they focus on the individual to the exclusion of the collective. We agree that personal initiative is important but know that it cannot, on its own, fix work: There are systemic problems that hold back even the most go-get-’em individuals. And if some people improve their lot while others don’t, we’re no better off. One of the foundational tenets of this project is that we cannot be truly happy in a society, or even an organization, that lacks equality. As we wrote in one of our first posts for this blog, creating the lives we want must be for everyone, not just for people with the time and money to access premium resources.

The latest example of an individualistic approach to fixing work is Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work by Bill Burnett and Dale Evans, a work-focused follow-up to their 2016 bestseller Designing Your Life. The authors advocate for applying design thinking to life: Reframe the problem, experiment and prototype, and never get stuck.

There is a lot in Designing Your Work Life (DYWL) that resonated with me personally: on seeking alignment between what you say you value and how you live (e.g., you say you prioritize family but work so much you never see them; you say you care about the planet but work for organizations that hurt it); on reframing suboptimal as “good enough for now” while you plot your next move so one isn’t “exhausting himself by rehearsing whether to quit or not every hour;” on the importance of quitting well, with closure and gratitude.

I am Burnett and Evans’ target demographic: a person with enough time, money, and entitlement to pursue the belief that work should be more than a paycheck. As an author myself, I understand why they would write for this audience: The books are based on their popular class at Stanford University, where they’ve been able to prove their ideas—with a crowd that is likely to drop $27.95 on a hardcover.

But as a concerned citizen currently steeped in examining the role of work in society, it is hard to unsee the systemic challenges that confront most of the rest of humanity, and therefore hard to be comfortable with DYWL’s premise that readers can get where they want to go if they just follow the advice in the book.

For example, Burnett and Evans suggest that if you’re discouraged with your job because you lack influence, you need to get more “culturally aligned with the business and other influencers.” I’ve been there, and have had wise mentors impart some version of “Fit in, play the game, get ahead.” 

In The Life I Want, we do believe there’s space for people to adapt to their workplaces. I have certainly gained new skills by emulating others in the various places I’ve worked, from the political operatives in government to empathetic teachers in education to driven executors in business. 

Don’t we want a world where we stop telling people to fit into the dominant culture, and instead demand that the dominant culture catch up with the times?

But we also want to challenge the expectation that people fix themselves for work, and understand how we fix work to embrace a more diverse range of people. Don’t we want a world where we stop telling people to fit into the dominant (white, patriarchal, cisgender, workaholic) culture, and instead demand that the dominant culture catch up with the times?

Burnett and Evans also accept the status quo of an elitist system in their discussion of grad school, which they suggest might be worth the cost to obtain the network: “The top schools have the most powerful networks, and even though you’ll never hear them admit it, it’s these networks that justify the super-high prices of the most elite schools… Education counts for a lot—perhaps more than it deserves to—but we don’t make the rules, we’re just trying to help you play by them and win.” Emphasis added by me, as I found myself wishing Burnett and Evans saw that even if they don’t think they write the rules (which I might challenge), the people they coach do.

While Burnett and Evans do readers a service by pointing out the dominance of the “hidden job market”—the fact that most (corporate) jobs are never posted publicly—the next step of tapping into it is inaccessible for many people. Shouldn’t they at least recognize, if not advocate, that the hidden job market should come out into the open, where a broader range of deserving candidates could have a shot? Which, by the way, will be better for the organizations, since diversity improves performance?

Anthony Jack, author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students, writes of a similar dynamic at place in elite colleges: the “hidden curriculum,” or unspoken norms that are alien to students from poor backgrounds. Jack wrote in The New York Times about students from low-income families “having to learn and decode a whole new set of cues and terms like professors’ ‘office hours’ (many didn’t know what they were or how to use them), and foreign rituals like being invited to get coffee with an instructor (and not knowing whether they were expected to pay).”

That feeling of alienation carries over into the employers of those schools’ graduates, as Jack writes in his book: “These companies also have cultural norms that new employees must adapt to—their own version of the hidden curriculum—and many of the rules for advancement are left unsaid.”

What Burnett and Evans and even Jack don’t say about these “hidden” phenomena is that if something is hidden, someone is probably hiding it.

What Burnett and Evans and even Jack don’t say about these “hidden” phenomena is that if something is hidden, someone is probably hiding it. The opacity of social norms and job opportunities help the ruling class stay in power, whether their intentions are conscious or not. But Burnett and Evans believe that managers will be swayed by smart thinking, untainted by bias:

[A] decision-maker will listen to you if she thinks you have good ideas that will help the company do more valuable things and be more successful. She doesn’t listen to you because she likes your dress, or because you used to date her cousin. (Sometimes those are the reasons, and that’s bad politics, but it’s pretty rare.)

Am I too cynical in thinking it’s not so rare? We’re doing people a disservice if we paint the world of work as a meritocratic utopia, where anyone can succeed if they just take the right steps. (In 2011, Lauren Berlant published her influential book Cruel Optimism, which she explained as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.” That concept has some resonance here.)

Someone could follow DYWL to the letter—do all of the exercises, network like a pro, and chameleon with the best of them—but still experience so much prejudice that she ends up more dejected than when she began, thinking she must have done something wrong. One person’s efforts can only do so much in the face of entrenched discrimination, wages that are too low where costs are too high, and the gradual breakdown of social safety nets and regulation over the last 50 years.

The mindfulness industry places a similar undue burden on the individual, according to Ronald Purser, management professor at San Francisco State University. In a scathing essay for The Guardian, Purser mocked Google’s mindfulness tsar for telling Googlers to look within, “for there, not in corporate culture—lies the source of your problems.” Advocates of the self-driven approach, Purser wrote, “rule out a curriculum that critically engages with causes of suffering in the structures of power and economic systems of capitalist society.”

Ignoring structural problems is what Anand Giridharadas derides in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World as “zooming in.” He bashes the TED zeitgeist that promotes compelling personal stories over the drier, more complex but more accurate truth of our prejudiced systems, saying that such a cultural paradigm leaves no space for appreciating “the thicket of circumstances that keep so many of us from being our fullest selves—some of them escapable through individual effort, but many of them not, being structural in nature, or depending on the choices of many other actors we do not control.”

Similarly, in their new book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn lament how the personal responsibility narrative has taken hold in America—partly by design, as an excuse to cut government safety nets. Kristof and WuDunn recount heartbreaking conversations with people who have internalized this narrative, and quote economist Esther Duflo wondering if “America’s ideology of mobility, the idea that anyone can achieve anything, empowers some poor people but leaves others feeling like failures and more prone to making bad choices.”

But Burnett and Evans aren’t talking to America’s poor: They’re talking to Stanford students. Their designer’s approach is the ultimate zoom in: Regardless of the context and constraints of the problem, there is a doable solution lying in wait. You just need to reframe, experiment, and find something that works within the constraints provided. If the constraints don’t truly constrain you, you’ll win.

So buyer beware that we’re not looking at the constraints here. Those are what Burnett and Evans in both of their books call “gravity problems,” because fighting them—injustice, global warming, homelessness, to name three of their examples—would be like fighting gravity. “The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance,” they wrote in Designing Your Life. Really? 

Don’t accept that? Well, then, go for it, crazy person: “We are all for aggressive and world-changing goals,” they insist in Designing Your Life. As long as you “become open-minded enough to accept reality,” a backhanded encouragement they repeat in DYWL. 

But Kristof and WuDunn and Giridharadas aren’t saying that mere mortals should take it upon themselves to change the system; they’re imploring us to see the system, for starters. Then there’s a lot of ground between ignoring systemic realities and personally trying to tear them down.

Burnett and Evans make it clear they didn’t “sign up for that fight.” But many people are in it whether they signed up or not. And declining to engage in the fight risks complicity in the conditions that make the fight necessary.

While Burnett and Evans’ book will help some people design a more satisfying work life for themselves, I would love to see the authors use their significant platform to issue a broader call to action—not just for the reader to attain happiness, but to help others get there, too. 

Courtney Harge does external relations for Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit that supports artists and arts organizations and is doing some amazing anti-racism, anti-oppression work, which includes giving benefits like remote work and unlimited vacation days to all staff, not just their highest-paid help. Harge told me:

Nobody would be comfortable being the only people who could work from home, when other people couldn't… There are a few things where people at the top of what was a hierarchical structure wanted to do the things, but they also wanted to enjoy the things, and so they needed to make sure that everybody else could also have access to the things… There is part of it that is like, ‘I want to build an equitable world.’ There's also a part of, ‘I want to enjoy my space in it, and if the way to do that is to also let you access your space in it, that feels like a simple solution.’

At the end of Designing Your Work Life, Burnett and Evans do nod to the bigger picture:

We often think that work frustration, overwhelm, disengagement, and burnout are personal problems. It’s our job and our fault if it’s not working, or our boss’s fault, or someone else’s fault. The truth is it’s not a personal problem alone. It’s a societal problem and a global problem. With disengagement at work at epidemic proportions, our work culture is not working, and the reason is that our organizations are filled with dysfunctional beliefs. This is not just a huge loss of productivity and performance; it’s a huge loss for our world. So much of work is wasted or lacking in purpose. We have real problems to solve and real challenges to face, and we need to transform our work culture so that it works for individuals, for organizations, and for societies.

Amen, Brothers. I get that you’re not writing that book now—but we are. We hope you’ll come along for the ride.

How have you taken initiative to fix your work life? What systemic or hidden barriers stood in your way? Tell us at hello@thelifeiwant.co.