I was working with a client who was ascertaining his next career move. He’s unhappy where he is, but unsure as to where he’d like to land, and the ambiguity was causing him a fair bit of stress. My perspective was that he had skipped over the middle part of the process — the exploration, list-making, pondering, questioning of others who know him well — and wanted to skip right to the end where he had the answers.
It reminded me of the Working Genius model, which outlines the stages of work (Ideation, Activation, Implementation) and how, in our certification training, they alerted us that it was common for teams to move right to action without first discerning whether the idea was a good one. In other words, they skipped the middle stage of the work.
Psychologist William Bridges noticed the same phenomenon in his work, Managing Transitions, and urged people to embrace the interval (aka “middle”) stage as the place where most creativity happens. Rather than skipping over it and getting right to the beginning, people undergoing transitions should live in the limbo to see what emerges.
Some Education faculty refer to middle school students as the “Oreos” because it’s in the middle where the good things happen. The crème of knowledge you seek might be in the middle stage of your rumination. Don’t jump too quickly to a conclusion, or you might miss the good stuff.
