A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
Jeff Bezos – Amazon Founder

Work metaphors offer visuals, beacons, insights, scripts, and Work Lessons Earned. Metaphors help us design a vision of what to expect from work. The career ladder is a great visual metaphor. A VUCAN started at the bottom and with the right effort climbed each rung.

BTW: VUCAN(R) is an VUCA iNhabitant.

The career ladder told us what the organization, its work, and expectations were for each of us. Your work metaphor is how you view work and make work based decisions.

Story: One commonly heard metaphor is you’re becoming an actor in the theater of work.

A VUCAN will move from job-to-job, project-to-project like actors moving from play-to-play, production-to-production on TV, radio, movies, and Broadway. Some roles are starring – most are supporting. The career ladder is pretty much dead during VUCA time. A career follows a zig-zag journey of knowledge acquisition and personal fulfillment. The ladder metaphor was inspirational because it implied there was always an opportunity for a promotion and a place to go.

Or, your career moves are described in terms of horizontal or lateral progression in a webbed organization. You start at the middle and move outwards on one of the strands. Sometimes, you detour on a lateral strand to start a new career, job, or even a business. This happening with VUCANs doing startups.

Or, is your career a patchwork quilt? You develop valuea dding skills and move around a chessboard or patchwork quilt. While these metaphors are not as powerful and inspirational as the career ladder, one will arise that most of us will accept in VUCA time.

Or another metaphor is the screw. We’ve all been in this mess before. Nothing further needs to be said.

Work Lesson Earned: We all have a vision or script of how our work will enfold. It’s standard with all of us. We go to college. We learn about ourselves. We get a degree. We then get married, buy a house and have 2.6 kids. In a VUCA world, this scenario can change abruptly due to off-screen risk events. The COVID world view based on new work paradigms are shifting our expectations. Adaptability and resilience have become a work or even a life necessity.

So, what’s your work and career metaphor? BTW: There is no right answer. Just an important fact of work you need to think about.