A Chaos Theory for Career Counseling?

Do career pathways and development arise from a carefully constructed plan that entails research, assessment tools and goal setting, or do career opportunities occur by a series of serendipitous chances from seemingly unrelated events?  These two career development concepts are discussed in a recently published book entitled: A Chaos Theory of Careers: A New Perspective on Working in the 21^st Century (Robert Pryor, Jim Bright). As someone who facilitates the process of career decision making for many of those whom I serve, I have often struggled to reconcile these two ideas.

Personally, I’ve always felt extremely attracted to chaos theory; small changes in a dynamic system at one level will reverberate and amplify in unanticipated ways throughout interconnected levels of the system. The popular cultural idea of  this is captured in the concept of the “butterfly effect” coined by Edward Lorenz, whose wings set in motion a series of events that cascade into major and seemingly unrelated outcomes (like affecting the weather a continent away) .

I also fall under the belief (illusion?) that because scientific research, through sound principles, can illuminate causality between two or more things, it must have equal explanatory power for future causality. Take for instance the weather. Even if we can pull apart, examine and understand everything that led to a particular tornado’s occurrence we cannot predict that under the exact same set of circumstances another tornado would even form.  It’s not a matter of some measurement that might have been missed or some possible unknown “X factor”, it’s simply that a small change in the beginning or initial stages of a system impact later stages in different ways under the same exact conditions. There is no way to completely predict the exact outcome. A set or series of probable outcomes; yes, but an exact outcomes – never.

How does this relate to one’s own career or choice of future career paths? The traditional model of career advising seeks to help one become self-aware through a series of tools and instruments that help delineate one’s preferences, interests and values – a “best fit” model. Understand a person’s interests, values, and preferences, and then seek to match them with an occupation that best relates. We can call this the modernist approach or positivist approach.  The postmodern approach to career advising entails having the advisee construct meaning from past experiences (work, life, family, spirituality) and thereby bring to light a pattern (life theme, map, life meaning, etc) that can then be aligned with a particular career path. In a very tiny nutshell, these two concepts have been the major theories that have propelled the career development ideology for many decades.

The authors of the book propose a new theory that integrates both of these concepts in a way that values both of their contributions. “Open systems thinking” captures the general idea of a chaos theory of careers by arguing that systems have constituent parts contained in a dynamic system where boundaries are ill-defined and impacts from chance encounters, events and circumstances will impact these parts in unknown ways. Looking at your own career development. What unknowns arose that you could not have possibly anticipated and how have your decisions and your pathways diverged from even your best laid plans and goals?  Ultimately, we can incorporate chaos and the unknown into our career planning and we should seek to embrace this - not "factor out" or insulate ourselves from the vagaries of life's chances.

This book was an amazing read simply for the fact that it gave me vindication of sorts for my internal struggles in my role as a career advisor. Can we really ever make a perfect decision about our future careers? Can we account and plan for all possible scenarios and situations that might come about in the future? Yet the tools, instruments and self reflection that a career advisor utilizes with another is able to set one on a new path with new goals and a new vision of what their future life and work could be. However, a new path that is closed to the possibilities and impacts of future circumstances, chance meetings and seemingly new directions could miss the greatest career development possibility of all – a career path or occupational opportunity that one could have never possibly imagined in their wildest dreams.