Concept
Life Design Team
A life design team is a small group of supporters, collaborators, intimates and mentors who meet regularly to hear your life design ideas, push back on them and keep your real-world experiments moving.
In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans argue that life design stalls when it stays in your notebook. The problem is rarely a shortage of ideas. It is that nobody else is in the loop, so no one notices when you skip an experiment or quietly drift back to the safe plan. Their answer is to treat life design as a team sport. The people around you are not an audience for a finished plan. They are part of how the plan gets made. Each person plays a different role. Supporters cheer you on. Collaborators work through ideas and prototypes with you. Intimates, such as a partner or closest friend, know how a choice will land in your actual life. Mentors bring experience and perspective you don't have. A team of three to five people that meets on a steady rhythm turns good intentions into scheduled next steps.
A real-life example
Maya is a hospital nurse curious about health-tech. She spent six months sketching possible futures alone and booked nothing. Then she asked three people to meet every second Sunday: a former colleague now in product design, her sister, and a friend who simply asks good questions. At the first meeting she committed out loud to one prototype conversation within two weeks. She knew they would ask about it, so she booked it the next morning.
How to use it
- 1List who already fills each role (supporter, collaborator, intimate, mentor) and invite three to five people. Make clear you want a sounding board for experiments, not approval for a decision.
- 2Agree on a steady rhythm, such as one hour every two weeks. Open each meeting with what you tried since last time and what you learned.
- 3Close every meeting by naming one small experiment with a date, so the group's next question is simply: did you do it?