From Execution to Authorship: Design Thinking and the Veteran Transition

Dec 7

Constraint First, Solution Second

On deployments, nothing ever arrived the way it was supposed to. Equipment was late, parts were missing, instructions were unclear, and the environment never matched the plan. You learned quickly not to wait for ideal conditions. You worked with what was in front of you. You improvised, borrowed, rebuilt, adapted. There was no romance in it. Just necessity. And over time, that necessity trained a particular way of thinking into the body: constraint first, solution second.

Military service members are pragmatic by necessity. I admit my bias, but in my view, especially Marines. They work with less, improvise constantly, and solutionize inside severe constraints in the most high-stakes situations. Creativity flourishes in this environment not because it is innate, but because it is trained into the body through repetition and pressure. This cannot be generalized across every service member, but the pattern is real.

From Execution to Authorship

The challenge after the military is not that veterans lack problem-solving ability. It is that they were trained to work inside pre-defined problem spaces. Someone else already decided what mattered. Someone else already set the objective. Civilian life, by contrast, requires the capacity to author the problem itself. That shift is not cosmetic. It is cognitive. The military optimizes for execution under constraint. Civilian life demands judgment under ambiguity.

Identity-Centered vs. Function-Centered Framing

Questions like How do I become a professor, a doctor, a police officer? are forms of identity- and role-centered framing. They begin with a socially recognized title and work backward toward legitimacy. Design thinking inverts this sequence. It starts by interrogating the daily functions of the role itself: What does this person actually do all day? What kinds of problems dominate their attention? What forms of labor fill most of the hours: cognitive, emotional, administrative, physical, bureaucratic? Once those functions are made visible, many people realize the role is not what they imagined. Others discover that the work aligns closely with what they already enjoy and are skilled at. Either way, clarity replaces projection.

The Professorship Example

Take the example of becoming a professor. One version of the problem is: How do I become a professor? That leads immediately to solutioning: admissions, GREs, funding, dissertations, tenure. But another version of the problem is: Why do I want to become a professor? To research, to write, to share knowledge, to build status, to teach. Once that question is surfaced, the solution space explodes. Professorship becomes one possible vehicle, not the definition of the goal. The problem statement shifts from How do I become X? to How do I do the work I actually care about?

That shift, from institution-centered framing to function-centered framing, is the core move of design thinking.

What Design Thinking Actually Does

Design thinking is not brainstorming. It is not ideation for its own sake. At its core, it is a disciplined loop:

Surface hidden assumptions
Frame a tentative problem
Test it through small real-world action
Observe what reality returns
Reframe the problem based on evidence
Repeat

The goal is not to get the solution right. The goal is to get the problem less wrong with each iteration.

Making, in this sense, is not about producing objects. It is about producing evidence. It is about acting in ways small enough to survive failure but real enough to generate information you cannot think your way into. This way of approaching careers as something to be tested rather than declared parallels the life-design framework popularized by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in Designing Your Life, which treats career paths as prototypes rather than fixed identities (Burnett & Evans, 2016).

Where my thinking diverges is in applying this logic under the specific constraints veterans face: hierarchical conditioning, status loss, compressed time horizons, financial precarity, and the psychological pressure to preserve the meaning of service.

The Cybersecurity Case

The cybersecurity pathway illustrates what happens when this reframing is skipped. Many veterans pursue cybersecurity because it promises quick money, proximity to security work, and narrative and career continuity with Defense. But cyber is rarely quick. It often requires years of low pay, uncertain entry, credential churn, and exposure to volatile labor markets. The real design question is not Can I do cyber? It is:

What assumptions am I making about speed, income, and stability?
What evidence do I actually have?
How much uncertainty can I afford, and for how long?

Without testing those assumptions through small, lived experiments, veterans often substitute narrative for data.

The Pressure Not to “Waste” Service

I also recognize the psychological pressure to “not let the military go to waste.” I felt it deeply. The fear is not only economic. It is symbolic: the fear of sunk time, lost status, and falling behind civilian peers.

Without anything visible to show for it, the thought starts to creep in that I am already far behind my non-veteran peers. That getting out before retirement may have been the wrong choice, not only in my own private accounting but in the imagined judgment of others. At thirty, that is not a healthy place to live mentally. The idea of starting from scratch feels less like freedom and more like free fall.

That fear shaped my actions: transfer credits, general education optimization, choosing institutions that would honor ACE credits. These were not merely academic decisions. They were identity-preserving strategies.

Design thinking makes this dynamic visible. It exposes how much of career decision-making is driven not by opportunity, but by unexamined loyalty to past identity.

Many veterans choose roles that visibly preserve military identity: cyber, law enforcement, security, project management, “leadership.” These are not irrational choices. They protect meaning. They preserve narrative continuity. But they can also over-constrain the problem space before real exploration begins.

Two Design Strategies for Transition

I now see two broad design strategies for transition.

One is sandbox experimentation. This means running small, low-stakes tests: a single class, a certificate, a short contract, volunteer work, a side project, informational interviews. Failure is contained. Feedback is fast. Pivot costs are survivable. The goal is not success. The goal is information.

The other is radical commitment. You choose a narrow institutional path and accept years of deep uncertainty in exchange for a long-term payoff: medicine, law, academia, specialized trades. This is a legitimate strategy. But it only works when chosen consciously, with eyes open to time horizon, attrition rates, financial exposure, and emotional cost.

Neither strategy is inherently superior. Each carries a different risk distribution. The mistake is not choosing one over the other. The mistake is confusing commitment with exploration, or mistaking narrative certainty for tested evidence.

Redefining the Problem

Redefining the problem gives veterans back agency. Not only to choose different solutions, but to choose different questions:

What kind of uncertainty can I tolerate?
What kind of work gives me energy rather than just status?
What do I want to preserve, and what am I willing to let dissolve?

That is the heart of design. And that is why the design process belongs in veteran transition work.