Intelligent Career Model
Dimension: Direction · Type: Stage
Three questions to run on yourself before any career conversation: Why do you do what you do (values, energy, purpose), How do you do it (skills you have and skills you need), and Whom do you do it with (network, who knows about your purpose). The Whom is the most underused of the three.
Introduced by Hannah Nash (Director, Business Development Executive and Coach, 10Eighty) at the Own Your Future, Make Your Role Matter session of the UN Inter-Agency Career Week 2026, on 8 May 2026, as the three-question diagnostic she runs on herself and her clients before any career conversation. The underlying construct is from Arthur, Inkson and Pringle’s The New Careers (Sage, 1999), which formalised three “ways of knowing” as the building blocks of intelligent career capital.
The framework
If you cannot answer all three questions, work on the weakest first.
When to use it
- Before any career conversation: an annual review, a meeting with a mentor, a coffee chat with a sponsor, a meeting with HR, a recruiter call.
- When you feel stuck and cannot tell whether the problem is direction (Why), capability (How), or network (Whom).
- As a quarterly self-check during periods of organisational change.
- As a coaching template when supporting a colleague who is unclear on their next move.
What you need
Honest awareness of your current state across all three dimensions. 30 to 45 minutes for the first full pass; 10 minutes for subsequent check-ins. Pen and paper or a notes document; the questions land harder when you write rather than think.
The three questions
1. Knowing Why. What gets you up in the morning. Your values, what you care about, your energy sources, the impact you want to make.
This is what most people approach last and pay the smallest deliberate attention to. It is also what every other dimension hangs from. Without a clear Why, the How and the Whom drift into busywork. Operationally, the Why is what produces a personal purpose statement (see Five Whys for Purpose). It is what you return to on bad days.
2. Knowing How. The skills you currently have and the skills you need. Technical skills, domain knowledge, human skills (leadership, communication, negotiation, facilitation, coaching, judgement under pressure).
The honest version: How is not a list of past trainings; it is the working inventory of what you can deploy now. The Skill Matrix Audit is the structured way to make the inventory explicit. The Skills-First Approach is the broader stance that organises a career around How rather than around job titles.
3. Knowing Whom. Your network. Who knows about your purpose. Who would speak up for you. Who can help you, and whom you can help. Who has the perspective, vantage point, or experience that fits a question you have.
The session was emphatic that Whom is the most underused of the three. Most people invest deeply in How (skills development), moderately in Why (values clarification), and barely at all in Whom (deliberate network building). If you cannot name the people who would speak up for you, that is the gap, not a side project.
Steps
- Take the three questions in order. Why, How, Whom. On paper.
- Spend more time on the weakest answer. Most people are reasonably clear on one of the three and weak on at least one other. Identify the weakest and work on it.
- Run a mini-action for each weak dimension. For Why: schedule the Five Whys for Purpose exercise. For How: run a Skill Matrix Audit. For Whom: list three to five people who know about your purpose; if the list is short, name two new conversations to start this month.
- Re-check before each significant career conversation. The questions are short; running them ten minutes before the conversation focuses what you bring.
- Re-run quarterly during high-change periods. All three answers shift faster than people expect.
Worked example
A P-3 specialist runs the three questions before her annual development conversation with her supervisor.
- Knowing Why. “I get up because I care about programmes that demonstrably change something for the people they are meant to serve. Energy comes from synthesis across complex inputs and from working with country-office colleagues. The impact I want is on the operational quality of programmes, not on policy work.”
- Knowing How. Strong: results-based programme management, multilingual stakeholder coordination, donor reporting. Stretching: data interpretation in Power BI; AI-assisted synthesis. Gaps: experience leading a cross-country evaluation; political acumen at the regional bureau level.
- Knowing Whom. Three people clearly know about her purpose: her current supervisor, a former mentor at another agency, a peer in the regional bureau. Two more she should tell about it: a sponsor in the country office she would like to learn from, and a colleague in the data unit who could help with the AI-assisted synthesis ambition.
She walks into the development conversation with a coherent argument across all three dimensions, three concrete asks (one per dimension), and a clearer sense of who else needs to know about what she is working on. The conversation produces commitments rather than generalities.
On the Whom: a recurring blind spot
The session asked the audience how often they tell people about their successes. The response: “we have a lonely heart”. Almost no one does it.
The operational consequence: people whose purpose is only known to themselves cannot be helped by their network. Recognition, sponsorship, and opportunity all flow through people who know what you are working on. If you have a clear Why and a strong How but a weak Whom, you will be busy and competent and largely invisible.
Three operational moves to strengthen Whom:
- Name three to five people who know your purpose. If the list is shorter than three, the priority is starting two to three new conversations this month.
- Tell people about your successes when something goes well. Not as boasting; as part of the work.
- Help people who come to you. If you would help someone who came to you with a request, assume the same of others, and ask. The session’s reframe on the “no one will help me” objection was direct: if your answer to the mirrored question is yes, then act.
Pitfalls
- Skipping the Whom. The most common failure mode. People run a thoughtful Why and a structured How, then never act on Whom. Career growth stalls quietly.
- Treating the three as one-off. All three answers shift over time. Re-run quarterly.
- Letting the How dominate. Many people are most comfortable in the How because skills are concrete and trainings are visible. The disproportionate investment in How without the Why and the Whom produces a strong CV in service of an unclear direction.
- Confusing “I have a network” with Whom. A list of LinkedIn connections is not Whom. Whom is the small set of people who know your purpose, who would speak up for you, and to whom you have given enough of yourself that the relationship is mutual.
- Running the questions in your head. The exercise loses much of its effect. Write.
When not to use it
When you are in acute distress and need regulation first. The three questions are for clear-headed planning. In an acute moment, run a body-based reset and locate yourself on the William Bridges Transitional Model curve before reaching for ICM.
When the conversation is purely operational (“can you cover this meeting next Tuesday?”). Save ICM for conversations about direction and capability.
How I use it
Personal note pending. Davide to fill.
Related frameworks
- Five Whys for Purpose, the recursive questioning technique that operationalises the Knowing Why dimension and produces a personal purpose statement.
- Four-Loop Alignment, the personal-organisational alignment exercise that pairs with the Why dimension at the organisational level.
- 3 to 5 Key Result Areas, the prioritisation tool for converting the Why and How into daily action.
- Five Ws Plus How, Career Scaffold, the unsticking scaffold that often surfaces the dimension that is actually weak.
Notes compiled by Davide Piga. Last updated 2026-05-09.