Shapeshifting is not something you study at university. There is no course for it, for now at least – but even if there was to be (which is one of our ambitions), it would be far closer to a reflective accompaniment to learning ‘on-the-job’.

However, we should be mindful not to discard learning. If shapeshifting is a craft, it means that it develops over time. Natural talent and aptitudes or family profile might well play a role – this is not the space to explore it – but it’s not simply ‘something people have’: it’s something that people develop. They can do so through necessity, curiosity, exposure.

Across our interviews and observations, three main developmental routes appeared.

1. Roles where you have to make it work

These are environments where a) failure is directly visible and b) the work is not to follow an established process but somehow adapt to dynamic and suboptimal conditions. Those can be:

• Solopreneur or micro-founder: whether it’s a side project, a social enterprise, a collective, or an emerging entrepreneurial venture, the founder has to make it work: juggling strategy, operations, culture, survival. There is nobody to blame if things don’t work, no PD to hide behind. There is very high agency, and consequences.
• Troubleshooter: when you run events, work in a festival, film production, youth camp, or overseas immersion program, you constantly face uncertainty and decisions. Things don’t go to plan, you need to compromise, use lateral thinking, balance material failures with relational smoothing over. It’s shapeshifting, the chaos version.
• First follower: we use this word to describe early employees at a start-up or small business. When the work is to build the plane while flying it, all sorts of things must happen without systems or resources, and the strategy seems to shift every few weeks.

2. Roles that teach you whole-system vision

Positions close to top decision-making are often well-suited to budding shapeshifters. You see how organisations actually operate, receive mentorship from senior leaders, learning executive wisdom, not just survival tactics for budget bartering and ladder climbing.

• Executive support and executive assistance: directly supporting a top executive, especially the CEO. We find a number of them now describing that they’re ‘acting chief of staff’ – but it begins by sitting in to meetings, reading emails, observing all the diplomacy that goes into holding an organisation, and the behind the scene tensions. A good executive support person develops great capacity for confidentiality, and emotionally holding things together through stress.
• Second in command: a role that explicitly exists to make things work. This can be the COO, CFO, CPO, or someone with a looser role in a smaller structure who has similar purview as the CEO to ‘look after the whole’. Here, what often serves well is complementary skills and temperament, not just intrinsic qualities.
• Board advisor, board member, or secretary: seasoned shapeshifters in particular often hold parallel roles, including advising founders and businesses. lateral exposure strengthens pattern recognition and systemic intuition. In this role, they get to hear first-hand about the challenges of decision making, learn about trade-offs, and balancing perspective.

3. Roles that require translation across worlds

These are roles where synthesis is the job: shapeshifters are likely to learn through those:

• Consultants and Innovation Lab Staff. They move across industries, sectors, and cultures, training their eyes and minds to see recurring patterns. They also learn to adapt and build trust very rapidly.
• Transdisciplinary Specialists. Some people begin as specialists, in tech, education, design, health, and stretch toward systems-level work. This can often be seen from the time of studies, where they will have ‘odd’ extra-curriculars for their major. Or, they might come into a sector after retraining. They then evolve towards ‘in-between roles’. With the rise of Ai-related disruption, we’re likely to see more of those!
• Community Managers. Shapeshifting is relational. Community managers sit at the intersection of care, logistics, and culture – including receptionists and other front-desk workers. They have very high levels of insight in the organisation, especially its social fabric, and often interface with the rest of the world, even by handling couriers, suppliers, etc. Yet their formal power is often very low: a shapeshifter-like position.