Building Sustainable Futures Brick by Brick: Exploring Reactions to Career Shocks Through LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®

Unexpected job loss can cause psychological distress and financial strain, limiting individuals’ ability to explore new career paths and future selves. While traditional career research has focused primarily on retrospective sensemaking to understand how individuals cope with such career shocks, the future is not a simple extension of the past. This article adopts a prospective sensemaking lens to explore how individuals engage in prospective sensemaking when presented with a simulated career shock. Drawing on data from eight LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshops with 42 participants, we identify four distinct imagined responses that vary along two continuous dimensions: agency (i.e., reflective versus active responses) and optimism (i.e., thriving versus surviving): Receptive Pause, Transformative Redemption, Survival with Sacrifice, and Enduring the Darkness. We further show how individuals envision actively leveraging their nonwork domains when being confronted with a career shock. Specifically, nonwork identities can function as important transitional roles that provide continuity, a sense of agentic direction, and enduring connection. Overall, this exploratory study augments contemporary career theories toward anticipation and future-oriented career agency, demonstrating how imagined futures may shape present-day affect, cognition, and behavior. We conclude the article by offering a set of empirically grounded propositions that can guide future research.