The Joy of T3PMO

I’m not sure I have ever seen as many people in my LinkedIn feed who are listing themselves as “#OpenToWork.” Part of that is the time of year – this is when school graduates are most actively looking for work. But the biggest number of folks I am seeing on my feed are a new set — people who’ve had research grants or contracts or foreign aid programs they work on paused or zeroed out.

Over the years I think I’ve probably taken a little more than my share of meetings who want advice about getting or changing jobs. I think it is part of our mutual responsibility to help each other out during times of transition. But I also find I genuinely learn something from the people I meet with.

Mostly the people I meet with want information or connections I might have about specific jobs they are looking at.  Who do I know at that company? Would I be willing to make a call? Serve as a reference?

T3PMO can turn job search upside down.

I try to do what I can to help. But I don’t let them go without telling them about the job strategy that has been most helpful to me: what I call T3PMO.

I stumbled on it accidentally. In the mid-90’s, I was desperately unhappy in my current job. My fiancé (now wife) and I began a series of brainstorming sessions with another friend about things I could do that would be 1) useful (as defined by me; I wanted to do something I thought would “do some good”; 2) interesting (something that I would be excited about doing); 3) discrete (something with a clearly defined, theoretically achievable goal).

By the end of a few meetings, we’d figured it out. We pitched it to my boss and he agreed to fund it. I had a new job.

When I was close to accomplishing the goals of that job, I realized I might be able to use a similar process to create another one. This time I started a document with a blank piece of paper. On top of it I wrote the heading “Ten Things That Piss Me Off.”

My deal with myself was that I couldn’t start looking for the next thing until I had a list of ten things I was annoyed about and needed “fixing” – and that I had an idea about how to fix.

Once I got to 10 ideas, I did some research on them and started shopping them around. Then I had breakfast and lunch and coffee meetings with people who might know something about some of the ideas. I wrote emails, talked on the phone.

And it worked again. I got another new job, working on one of the ideas.

Over the years, I used the process, which I started abbreviating as “T3PMO,” to create six other jobs.

It played out in similar ways each time.

·      Some of the ideas that I thought were brilliant went away because people convinced me that either the idea or my proposed “solution” was stupid.

·      Some ideas, people said, were decent ideas, but I didn’t have the right skills to pull them off.

·      Some ideas people thought were good, but knew that someone else smarter was already working on them.

As I looked back through my lists this week, I realized that each time there was one of my ten ideas that  I was particularly fond of, and most every time that one died an early and ignominious death. I can’t lie: it hurts to have something you think is a “great” idea shot down.

·      A strategy I liked to reinvent Medicaid (“M2.0”) collapsed -- turns out you need to understand either Medicaid or insurance, preferably both, if you want to reform them. I didn’t.

·      The “Office of Nudge,” an agency that would test out high-leverage, low-cost interventions to accomplish public policy, could never find a government backer.

·      An idea I called “the McKinsey of Nonprofits,” with a SWAT team coming in to help nonprofits salvage failing projects, could never find a philanthropic backer.

·      Even though I was convinced it was a good idea, I never had the political acumen to form “Metrural” -- a voting coalition of left-behind inner city and rural folks (or maybe it was just a really bad name!).

·      An idea called “The Justice League,” an incubator and mentoring program for social entrepreneurs, made three different T3PMO lists… and never got any traction.

But the good thing about having TEN ideas is that when some of them don’t work, you’re not hosed. There are others.

Each time I did a T3PMO list there were 2-3 ideas that survived the initial hazing process. I went back and developed those ideas into 5-7 page business plans. Then I took the narrowed list back out for vetting. Eventually, each time, one idea “won”: I thought it was useful, interesting and discrete; someone with the money to make it happen agreed with me. And I ended up with a series of jobs that made very excited to get up and go to work every morning.

In the 1880’s, John Venn created this chart to show that there can be a sweet spot of overlap between three different sets of information — the “Venn diagram.” For T3PMO, the ideal job is one that is useful (however you define useful), you are interested in, and has a discrete, accomplishable end.

I mention the process to jobseekers not because what worked for me will work for everybody, but because it changes the way they look for jobs. Instead of trying to convince and contort themselves into fighting for jobs they aren’t passionate about, what if they tried to find their passion, and find other people who might share it?

Because of my interests and skills, most of my ideas on my T3PMO’s ended up being in the nonprofit or government sectors. But there’s no reason the process couldn’t work in the private sector. If you don’t think you are ready for a free-standing startup, is there a new app that would extend a product you love? A different way of doing approaching HR you could convince a company to try out? A new market you could help your favorite company develop?

And even if it doesn’t work, the process has several potential side benefits. By identifying how you want to work and what you want to work on, you can narrow down your job search significantly. If you meet with a bunch of people and they come to know you as someone who thinks creatively, even if your ideas don’t go forward, word might get out that you are a person who is creative and innovative. And even if you aren’t working to solve the problems that frustrate you through a full-time job, you might be able to do some work on it in your free time or as a board member.

God knows there is a world of things in this world that are broken right now. And there is a world of people who are happy to complain about them. We need more people who see it as their job and their responsibility to find their passion and start working on solutions.

So what’s on your T3PMO list? And what’s stopping you from working on it?

-Leslie

Notes:

Federal buyouts: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5343631/trump-federal-employees-resign-layoffs

Health care layoffs: https://apnews.com/article/health-human-services-layoffs-restructuring-rfk-jr-ec4d7731695e4204970c7eab953b2289

IRS layoffs: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/04/irs-sends-rif-notices-it-begins-widespread-layoffs/404317/

Summary of federal cuts: https://www.dcnewsnow.com/news/local-news/washington-dc/new-report-shows-federal-government-leading-job-cuts-in-all-sectors-as-federal-employees-are-offered-more-buyouts/