Eleanor Ford
“I want to figure out what’s next.”
It’s something I hear often, at Zinc and beyond. And each time, it carries more than a question. It’s a signal of readiness - not just for a job change, but for a shift in direction. A fresh alignment between skills and meaning. A willingness to step out of default and into design.
The people that ask me this are thoughtful, accomplished, and hungry for more. They’ve built strong careers and skills. But they’re looking up and out, curious about how they can have more purpose, more impact, more meaning.
And there’s often a catalyst.
Sometimes it’s professional: an exit, a restructure, or a promotion that doesn’t feel quite right. Other times, it’s personal: the birth of a child, the experience of illness or bereavement, the emergence of a new perspective that makes old goals feel too small.
As I’ve written before, I’ve had those moments myself.
Whatever the cause, a quiet but urgent realisation takes root: “It’s time to use your time and talent differently.”
Of course, that’s easier said than done. When you’ve spent years climbing a ladder, it takes courage to ask whether that ladder is leaning against the right wall. And even more courage to consider what other walls (or ladders?) might exist.
I often think of what social theorist Pierre Bourdieu called social ageing - not the ageing of the body, but of the imagination. The way our sense of possibility narrows over time, shaped by identity, duty, and other people’s expectations. We’re building a space to resist that contraction.
Having met over 15,000 people navigating career crossroads through our venture builder, coaching network, and wider Zinc community, we saw a pattern: the desire for meaning and change, the weight of uncertainty, and - often - a quiet sense of isolation in this experience.
We built Inflection to create a shared space for reflection, experimentation, and momentum. To shift from proving ourselves to improving ourselves - and, by doing so, the world around us.
A Changing World, A Call for New Problem-Solvers
This isn’t just a personal story. It’s a global one.
The future of work is no longer a distant horizon - it’s a shifting terrain we’re all navigating. As AI, climate change, demographic shifts, and political upheaval reshape every sector, the idea of a linear career path is fast becoming obsolete. Reinvention isn’t a luxury or a response to crisis - it’s a lifelong discipline. One that demands new tools, new communities, and new ways of thinking about what a career is for.
With this backdrop - and the profound shifts it reveals - we have the opportunity to reimagine how we allocate our talent differently.
“The most underutilised resource in our society isn't capital or time—it's talent.”
- David Brooks
Indeed, we’re not suffering from a shortage of ideas, skills, or ambition - we’re suffering from a misdirection of them. Too much talent is stuck in the wrong problems: optimising ads, chasing margins, scaling what shouldn’t scale. And even those working on meaningful issues - researchers, scientists, clinicians - are too often trapped in broken systems, slow pathways, or institutional silos that blunt their potential.
What we need now is a redirection - of energy, intelligence, and creativity - toward the challenges that define our time. Not just more talent, but talent aligned with purpose and in service of progress.
For us at Zinc, this redirection is core to our Science for Impact agenda. We believe many of the world’s most urgent problems - across health, the environment, education, and society - are not suffering from a shortage of knowledge, but a shortage of people working on the right things, in the right way. Scientific talent is underutilised, commercial talent is locked out of science, and innovation systems remain siloed and slow, unable to fulfil the potential of the people within them.
That’s why we built Inflection.
Inflection is our response: helping talented people find their way into the problems that matter most, and creating new pathways that bring purpose and progress back into alignment. It sits at the intersection of two truths:
- People want more purposeful work.
- The world urgently needs better problem-solvers.
Bridging those truths takes work. It means asking harder questions about who work is for - and how we unlock talent where it’s most needed.
So What Gets in the Way?
The pace of change has made adaptability and self-authorship core career skills. But things get in the way:
- Internal blockers: fear of change, identity, belief, stagnation
- External blockers: lack of visible entry points, sunk costs, permission structures, absence of real models for nonlinear careers
We’ve learned that people don’t just need inspiration - they need the conditions for courage, the conditions to Inflect. We believe this means:
- A Catalyst – Create a moment and space to recalibrate what matters, where you can initiate prototyping and de-risk your future career
- Coaching – Get clear about your North Star and build awareness of your own patterns, mindset, and motivation
- Content – Find inspiration with tools, frameworks, and experiments to test what’s next
- Capital – Define your proposition, with access to people, ideas, science, and opportunities
- Community – Broaden your circle with a group that holds you to account and roots you in action, a positive social contagion for change
We draw on what we’ve learned from years of venture building at Zinc, but we’ve adapted it for a different kind of challenge: personal transformation with mission impact. As Reid Hoffman puts it:
“All humans are entrepreneurs now.”
- Reid Hastings, founder of LinkedIn
What You’ll Take Away
This isn’t a bootcamp. It’s not a sabbatical. It’s a space for building what’s next - with pace, depth, and support. Our methodology is rooted in five core principles:
→ Person-first We start with a coaching mindset. Change begins with knowing yourself.
→ Mission and purpose-driven Human potential must serve missions, not just markets.
→ Action over introspection We learn by doing. We test, build, iterate - with a bias toward action.
“We learn who we are by acting, not by thinking.”
– Herminia Ibarra
→ Inter-disciplinarity The future belongs to people with depth and range. Creative re-combiners. Boundary-crossers.
→ Community as catalyst You don’t do this alone. Talent unlocks impact. But community unlocks talent.
This platform for career reinvention is not as a one-off intervention, but as an ongoing system of support, experimentation, and possibility. With new pathways, tools, and offers for individuals, teams, and organisations - on, off, and between jobs.
In our pilot:
- 90%+ of participants reported increased clarity in their career direction
- 100% shifted from analysis paralysis to structured action
- Participants took concrete career steps during the 6-week programme
- New networks formed with ongoing, meaningful connections
- Practical frameworks were adopted and are still in use
- Mindset transformations from rigid to adaptive and curious
What’s Next for You?
For me, building Inflection has been its own inflection point. It’s brought together years of work on innovation, coaching, talent, and systems - and reminded me how powerful it can be, at any stage of life, to ask with fresh eyes:
What’s next for me - and how can I make it matter?
If that question is alive in you, we’d love to build with you.
🚀 Applications now open
Applications are now open for the Inflection Explore Fellowship - a new opportunity to explore and experiment with what’s next, in your career and beyond, alongside a cohort of thoughtful, ambitious peers.
This is the first of several products and services we’re launching to help you design a life of greater impact and possibility.