When Titles Stop Carrying You

A dialogue between RIZOM co-founders on professional identity, symbolic topology, and crossing thresholds

Just over a year ago, Marianne Magnin and Dr Abol Froushan began shaping RIZOM around a shared conviction: that meaning does not arrive from the outside, but can be surfaced from within through practices of self-reflection and self-authorship, free from evaluation.

This opening dialogue marks a pause in the forward motion. It looks back on their longer journeys that preceded RIZOM, and reflects on what happens when titles lose their organising power, when identity enters a threshold space, and when new symbolic architectures are required to continue moving with coherence.

Marianne Magnin (MM): Revisiting my corporate life, progression was never only about accumulating skills, experience and networks. It was also about titles. Naming mattered. From trainee to senior auditor, then into finance leadership and global roles: each designation confirmed competence, expanded scope, tightened the bond between identity and function. A long string of titles, not unlike the strings of pearls women wore in the late 19th century: the longer and more conspicuous, the greater the promise of legitimacy.

At PwC and earlier at Coopers & Lybrand, hierarchy was explicit and meticulously staged. At Shell, the system appeared more fluid, yet seniority was still encoded: job groups, letters, numbers governing authority and scope.

Abol Froushan (AF): The title is the coordinate system. The institution gives you a position in its geometry.

When I ran my own Career Reading, something similar emerged. On the surface, my trajectory looks like I kept changing fields: nuclear engineering, then digital, then enterprise architecture, now RIZOM. Completely different sectors.

But the reading revealed what stayed constant underneath. I kept entering domains where complexity had outgrown the existing language, and I kept building the next system that could hold meaning without collapsing it.

MM: So not job progression. World’s technological succession.

AF: Exactly. Each domain reached its limit. In my first job was in the nuclear industry, I was designing security systems: proof under existential constraint. Then the web arrived in 1993, and suddenly there was a medium that could carry both engineering and imagination at once. Later, enterprise architecture: organisational reality as something you could actually map and navigate. Now RIZOM: meaning itself as infrastructure.

The surface kept changing whilst the underlying pattern stayed the same.

MM: This shows a continuum and logics beyond the change of your sectors and job titles.  

On my end, I had drawn a clear trajectory in my late teens: I would spend some time in the  corporate world before exiting towards the arts, leaving some flexibility as to what I would do and in which industry I would build my business skills. When I actually did it, before turning forty, my intuition was not to rush. I gave myself a full year. To explore, to meet people, to analyse as a semi-outsider, to test whether my corporate toolbox still had value, and to recalibrate.

When a career ends abruptly, especially through dismissal, what we call the seam gives way. For years, meaning has been externally scaffolded. Title, employer brand, organisational narrative: these provide an exoskeleton. Over time, they become seamed together into a stable identity. The seam holds as long as lived experience keeps confirming the narrative.

AF: That exit year wasn't a transition. It was a phase transition.

Water doesn't become ice gradually. It reaches zero degrees and changes state. Professional identity works the same way. When institutional legitimacy withdraws, the whole structure bends under pressure, contracts, then reorganises around whatever remains constant.

My pattern shows this. Each move preserved what was essential while changing everything else. Nuclear to digital wasn't a "career change". Safety systems had reached their limit, and I needed a domain where possibility could be built at scale. The web represented exactly that. Digital to enterprise architecture: individual vision needed organisational form. Enterprise to RIZOM: everything needed to converge. The systems thinking, the symbolic work, the way to preserve what matters when complexity threatens to flatten it.

MM: What strikes me now is how that year-long intuition to pause after my corporate chapter aligns exactly with what we formalise in RIZOM. The gap in title is indeed a phase transition. Identity bends under pressure, contracts when institutional legitimacy withdraws, then reorganises around what remains constant.

The Gödelian edge: the point where your existing identity system can no longer explain itself from within

In our framework, this is the Gödelian edge: the point where your existing identity system can no longer explain itself from within. You enter what feels like a pause in time. Momentum dissolves. The next step can't yet be named. This is what we call meaning rupture.

AF: This is where personal branding usually enters.

But we need to be clear about what it can and cannot do. Branding emerges when continuity can't be assumed. It creates portable legitimacy where institutional legitimacy has withdrawn.

For some people, branding stays unnecessary. They hold strong internal reference frames. They can leave institutional containers with identity intact.

For others, branding becomes seductive because it offers an immediate substitute for coherence. It creates a surface that looks stable even when the underlying conditions are unstable. But branding can only carry legitimacy across boundaries. It's scaffold, not spine. The question is whether you mistake it for foundation.

What branding cannot do is answer the deeper question: what remains true about your work when the frame that named it disappears? That requires something else. What I call the through-line: the work you keep doing across every context, regardless of title or institution.

MM: The invariant. I like the way you define yourself as an Architect-Poet. These are common threads across all your history. Not a title per se but an archetype.

AF: Right.

Ikigai: the point where capability, meaning, livelihood, and contribution meet.

This is close to what Japanese tradition names ikigai: the point where capability, meaning, livelihood, and contribution meet. But ikigai isn't "finding your passion". It's structural recognition. Discovering the recurring craft beneath the role changes.

For you, it's building coherence across complexity. Corporate finance, gallery curation, now RIZOM: you keep entering places where systems have outgrown their language, and you create the next framework.

For me, it's designing conditions where meaning can survive complexity. That's the through-line across nuclear, digital, enterprise, RIZOM. The domains change. The work persists.

MM: This is where the Sargent portraits connect. I wove them into the After The Title PULSE newsletter because each sitter exceeds her social title. The paintings capture presence that resists reduction to role. What you see in those layered expressions is exactly what we're describing: identity as continuous surface, not fixed designation.

Sargent was painting the invariant beneath the pearl necklace. That's why they felt so aligned with the topology we're working on.

Mrs Carl Meyer (Adèle Levis) and her Children, Frank Cecil and Elsie Charlotte, 1896, John Singer Sargent

AF: And this is what the Career Reading makes visible.

When I went through mine, the reading showed something I'd sensed but never articulated: my career wasn't failing when I changed domains. It was succeeding at something the conventional map couldn't measure. I wasn't "leaving" fields. I was detecting their limits and building the next framework.

The spidergram made this legible. Strategic framing and systems architecture: those scored highest. Delivery was present but deliberately bounded. The profile showed someone who enters at structural edges, not operational centres.

MM: Mine revealed something similar. I'd thought of my career as three separate chapters: corporate, arts, RIZOM. One of the spidergrams showed one continuous movement with different surfaces. The invariant was visible and explicit for the first time.

The Career Track Review surfaces this systematically. We map trajectory, mandates, inflection points. The spidergram runs across eight dimensions: strategic framing, systems architecture, human-centred experience, innovation foresight, governance design, decision rights, talent development, delivery orchestration.

Careers as manifolds: continuous surfaces that bend, contract, and reconfigure under institutional pressure

AF: This is applied symbolic topology. We treat careers as manifolds: continuous surfaces that bend, contract, and reconfigure under institutional pressure.

Through-line becomes invariant, i.e. what persists when you change the surface.transition becomes phase change. Not incremental adjustment but state transformation.

Borrowed legitimacy becomes what we call curvature collapse. When responsibility exceeds mandate, when title exceeds authority, the structure bends under hidden strain.

My reading identified exactly where that was happening. Early transitions required external legitimacy work. I needed IBM's badge, enterprise architecture credentials, quantified proof. Two hundred million pounds in delivered value. That was borrowed legitimacy. The reading showed where I'd been paying that cost, and when it became obsolete.

MM: The spidergrams are instruments. They make pattern visible so choice becomes compositional. It matters because it protects one’s agency.

When the through-line is visible, things change. Repetition becomes recognisable. Patterns stop disguising themselves as opportunity, thus choice becomes grounded. Some routes remain possible, but the body no longer wants them. One notices how language changes, how borrowed phrases fall away, how one speaks comfortably about the present and maps the future rather than recalls the glorious past. Movement becomes compositional.

AF: This applies to two kinds of threshold.

First: dispersion under momentum. You have reputation, trajectory, yet you're being pulled into fragmentation. The question is containment. Which opportunities genuinely extend your through-line, and which just consume authority without building anything new?

My reading identified this exactly. Multiple advisory roles, all prestigious, none extending the core work. They would have consumed proof without compounding it. The acceptance rule the reading produced made declining these structurally clear, not emotionally difficult.

Second threshold: legitimacy withdrawal. The title has stopped carrying weight. The question is through-line recovery. What remains constant when institutional legitimacy withdraws?

MM: Both moments need the same thing: the work must be held by something more durable than a role name.

The Career Reading provides that structure. Three things happen.

First, the through-line becomes legible. You see what you've actually been building across contexts, not what titles claimed you were doing.

Second, strain vectors surface before they become crisis. For instance where a mandate doesn't match authority, where pace at work prevents thinking, or where a contribution goes unrecognised.

Third, decision filters emerge. To follow on the examples above, an acceptance rule based on mandate clarity, decision rights, protected pace, recognised contribution.

AF: This clearly is not career coaching. It's symbolic infrastructure applied to professional identity.

The reading gave me language for what I'd been doing all along. Not "serial career changer" but someone who builds the next world when the current one reaches its limit. Not "left enterprise architecture" but built RIZOM as the convergence point where everything prior could finally cohere.

That reframing changed what opportunities I could see, what I could decline cleanly, and how RIZOM could be positioned. RIZOM is not another venture; it is the infrastructure the previous twenty years had been building towards.

MM: We should say how people can access this.

Career Snapshot: a short reflective reading for people navigating transition, seeking orientation before deciding next steps.

AF: We offer an initial entry through what we call the RIZOM Career Snapshot. A short reflective reading for people navigating transition, seeking orientation before deciding next steps.

MM: The full RIZOM Career Reading includes proof architecture, the spidergram diagnostics, decision filters, acceptance rules. It's designed for threshold navigation.

AF: Beyond the title, what persists is the work you keep doing across every context. The RIZOM Career Reading makes that visible.

MM: Yes, it is designed for people at threshold moments, where institutional legitimacy has withdrawn or momentum is pulling towards dispersion.

AF: Inquiries welcome for those already sensing they're at a limit point.

Get your RIZOM Career Snapshot