CONCEPT
Provisional Identities
Ibarra's term for the temporary selves professionals try on during transitions — hypotheses inhabited experimentally, neither committed to nor abandoned, held in play until evidence converges.
A provisional identity is a temporary professional self, inhabited experimentally, that a person tries on during a transition without committing to it permanently. The concept, introduced in Ibarra's 1999 Administrative Science Quarterly paper and developed across her subsequent work, describes the specific structure of successful career change: people do not move directly from one established identity to another. They move through a period of multiplicity, in which several provisional identities are held in play simultaneously, each one tested through identity experiments, each one contributing data that shapes the eventual reconstruction of a working self. The provisional nature is essential — premature commitment collapses the experimental space, while refusing to commit at all produces permanent drift. In the AI age, where possible selves can be sampled at unprecedented speed, the capacity to hold provisional identities without prematurely collapsing them becomes one of the critical competencies of professional life.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Ibarra's research shows that the most successful career changers hold multiple provisional identities