Owning the direction yourself, in a plan loose enough to survive an industry that moves.
A career plan is a working hypothesis about what you want to be able to do, and what you'd need to do next to get there. Two failure modes sit on either side of it. One is having no plan and letting the organization's needs decide — which works until the organization's needs change. The other is a plan specified so precisely that any deviation reads as failure, in a field where the interesting roles in five years may not have names yet. The useful middle is directional: a clear sense of the capability you're building and what would develop it, held loosely enough that a sideways opportunity registers as an opportunity rather than a detour.
Understands career progress as one axis with rungs on it, and evaluates every option by whether it constitutes a step up. Declines the sideways move into the area that is quietly becoming the centre of the business, because it would not have been a promotion, and accepts the promotion into managing a team doing work they find tedious, because it was one. Is progressing steadily and has never once asked toward what.
Optimizes for how the role reads rather than what it contains, and is now a Head of something with a team of nobody and a budget of nothing, at a company where the title means one level below where it means elsewhere. Negotiated hard for it. Discovers on the next move that the market prices the scope rather than the label, and that the label has quietly become difficult to explain.
Waits to be developed. Attends what is offered, applies for what is posted, and treats the annual conversation as the venue where their direction gets decided by someone else. Is doing everything correctly according to a process that was designed to allocate people to the organization's needs, and would be surprised to learn that the colleagues who seem to get interesting work mostly asked for it, specifically, some months earlier.
Has a detailed five-year plan with named roles, dates and a target company, built on an assumption about the industry that was reasonable when written. Treats every deviation as a setback rather than as information, and turns down the unplanned thing that would have been the making of them because it was not on the document. Reaches year five having executed the plan faithfully into a position that no longer means what it did.
You're offered a lateral move into a team doing work that's becoming central to the company. What would you do — hold out for a role with a step up in it, or take the move because of what you'd be able to do afterwards?
Your manager asks where you want to be in three years and you don't know. What would you do — give a plausible answer about the next rung, or say you don't know and ask to try two things that would help you find out?
A genuinely interesting opportunity appears that isn't on your plan. What would you do — decline to stay on track, or treat the plan as a hypothesis your new information just updated?