I recently came across the idea of Ikigai. Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means your ‘reason for being’. It seems that people practicing it, are among the longest living people on the planet.
The concept of Ikigai was created on the Okinawa Islands and the residents there, are are less likely to contract cancer, heart diseases and dementia. Their secret of longer and contentful life is a combination of healthy food, exercise and — having a clear purpose of life.
The picture is worth thousand words
While majority of ikiagi writing is about personal well being, it can be applied to organizational context as well. If you change the four directions (the four circle) to following, you may well be on the path of clarity to do what next
What I want
What my team is good at
What is the market for it
How much will they pay for it.
The visual model is simple to understand but, getting started and discovering some AHA moment seems to be the difficult part.
How do you figure out what to love, what to do and what to hope for?
Each of the circle is a journey of self discovery. Barring few, for majority, the immediate answers that pops in the mind are biases.
So, how do you get past the filter of biases? Once beyond the bias, the next challenge is figure out the possible intersections? If you imagine each circle as a list then your ikigai would be an intersection of those lists. Is there any model that can help us discover different combinations?
One of the practical ways that worked for me and others whom i explained was to follow a 3 step process. The three step process goes beyond ikiagi and also helps in discovering newer or hidden connections.
Collections → Visualization → Connections
Collection
At this stage you need to ask lots of open ended questions. The writers call it writing prompt to get the thoughts flowing. Here are few writing prompts. Do note that they are not grouped circle wise as the purpose is to help you get started.
What would you like to have or to accomplish?
What kind of work makes you happy?
When you procrastinate most?
What business ideas really excite you and would you like to generate more?
What would you like to do better?
What do you wish you had more time to do?
what are your unfulfilled goals?
What business and personal relationships would you like to improve?
What excites you in your work?
What angers you at your work?
What are the things you complain about?
What are the things people around you complain about passionately?
What changes would you like to see in others?
What changes would you like to see in yourself?
What would you like to get others to do?
What changes would you like to introduce?
what takes too long?
What is wasted?
what is too complicated?
What are the bottlenecks?
What makes you inefficient?
what frustrates you ?
what would you like to do better?
In what ways could you make more money at work?
The questions may feel similar but it is essential to answer them honestly as paraphrased questions helps to quiz you from different frames and helps in breaking the unconscious bias filters. As a tip, it helps to spread the answering over few days or at least review it that ways.
Here are few writing prompts that helps to discovers patterns and insights in professional context
What suggestions can i make about new product ideas?
How can i cut costs and increase production?
How can we better differentiate our product from all others?
What new product is needed? what extensions of a current product’s market?How can i sell 20% more than i am at present?
What new selling techniques can i create?
Can i reduce the cost of our current selling techniques?
How can i become indispensable to my company?
How can we better handle customer complains?
How can our advertising better communicate about our goods and service?
What awards would be more meaningful to employees?
How can we become more customer oriented?
In what ways might we outperform the competition?
What leading products or services could for my company?
While answering, it is essential to keep it really-really short — max 3–4 words! It would require you to do ruthless reviews and edits. We are not done with the collection stage yet. The output of the collection should be sliced and merged into max 10 items per circle (direction). Anything beyond it, is an indication of clutter. May be, go back to the answering the question again in case you are struggling with your long list. BTW, having a long list is a good problem to have. It is a good indication that you were able to observe and articulate what is going in our mind.
Visualization
To discover the hidden interconnections, we need to visualize the collections. While there are multiple visualization techniques, we are interested in the one that enables connecting the ideas and exploring the space easily and explicitly. Fortunately, we have one and is called zwicky box.
zwicky box is a simple and effective way to to discover new connections leading to new ideas. Again, a picture is worth thousand words
The first step of zwicky box is to identify the categories. The categories are the different aspects or parameters that would like to combine. In the ML world this is called parameter space exploration. Sorry, i am digressing!!
Coming back, for us, the categories are the four circles and the values are the answers you had discovered during the collection stage.
Connections
It is time to draw the connections
In the diagram above, we are picking different connections to build combinations. These combinations are the intersections. The beauty is the variety of unique combinations or new discoveries that you observe. Obviously, there could be huge number of combinations (5*5*5*5 = 625) but then we are not here to list down all the combination but to uncover combinations that we didn’t think about.
It is not too early nor late to start finding for our own ikigai. It would take time for sure but it is undeniable that eventually it will lead to sustainable rewards — personally and professionally.
knowledge is a synthesis of nuggets seen, heard, read and experienced from different places. I discovered zwicky box from nesslab and the questions collections are inspirations from the book thinkertoys.
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