What a diagram taught me about organisations that have lost their way

In 2014 I put the word ikigai in the middle of someone else's picture. Andrés Zuzunaga had drawn a purpose Venn diagram. Dan Buettner had brought the Japanese idea of ikigai to my attention. I joined the two on a small blog, and the picture went much further than I expected.

Then it escaped. The picture has appeared in a bestselling book, on Wikipedia, in coaching exercises, classrooms and workplace workshops, as well as copies that no longer point back to either of us. My recent attempt to reconstruct its spread suggests tens of millions of people have seen some version, and millions may have used the four questions as a tool. Those are estimates, because a copied image has no single counter. The scale still stops me in my tracks.

That reach is not the same as knowing what it changed for each person. But it has put a shared question about work and meaning into rooms I will never enter. It has also helped spread a misleading idea of Japanese ikigai. I did not invent the four circles, and a paid job at their intersection is not the Japanese meaning of ikigai. The size of the conversation makes it more important to tell the whole story.

I think about that when a founder tells me the company is growing but feels less like the thing they started. The targets are clearer. The calendar is fuller. Everyone can repeat the strategy. Yet a decision that used to be obvious now takes three meetings, or the people closest to the work stop saying what they see.

I would not draw four circles around that problem and call the middle an answer. I would start with the decision in front of the room.

What made this organisation worth building in the first place? Which part of that still lives in the work, rather than only in a story about the early days? What are the people who meet your customers noticing that the board cannot see? And what is the choice you keep postponing because naming it might change the plan?

Those questions are useful even if the answers pull in different directions. A purpose statement cannot make that tension disappear. The work is to let the tension inform a decision: what to keep, what to stop, and what new possibility you are willing to test. New technology may change the choices available to you. It does not decide what your organisation is for.

The picture travelled because it made an invisible question easy to point at. Its reach showed me how much people want to talk about work and meaning. Its limits taught me something else: the conversation after the picture matters more than the neatness of the picture itself.

If there is one consequential thing your team cannot quite name, bring me that thing. You can think it through with my digital twin at marcwinn.org, or see how I work with founders and leadership teams at marcwinn.com/talk. Either way, start with the question you would rather avoid.