What’s the difference between the Purpose Diagram and Ikigai?
If you aren’t a hermit, you’ve probably seen various different versions of the purpose diagram floating around the web. The two most popular versions either have purpose or ikigai in the centre.
If you’re wondering about the origin of the diagram(s), go here. In short: the purpose diagram came first and then a brilliant person named Marc Winn (who was inspired by an ikigai TED talk by Dan Buettner) combined my purpose diagram with the japanese concept of ikigai. The purpose diagram had already gone viral, but once ikigai was placed in the centre, it spread like wildfire and suddenly ikigai coaching offers, ikigai t-shirts, ikigai workshops, ikigai journals and books showed up everywhere, the most well-known among them interviewing japanese centenarians and positioning ikigai as the secret leading to their longevity.
Why did ikigai take off so much more than purpose?
This is a brilliant example of the power of marketing. The popularity of ideas depends so much more on the story you can tell around it. And telling the story of an ancient Japanese concept that we can learn from in the 21st century is much sexier than the very down-to-earth and so widely philosophised term “purpose”. We all love extraordinary concepts and giving a new spin to an ancient one feels both tradition-honouring, established, to be trusted and freshly edgy at the same time..
Don’t get me wrong! I love the ikigai idea and I applaud the spreading of the concept. Anything that gets people to switch from a miserable work rut to questioning why they are living their life the way they are gets a high five from me. However, I’m not a fan of calling the diagram ikigai and here is why:
Working with the four-circle diagram and calling it ikigai hijacks Japanese culture
The purpose diagram (those labeled, four overlapping circles) have absolutely nothing to do with the Japanese term ikigai. If you showed the diagram to a wise Japanese centenarian, they would probably be very confused.
You see, according to clinical psychologist Akihiro Hasegawa and his 2001 research paper, the term ikigai dates back to the Heian period (794 to 1185) and is composed of two words: iki meaning life and gai describing value or worth. (For the etymology geeks, gai apparently stems from kai, meaning shell, which were very valuable at the time.)
Today, ikigai is part of everyday language. But guess what? The Japanese concept of Ikigai isn’t about your grand life’s purpose. It’s about the little things.
If you look at the traditional literature on ikigai, you’ll find a 1966 piece called Ikigai-ni-tsuite (“About Ikigai”) by psychiatrist Mieko Kamika. He explains the nuances of ikigai. There are two types of “life” in Japanese language: jinsei and seikatsu. According to him, jinsei refers to lifetime and seikatsu refers to everyday life. Ikigai aligns with seikatsu, i.e. everyday life and is all about the sum of small joys in everyday life that lead to a more fulfilling life as a whole.
Here’s what ikigai isn’t about: work, maximising what you’re getting paid, while maximising your joy, impact and skills, which happens to be what the purpose diagram is about.
Now before the business coaches who have built their website around ikigai throw a fit: YES! Yes, you CAN find joy in your life and live according to ikigai AND have a career that you love, that you’re good at, in which you add value to the world and are handsomely paid for. But ikigai according to Japanese culture isn’t something you need to make money from, doesn’t have to be something the world needs, isn’t something you have to be particularly highly skilled at and you don’t necessarily have to love doing it.
The purpose diagram is a Western philosophy and while I can’t explain what anyone else means when they use it, I can tell you with which intention I apply it:
I created my version of the purpose diagram as a diagnostic snapshot tool for people to determine where they consider themselves to be within their careers. (Am I having an impact with what I do? Am I actually enjoying how I spend my time? Do I get to apply the things I know and do I get to evolve the skills I want to evolve? Am I happy with how much I’m getting paid?). The methodology that I teach in large corporate organisations and train the trainer courses helps organisations match people’s individual sense of career purpose with their team’s purpose and the larger organisational purpose.
The purpose diagram and the work related to it are very much about purpose in action. The diagram helps leaders, individual career actors and entrepreneurs to make sense of how it all fits in together and what they need in order to be more on purpose.
Calling the diagram ikigai makes it hard to sell to leaders and decision-makers
When you tell the story about ikigai, Japanese culture and the value of shells as a metaphor for the value of life, that’s a wonderful story but it places the conversation around purpose in a box labeled B.A.C., which stands for “Beautiful Ancient Concept that you can delve into when privately musing about how to spend more time with your loved ones, do the little things that bring you joy and live a life of zero regrets”.
It doesn’t exactly help with convincing a CEO to reconsider career structures, work on giving teams what they need in order to work together more effectively and help people gain a sense of alignment between their individual job and what the organisation is doing strategically.
If you ask me, (and I own my personal bias here) that’s exactly what the world needs: more organisations that exist for many reasons beyond profit and leaders who apply the overlap of the elements of the diagram - impact, meaning, joy and profitability - at all levels of their organisation.
Corporate purpose may be on its way to becoming a buzzword but we still lack methodologies to operationalise purpose. And in order to do that we need a corporate-compatible language for it. The term “ikigai” simply doesn’t serve that particular purpose well (pun intended).
Calling the purpose diagram ikigai makes it sound abstract rather than applicable.
Some people are aware of the foregoing factors and still favour the term ikigai. They feel they can respectfully clarify the lack of relation between the diagram and Japanese culture and perhaps they don’t require business-compatible language in their particular field of work. But a problem persists: our human tendency to look for solutions out there rather than inside of us.
When we use a term that is abstract to most non-Japanese people, it enforces the notion that we must search for answers and make sense of an elusive abstract answer that’s somewhere out there. And that, once we find it, everything will make sense and fall into place. Spoiler alert: it won’t.
This same human mechanism is what makes leaders introduce productivity system after productivity system (KANBAN, OGSTs, OKRs etc.), hire the according coaches and pay for the relevant software, rather than talk about the clashes of different types of needs of different humans and their personal communication preferences.
You see, team productivity, much like team purpose is an inside job that requires us to look our reality straight in the eye and talk about what isn’t working. To me, purpose isn’t a destination but a work in progress, a perpetual state of permanent beta.
So, despite the larger popularity of the term ikigai, I have chosen to keep working with the original terminology purpose because:
The term purpose is robust and straightforward. When something ceases to have a purpose in our life we usually let it go or find a way to transform it. That’s a simple and powerful association.
The concept of purpose can easily be transferred to the corporate reality. “What is the purpose of this team/ organisation?” helps us focus on actionable questions that matter for organisations that want to become more purpose-driven.
“Purpose” is a big word that can trigger resistance. I’m a fan of saying things as they are and using “purpose” is adequate because it both reflects the reality (whenever you work with change you are bound to come up against personal and systemic resistance) and because said resistance is the fertile matter that you can work with, as an individual and with your teams and organisation.
In conclusion: if you love the philosophy of ikigai and Japanese culture, read up on its true origin and speak to local experts. If you’re looking for a tool to bring more purpose into your/ an organisation’s work reality, work with the purpose diagram.
PS: For an impression of what working with the purpose diagram is like at an individual level, take the free purpose test. You’ll be asked a few simple questions that position you in the diagram and you’ll learn which individual resistance other people at this stage have reported being up against.
PPS: You’d like to use my purpose diagram for your book/ event/ course/ t-shirt? Go ahead and grab it (creative commons attribution license). I’d appreciate a link back to this website.
