Through the activities covered through the previous posts (1 to 6), at this step, we have three lists:
- Important elements of your strengths
- Important elements of your passions
- Important elements of your customers' needs
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The next step is to find the overlap between the strengths and passions of your company with the needs of your customers.
Exercise: Identifying the Overlap
Step 1
First, start with strengths. Go through each item in your strengths list and see if it matches to any items in your needs list. In this step, you are looking for pairs of strengths and needs.
Step 2
Next, do the same thing with your passions. Go through each item in your passions list and see if it matches to any items in your needs list. In this step, you are looking for pairs of passions and needs.
Step 3
The previous steps will give you a list of pairs. In essence, these pairs represent the connections of your strengths and passions with customer needs.
In this step, with each pair, find a word or phrase that best represents the relationship. If you have trouble coming up with the word/phrase, feel free to use the words of the originating items in the pair. For example, if you had "coffee" as your passion and "drinks" as a need, you can use the word "coffee" to describe this pair.
We call these words/phrases derived from the pairs essences.
Starbucks as an example
Before we end this post, let's go through a quick example of finding pairs and coming up with words/phrases to extract purpose essences.
Let's imagine we are on the management team of Starbucks and using this methodology to uncover and express our purpose.
On our strengths list, we might have:
1. the authority on coffee
On our passions list, we might have:
2. we believe coffee can create community
On our needs list, we might have:
a. wants great coffee
b. wants to be part of community
Starbucks purpose discovery team may come up with the following pairs
1 and A
Strength: authority on coffee
Needs: wants great coffee
For this pair, they might use the phrase "passion for coffee" to describe this relationship.
They can also form another pair with passions and needs with 2 and B.
1 and B
passion: believe coffee can create community
needs: wants to be a part of community
For this pair, they might use the phrase "human connection" to describe the relationship.