Golden Circle Canvas

1 Collect

Put the Golden Circle canvas on the wall, and hand your team a stack of post it notes. Set an alarm for 5–10 minutes. Ask the team to come up with things that define the company in the future state (1, 2 or 5 years in the future). Ask them to write down as many things as they can come up with that they find important about the company or the product on post-it notes.

2 Categorize

Once the timer rings, have each team member stick post-its on the Golden Circle canvas. Try to categorize what they came up with in ‘What’, ‘How’, and ‘Why’. If there are similar post-its, cluster them together (skip identical ideas).

3 Ask 5x 'Why?'

Now that you’ve filled the Golden Circle canvas like this, take a step back. Look at your canvas, and try to see if there is a balance between ‘What’, ‘How’, and ‘Why’ post-its. Chances are, there will be a lot more ‘What’ and ‘How’ post-its than ‘Why’ post-its.

Go over the different post-its and use the ‘5x Why’ approach to get to the deeper reasons that you find them important. Start with ‘Why is this post-it important?’, and keep drilling down, asking for the deeper reasons. Add the new answers to the Golden Circle.

4 Next Steps

The Golden Circle reflects your current ideas about your idea or startup. It can change, so revisit it every so often.