Learn faster than your competitors

Steven Bartlett has just argued that growing businesses must reward trying, because you cannot know the output of an experiment in advance.

“The one metric that would determine how you’re going to scale over the next 10 years relative to your competitors is: did you or your competitors have a higher rate of experimentation? Did you acquire firsthand information fastest?”

Barlett is not asking whether you have sprints or stand-ups. He is asking whether you get usable information before the other side does. The speed of learning is only a strategy if that information is allowed to land. He says you cannot tell which experiment will work. “That is why it’s called an experiment.” If you’re looking to support a required answer, you do not have an experiment. You have a plan wearing a lab coat.

Beware of local optimization: reimagine.

Diana Kander names another trap: in the big planning meeting, we ask how to do last year a little better.

“The more innovative question is: How can we reimagine?”

“Reimagine” means a blank page. That is hard. Last year’s plan is already staffed, budgeted, and socially safe. Reimagining takes slowing down and collecting new evidence. It is great agility, however, if you can let go of the suboptimal.

I see this often in the Agile simulations I run. I nudge all teams to reimagine their initial ideas. Furthermore, I tell them I accept a dip in output. The teams that can reimagine typically triple their initial results and expectations.

Focus on clarity. Certainty is an illusion.

Seth Godin names the mindset by carefully considering the words people use. He asks: Are you looking for clarity or for certainty? More clarity is achievable this week: what we know, what we do not, and what we will try. Certainty is certainly not achievable, because it means demanding that the future stop moving. If you require certainty from teams, they will not bring insights; they will bring you theater.

Again, he doesn’t use the word, but the core idea of agility is that certainty is an illusion, but this should not keep us from starting the work and creating clarity. Instead of clarity, we usually talk about transparency. I do like clarity better: clarity, inspect, and adapt!

Risk is the price of the new

Dr. Eva de Mol gave an overview of her research into investing and innovation. “Without risk, there is not one success,” she quipped. “If you are doing something truly new, some work will fail—otherwise you probably have not been creative enough.” A portfolio in which every project succeeds is most likely last year’s plan plus a little extra. It’s just delivery. Which has its merits. But it is ultimately not enough.

Jacinda Ardern describes the same problem from society’s perspective. We celebrate curiosity in children, she says. Then, as people take on formal jobs, we replace it with a demand for almost absolute knowledge. Where Godin advises clarity, her approach takes it one step further. She advocates proximity, curiosity, and action: get close enough to see; admit what you do not know; then do something that can change the next decision.

Before the next expensive commitment

None of the speakers needed the word Agile. They still discussed the hard part of Agility: pay the risk, seek clarity, and let the evidence move the plan.

I like to make things practical. Here’s a tool I use for clarity and learning fast. Think of an ongoing project and fill out these lines.

• Risky unknown:
• Cheapest test that could reduce it:
• Decision that this test is allowed to change:

The third line is key. Without it, the test is moot. Don’t get stuck in the agile theater. Learn what matters, like your business depends on it. Because it does.

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I liked the book Ikigai and recommended it too easily. Then I started digging. Here is what I found and what it means for teams that want both strong performance and genuine well-being.

Four Circles, No Research

The famous four circles were never tested with Japanese people. They do not come from research. In Japan, hardly anyone knew the diagram before it came back as a Western invention.

In 2011, the Spanish astrologer Andres Zuzunaga created a “Purpose” diagram. There was no reference to Japan. Three years later, the British blogger Marc Winn watched a TED talk about life expectancy in Okinawa. He liked the word “ikigai” and replaced purpose with ikigai on Zuzunaga’s graphic. That version went viral. A book author picked it up. Now much of the world assumes that this is what ikigai means.

Japanese speakers usually do not recognize the diagram. That is the problem. People go looking for happiness at the intersection of four circles, but those circles were never about meaning, purpose, or Japan in the first place.

Where Ikigai Really Comes From

The real story starts with the Japanese psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya. In the 1950s, she made seven visits to Nagashima Aiseien, Japan’s largest leprosarium. About 1,700 patients lived there in isolation.

Kamiya conducted psychiatric interviews and questionnaires. She wanted to understand one thing. Why did some patients with mild symptoms describe their lives as meaningless, while others with severe and disfiguring illness still felt their lives were deeply worth living?

That question became her life’s work. In 1966, she published Ikigai-ni-Tsuite (“On the Meaning of Life”).

Kamiya argued that the feeling of ikigai, which she called ikigai-kan, depends on a cluster of needs. Think of life affirmation, freedom, future orientation, and self-realization. Not everyone needs all of them. No single combination was universal. But several needs kept showing up, even in people living under severe constraints.

Notice what is missing: money, career, and what the world needs in any market sense. Very few leprosy patients had those things. Yet they still had ikigai in the original sense. That is also how I use the term in the rest of this article.

Nine Questions Instead of Four Circles

Kamiya’s clinical theory was later turned into something measurable: the Ikigai-9, a nine-item questionnaire developed and validated by Imai, Osada, and Nishimura in 2012. It was later tested in the UK, Germany, and France.

The Ikigai-9 measures roughly three dimensions:

• the feeling that life has meaning
• the feeling that you are needed
• the feeling that you can grow

Answers are scored on a scale from 9 to 45. Nothing like four circles.

One Simple Question About Longevity

The longevity studies did not even use all nine items. They asked one direct question about whether people felt a sense of meaning in their lives.

The Ohsaki Study (Sone et al., 2008) followed 43,391 Japanese adults for seven years. The question was simple: “Do you have ikigai in your life?” People who answered no had a 50% higher risk of dying during the study period. The increased risk was mainly linked to cardiovascular disease and external causes, not cancer.

The Japan Collaborative Cohort Study followed participants for more than ten years. People reporting ikigai had roughly 7 to 15 percent lower all-cause mortality. In men, the effect was especially visible in lower cardiovascular mortality.

These are large, well-designed cohort studies. They are not anecdotes from a productivity blog. They show that people with ikigai die less often. They do not prove that you can lower someone’s mortality risk by somehow “installing” ikigai. Almost all of this research comes from Japan, so we do not know how well it travels. Scientific honesty matters more here than a neat story.

Motivation and Well-Being Through Self-Determination

As a coach, I use a different framework: Self-Determination Theory (SDT) by Deci and Ryan. It rests on fifty years of cross-cultural research. That evidence base is much larger than anything behind the ikigai meme.

SDT proposes three universal psychological needs that drive real motivation and well-being:

Autonomy: your actions feel chosen rather than forced. That is not the same as being independent. You can freely choose to serve a team goal and still experience autonomy.

Competence: you feel effective and able to grow in meaningful work.

Relatedness: you feel connected to and supported by others.

Unlike the ikigai literature, SDT has been tested explicitly across cultures. Studies in Western Europe and East Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and China, show that autonomy and relatedness matter in both. People in collectivist cultures also experience autonomy when they choose to act for the good of the group. The key is that the choice feels like theirs.

Where SDT is thinner than ikigai research is simple: it has not yet been tested against hard mortality data in the way the Ohsaki studies tested ikigai.

What This Means for Your Team

This is where it becomes practical. This is also where performance and well-being start to line up.

Autonomy means engineers making technical choices instead of just executing specs. It means marketers having real room to shape a campaign, not just waiting for approval on channel and copy. Autonomy-supportive environments create stronger motivation. That also holds under tight deadlines and high accountability. Boundaries do not undermine autonomy when people understand why those boundaries exist.

Competence means stretch with support. The work has to be hard enough to help people grow. It also needs fast, concrete feedback. That is how people improve. Teams that overprotect people, or throw them in at the deep end without feedback, fail to support the need for competence.

Relatedness means psychological safety and genuine collegial connection. Not forced fun. Not another team outing. Relatedness is the experience of being supported rather than merely sitting next to each other. The ikigai research puts strong emphasis on this dimension. That is a useful correction to Western coaching, which can lean too heavily on individual autonomy and invest too little in belonging.

Meaning and purpose mean a credible, felt answer to the question: “Why does my work matter?” Not a poster on the wall. Closer to Kamiya’s insight that meaning can survive even under hard conditions, as long as an important need is being met. In a team, that may be as simple as seeing the impact of the software they build or the campaign they run.

Some teams get these conditions right. Those teams experience more satisfaction at work, and they sustain stronger performance over time. Well-being and productivity go hand in hand.

If you would like to explore how needs and long-term motivation can drift apart, read balancing needs and shoulds.

Give Ikigai. Don’t Tick Four Boxes.

The four-circle diagram is a nice story with no scientific foundation. What the research actually supports is more specific and more testable: build environments with real autonomy, real growth paths for competence, and strong relatedness.

But the most essential insight is this: ikigai is not something you get by ticking four boxes. It is something you can give.

You can help people feel that they matter. You can help them feel needed and important to others. Who will you give ikigai to today?

Practice With Your Team

If you do not just want to read about this, but practice it with your team, the Agile Leadership Training helps you work on autonomy, competence, and relatedness in a concrete way, in your own situation.

If you want to find answers to your questions about purpose and motivation, take a look at Socratic Coaching.

The post The Ikigai Diagram Is a Meme. Purpose works differently. appeared first on Wendbaar Groeien.