Some projects seem to develop by themselves: you’ve found out the problem and you haven’t even closed the email because you already have 3 leads on what you could do to solve it. You meet with the team to brainstorm, then validate the best ideas and start presenting them beautifully.

And yet, what do you do when you’re faced with a thorny brief, full of data and challenges, that seems to generate more question marks as you tackle it? How do you navigate the issues behind the problems it raises? And how do you figure out what the brief and the business is really about?

We already know each other, it’s not a shock anymore: you apply a method of ideation! If our approach is a surprise, we invite you to read our article on brainstorming and validating the ideas that came out of it. 

Golden Circle

Started as a leadership exercise, the Golden Circle is a very valuable tool for branding or positioning projects because it generates strong differentiators and a clear vision. Its philosophy is to start with Why (we do this), and adapted on a design thinking model it generates both powerful insights and truly relevant solutions. By going through the process you’ll get to the ways in which your brand can become one that inspires, that consumers trust and want to use. Because your brand is now a one that shows it knows why it does what it does.

How we use it: we start from the things we know, as simply as possible, to get to why the brand or business does what it does. The idea is this, the better you get through the stages, the closer you get to a truth, an insight, that will inspire and develop the rest of the process: from conceptualisation to the smallest details of implementation.

How it works: you draw a circle. Inside it you draw another circle. And inside this circle you draw the third. From the outside of the circle to the inside, the steps are:

Step 1 – The known facts

What: You establish exactly the universe in which the business manifests itself.

Questions: What exactly does the business do? What does it make? What is its specificity? What are its objectives?

Step 2 – Aspirations

How: Review all the ways in which it does it or proposes to do it, at which stage the differentiators emerge.

Questions: What is special about the way it does it? What does it do like others?

Step 3 – The Goal

Why: The point where you discover and build relevance for consumers.

Questions: Why is the brand doing this? What is the purpose?

Once you have discovered why the brand or business does what it does or is going to do, you can do the exercise again in reverse. You’re at the point where you can start developing the next steps: starting from the newly discovered insight, you’re now at the point where you integrate it creatively into HOW it will do it and from an implementation point of view into WHAT it will do.

When and how to use it

Our recommendation is to use it especially when you are faced with conflicting, unclear or confusing information that cannot be translated into a simple, understandable, strong direction and when you need clarity, because it will help you focus your efforts only in the direction you need and want.

The exercise can be used both individually and in a brainstorming group. What is important is to always aim to find the simple, true things that fit each section of the Golden Circle: the method is not necessarily about creativity, but about authenticity.

We hope we’ve inspired you to find insights that generate more powerful creative ideas and discover more often Why, before you get caught in the circles of the problems your brief raises and spiral into the solutions you want. If you want to see the video where Simon Sinek explains the basic idea, find the link here.

We invite you to read on, this article is part of the series How to constantly generate ideas for your projects, the editorial project through which we want to share the processes that make us, at Minio, creative problem solvers. Yes, here is our Why. See you next time!