After exploring your strengths, passions, and needs of your customers, you will end up with three corresponding lists of elements. The next exercise is identifying the essential elements within these three lists. The elements will serve as the foundation for finding and expressing your purpose.
Exercise: Identifying the Essential Elements
The goal of this exercise is have the purpose development team members review the three lists and select the elements they believe are important.
Here are two approaches to help you select the elements.
Visual Voting
If you have taken a workshop approach, you might have your elements written on post-its. Provide the prticipants with round stickers and have them use the stickers to vote on elements they think are important. Each stick represents one vote. This activity helps the team quickly understand visually which elements are important.
Scoring Approach
This approach works well in a non-workshop setting. Provide the team members an Excel spreadhseet with the three lists of elements. Each team member uses a scale (i.e. 1 to 5) to rate the importance of each element.
One benefit this approach has over visual voting is that there is less bias. In the visual voting activity, since you're able to see the votes of others, you might be influenced by their thinking.
Whichever approach you take, after this exercise you will have shortened your three lists of strengths, passions, and needs. These lists now contain the elements that are central to your purpose.