Deconstructing “What’s Worth Doing?”

Or, how a ‘simple’ card deck can improve our thinking.

Okay, this isn’t a post about finding your life’s purpose or anything like that. 😆

This post is about the What’s Worth Doing? card deck from Experience Institute, and what—in my analysis—makes this effective as both a self-reflection tool (intended purpose) and as a kind of ‘playful thing to think with’.

But…

This post is not really about this specific card deck, necessarily — that’s only the first 23.7% or so of this article! As I set about deconstructing this as a kind of thinking thing, I ended up making a broader case for:

• why we should make our thinking visible,
• multiple ways we can make our thinking visible,
• how card decks like this one — as well as visual primitives, canvases, and other forms of visual thinking —aid our thinking and can be a step level improvement over just ‘talking’ about things,
• …and the importance of play!

In other words, I’m using this card deck as practical example (and explanation) of extended cognition! 😜

What is the ‘What’s Worth Doing?’ card deck?

Someone ‘playing’ with the ‘What’s Worthy Doing’ card deck.

First, what’s the card deck about? From the web site:

What’s Worth Doing? is a deck of cards created… to help you with life’s big and small decisions.

The tool uses a simple hexagon shape to help you create a mind map around three main questions: (1) What challenges do you want to address? (2) What kind of people do you enjoy working with? (3) What do you like to make?

You’ll be challenged to sort through 85 cards quickly and then draw connections across your mind map to see what types of interesting and meaningful projects you might do next.

The cards help you navigate transitions and dive deeper into your work by designing small projects that allow you to learn, grow, and change your life, work, or world for the better.

That’s the tool. Before I deconstruct it, let’s walk through how it actually works:

When you open this for the first time, the topmost cards are the instructions. Set up and play is fairly straightforward:

Step 1: SET UP

Lay out the solid-colored cards:

Easy enough!

Step 2: SORT

Each prompt has 25 possibilities. Choose your top 3 cards from each stack, or write your own on the blank dry erase cards. All of the other cards can go in ‘Not Right Now’.

I ‘cheated’ — and added more than 3 cards 😂 . As far as the options to choose from go:

• I enjoy the suggestions for ‘I care about…’ and ‘I like to work with…’, many of which are things I might not have considered on my own. That said, with more time, I would dial this in using the blank, write-in cards.
• As far as the ‘I want to make…’ cards go, I felt like the the range of options presented — from toolkit to game to digital product — were spot on.

Step 3: IDEATE

Next, set a timer for 3 minutes and brainstorm as many potential projects as you can by combining the cards you’ve chosen. Anything goes! Tip: think about things you could try in 3 days, 3 weeks, or 3 months.

This is where the toolkit goes from broad exploration (step 2) to a way to think about very specific projects — whatever the scale — you might take on next.

Sidenote: I like this emphasis on project-based thinking. Whether it’s a side thing, or something at work, thinking about what we do in terms of stories we collect is a great approach to all we do! 😍

Step 4: BOOST

Select the idea you’re most excited about and the cards you used to generate that idea. Now review the boosters and add up to 3 that will help you get started on your project.

Step 4 asks you to think about what you need to get started. Again, as with the ‘I want to make…’ cards, I really enjoyed the range of suggested options; e.g. What do I need more of — Time? Money? Connections? Habits?

Step 5: SHARE

For the purpose of this post, I’ll skip the final instructions. They’re essentially an invitation to capture — mad-libs style — and share the next project you might work on.

And… that’s the tool.

🙂

As I said, it’s fairly straightforward; it’s also a card deck I recommend a lot — that’s my endorsement! I feel What’s Worth Doing? is aimed at early or mid-career professionals, or those who aren’t sure what they’d like to do next (I’ve got the opposite problem — too many ideas!) Even with that caveat, I’ve had a lot of fun ‘playing’ with this toolkit — and could easily see modifying it to suit my personal needs.

What I’m more intrigued by are some of the design decisions the creators made, and what we can learn from these decisions…

Hold onto your seat!

My analysis

The first thing most people notice is the hexagonal shape. ‘Aren’t cards supposed to be ‘rectangle shaped?’ This isn’t necessarily a conscious thought, but an unconscious one. The rectangle playing card shape and size is something we’re all familiar with. But, cards can be also be square, circle, rectangles, and so on—so long as the shape (and size) fits with the intended purpose.

Common card shapes and sizes [source]

In this case, the decision to go with a hexagon shape is a brilliant one, that (a) allows for more organic arrangements, and (b) allows cards to be more or less aligned closer to the core.

Had this deck been composed of traditional rectangle cards, our options for arranging these cards would more limited.

You could solve this by spreading apart the different categories into distinct piles, but then we’d lose some of the cohesiveness of having everything coming together to form one, compete picture of your interests (step 2). Also, the grid nature of rectangle (or square) cards is better suited for when precise placement (say, above or below the starter card) does have an intended meaning. Given what happens in steps 3 and following, I could imagine a version where possibilities are all added below the row, and then different mad-libs configurations — 1 card per suit — are added above the row:

But as a playful activity, What’s Worth Doing? is meant to be more fluid and organic — and avoid any meaning suggested by precise placement of the cards (or at least that’s what the creators have pulled off here!). Multiple cards can come close to touching the center. You have some flexibility into how you position and arrange things, which allows for a more flexible sorting and repositioning as you get clearer about your priorities. FWIW, you could avoid this snapping altogether by using a circle shape, but hexagons give some structure (order), while allowing for this organic flexibility. This fits with the theme of bringing some structure to a fuzzy area of our lives.

But…

Let’s clear the cards off the table.

(Let’s clear the table…!)

To appreciate what’s going on here, let’s start from the fundamentals.

Imagine some of the different ways we could help people explore the four questions at the core of What’s Worth Doing?

I view this along a spectrum from a purely verbal exercise on one end to what we have here, where information is given form and can be readily manipulated, shared, and discussed.

Let’s consider each of these ‘levels’, and how they support reflection.

Level 0: Conversation and self-reflection questions:

Most of us dive into a complex topic with… conversation. It’s a natural impulse—conversation is how we move through most of our waking lives. In all that follows, an outside human coach is certainly valuable — for a number if reasons, but especially knowing the right questions to ask, and being there to reflect back what you said earlier. In the case of this specific toolkit, you’re essentially being asked to reflect on four questions:

(1) What challenges do you want to address?
(2) What kind of people do you enjoy working with?
(3) What would you like to make?
(4) What do you need to get started?

So, we could just skip the whole toolkit, ask the questions, think about them, and be done with it.

Except… this isn’t very effective.

In terms of cognitive abilities, there’s a limit on the amount of reflection—deep reflection—that most of us can hold in memory. Unless, we bring information into the world. Which leads us to…

Level 1: Written notes

Let’s take those same, thoughtful questions that a coach, therapist, mentor, counselor, friend, etc. might ask you. Instead of asking us to only think about and discuss them—keeping thoughts “in our heads” so to speak—committing your thoughts to notes allows us to (1) dump, and (2) reflect.

1. Putting thoughts in writing means there’s less stuff to hold in short-term memory—that’s the brain dump part.
2. Once your ideas are captured as notes, you also free up your short-term memory to reflect upon what you’ve written. This is a good time to invoke the whole “How Can I Know What I Think Till I See What I Say?” idea. Or, stated differently:

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

― Flannery O’Connor

In this way, our thinking is externalized.

So, let’s take that handful of questions:

(1) What challenges do you want to address?
(2) What kind of people do you enjoy working with?
(3) What would you like to make?
(4) What do you need to get started?

Writing down our responses allows us have a sort of dialogue with ourselves, in way that hard to do only with an inner monologue.

But, we can do better than simply taking notes…

Level 2: Notes you can manipulate!

If you capture notes in a way that supports remixing information, as with sticky notes or index cards, I’d argue this is better that straight up than linear, top-down, note taking (what most of us were conditioned to do from an early age). Writing out distinct ideas, each idea on a separate piece of paper, frees you to manipulate this information. Stack. Sort. Combine. Draw connections. Interacting with our externalized thoughts in this way supports deeper reflection and can reveal new patterns we might not otherwise see.

NOTE: There’s another side benefit to getting ideas out of your head and into a visible form — it makes it far easier for other people to react to, reflect upon, question, build upon, and inquire about what you’ve written. A friend or coach can you help you zero in on specific details, ask you to prioritize, or otherwise explore things in a way that’s more challenging using words alone. Learning is social!

We get more out of our notes when we’re free to find patterns and connections between things, or structure these notes into organized units. We can take notes by hand on any blank piece of paper; while sticky notes and index cards are the most common tools for this, you could also step things up with something like the artefact cards, which are tailor made for this kind of thinking:

We can also take notes digitally using a tool such as Mural, Miro, Figjam — or even something like PowerPoint or Google Slides — so long as the tool supports freeform arrangement of objects, and (preferably) allows for a very large or even infinite canvas. While taking notes with tools in this way is something that takes practice, there are numerous benefits that come with this approach, from effortlessly copying sticky notes to adding semantic meaning by playing with things like relative size, colors, or borders:

Consider all the additional meaning conveyed through small visual adjustments.

Whether analog or digital, we’re after the freedom to organize notes however we want. It’s through the spatial arrangement of information plus the intentional use of visual encodings that we can begin to see emergent patterns.

So…

• Thinking and conversing is good.
• Notes [can/often] make thinking better (<sigh> this is where many of us stop — at merely taking notes).
• Notes you can manipulate — even better!

But… there’s more we can do to get the most out of our notes.

Level 3: Structured reflection using visual primitives

Chances are, while sorting out our ideas, there are some natural ways we tend to organize things. Clustering is one. The other is to sort things into a priority order of some kind.

Tier Lists!

This is where visual primitives come in. Visual primitives are a small set of nearly universal ways to organize information. They are information agnostic, meaning you can define the labels and rules based on your needs; what they provide is the scaffolding for different kinds of spatial arrangement. How you use this scaffolding is up to you!

Having, or building, a small set of “go to” ways to structure information can be invaluable. Aside from pulling some of these out in meetings, I’ve found that whenever I’m thinking in one direction, grabbing — at random — some of these patterns helps me to think differently about a topic.

You can…

• Sort information along a spectrum
• Arrange things in an X-Y Matrix
• Use a Bulls-eye
• Arrange things into columns, to draw connections
• Use a Venn diagram to identify relationships
• Use a radar chart to prioritize personal tasks (though I’ve seen this used with teams to discuss priorities)
• etc.

The point is, arranging information — in different ways — reveals patterns we might otherwise miss.

But… can we improve our thinking even more?

Level 4: Structured reflection using a canvas

Like the visual primitives above, canvases are designed to hold information in a structured, intentional way. Unlike visual primitives, a good canvas is purpose built for a very specific outcome. Understand your business model. Identify target customers. Uncover hidden biases. Identify barriers to change. Hold space to assess competing perspectives.

I define a canvas as: A framework for clear thinking on a specific topic. As such, a really useful canvas will have these characteristics:

• A visual structure/scaffolding,
• based upon expert, domain knowledge
  (but containing no specific details),
• that reveals how parts of a whole relate and affect each other,
• facilitates self-reflection,
• and holds space for dialogue.

The visual arrangement of the (most often) boxes, and the very specific labels, is typically based upon years of expertise.

Building on our “level” progression, I’d say that while a a canvas can offer structure to existing ideas (e.g. a way to structure items following a brainstorming), it’s more likely that you would start with a canvas, as a way to generate ideas. So, returning to our What’s Worth Doing? card deck, a canvas version might look something like this:

…where each box is one of the four questions being explored.

Adding sticky notes to our canvas might then look something like this:

⚠️ FWIW, I DO NOT think the specific questions in What’s Worth Doing? lend themselves to a canvas format. Why not? Understanding how parts of a whole relate to and affect each other — this isn’t critical to these specific questions. The questions are great, but how you arrange these questions relative to each other doesn’t really add much value. You could form these questions into a 2x2 grid, stack them vertically, etc, and there’s no real value add to the spatial arrangement. That said, for illustration purposes, and to highlight what’s really cool about the final card deck, let’s stick with this canvas version, if only to set the stage for…

Level 5: A canvas, with suggested options

With canvases, the specific details — how you respond to each prompt — are left to individuals and teams. As with good coaching or consulting tools, the prompts will be very specific to a situation, while remaining agnostic as to how you should respond. These details are unique to each situation. We can all fill out the same canvas, but with wildly different responses. The canvas is a tool for structured thinking.

But what if we did suggest how to respond to these different prompts?

Indeed, if you dig into the books that often accompany the very best canvases, they’ll offer suggested ways to fill out a canvas, or illustrations to show how it’s been done in the past. These examples are invaluable, for learning how to use these tools well. ‘Is my response to broad? Too specific? Am I answering this in the way that was intended?’

An example of how you might fill out the business model canvas, from Business Model Generation

There’s a risk of course — depending on the context — that offering examples might steer or shape the conversation in some unintended way. You might prime someone to respond in a very narrow way. But you might also spark new ideas that otherwise might not surface from the vast well of unconsciousness.

As always, the “right” decision depends on context.

With the What’s Worth Doing? deck, I believe prompting and seeding ideas, by providing suggested responses, is part of what makes this a useful tool. Asking me ‘What challenges do you want to address?’ and then suggesting things like ‘Disaster Relief’, ‘Healthy Parenting’, or ‘Political Advocacy’, broadens the scope of challenges I might consider, otherwise.

At this point, I’ll also invoke the principle of recognition over recall — it’s far easier to identify something than it is to also recall that thing from memory.

So, you could take most canvas activities, and supplement them with pre-loaded, suggested prompts, like so:

While this illustration works where the objects (cards) could align to any of the questions/columns, this isn’t the case with the What’s Worth Doing? toolkit. With What’s Worth Doing?, each of the suggested responses align to one of the 4 four specific questions. To support this, lets introduce a separate suit of cards to go along with each question. Which leads us to…

Here we have a version of What’s Worth Doing? toolkit, where the canvas is supplemented with cards. Each card represents a possible response to the accompanying questions. And, getting even closer to the final version, we have a separate suit of cards to go along with each question.

With this iteration, rather than adding a sticky note (a response originating with you), you’re choosing from a pool of possible responses, and selecting those that feel relevant. And you could always use blank cards for anything you want to add.

Sidenote: Priming like this can come from a deck of cards, but also other things like pre-filled sticky notes or a bank of suggestions off to the side. In a social space, visibility into the activity of other people, anonymous or not, can also serve as inspiration!

Level 6: An implicit, emergent structure

Here’s where things get really interesting!

Recall how I said spatial arrangement wasn’t particularly critical to the What’s Worth Doing? card deck? Other than grouping like colored responses with the corresponding questions, how we arrange these things relative to each doesn’t really change anything So this light structure—four columns to hold answers to each of the four question prompts — isn’t needed. We can lose our canvas!

We still need a way to structure the cards. For this, the questions in the canvas can become a kind of “header” card, to which the (color-coded) responses can be aligned.

While we’re at it, we don’t even need to concern ourselves with columns anymore — our cards (still a familiar rectangle shape) could be arranged in some other way, like so:

And once we start playing, you might end up with something like this:

From here, it is easier to imagine the small creative leap of altering the shape of the cards themselves, to be more accommodating to the activity:

Whew.

So, where does this leave us?

Brilliant in it’s simplicity

Here is where the brilliance of the What’s Worth Doing? card deck really shines: While I’m a huge fan of canvases, and canvases + card decks, there’s something wonderful about “reducing” this particular activity to only a deck of cards.

Most notably, this apparent lack of structure we’ve arrived at brings with it an inherent feeling of play. Functionally, all we’re doing is drawing cards, and either discarding them or placing them into a semi-structured arrangement. But there’s more going on:

• The final result (at least in step 2) is a personal bit of self-expression, unique to you.
• It’s simple.
• There’s the suspense and curiosity that comes with not knowing what card you’ll draw next.
• There’s the unique tableaux of cards you’re slowing building.
• You can modify this game by imposing you’re own rules upon it (e.g. arranging things closer or farther to the origin card).
• And there’s all the playful associations that come with anything that involves cards.

Bottom line: It’s a fun activity!

But, as I’ve tried to unpack, it’s a deceptively fun activity. Reflecting on ‘what’s worth doing?’ is actually a somewhat complex activity, one that millions of us think about; and yet, by playing with the form and structure of how we might do this, we end up with something that transforms reflection into a fun and accessible activity. We have, in my words, a playful think to think with!

Conclusion?

To be clear, I’m not necessarily suggesting this is the process that the team went through to design this card deck. Rather, I wanted to walk through different ways the same content could have been presented, with a focus on the cognitive benefits of these various approaches.

In the end, every approach I’ve tried to describe here is some form of scaffolding to support learning and discovery. The trick with a tool like What’s Worth Doing? is to provide just enough structure, and no more. In this case, the final form—suggested prompts that you curate and arrange into a a tableaux—feels like a rich, fruitful, exercise. Through this structured activity, you’re empowered to author, hone in, or bring into focus ‘what’s worth doing.’ And have fun in the process!

This is makes What’s Worth Doing? something to think with — and something to think about.