Last week we took half a day out as a company to re-state our vision for Made by Many and share some work we’ve been doing to sharpen our narrative.

It was a great session and gave us the opportunity to reflect on the past 10 years of Made by Many, and look at what’s coming.

One of the things we’ve done recently is to re-define our narrative using the Why, How and What model Simon Sinek explained in his famous TED talk, ‘Start with why’.

Sinek believes that most companies start at the outside - by explaining ‘What’: what the company does or produces. He contrasts this with the most inspired and visionary brands and people (like Apple and Dr Martin Luther King) who start in the middle with ‘Why’, and work out to say 'How' and 'What'.

His point is this:

That means being able to start with ‘Why’. It means you can explain your core purpose, your cause, and your belief.

This is where we’ve ended up:

The workshop we ran last Friday involved breaking out into teams and working on different versions of this statement, to suit different scenarios. We wanted to get everyone here comfortable with adapting this core narrative to whatever situation they might find themselves in: a cocktail party, a creds deck... the fabled elevator encounter...

As an example, our website uses the same Why, How and What structure on the home page. The underlying narrative is adapted to the website, which is configured to address prospective clients in reflecting their needs and problems.

The golden circle model isn't a script, it's a meta-narrative that sits behind the way we might explain Made by Many in every possible context.

Here's the home page content:

Yet most transformation projects under-deliver, grind to a halt and fail. Learning how to be digital is more difficult, risky and painful than it should be.

We think there’s a better way.

We make new digital products collaboratively in a way that brings technology, culture and people together to drive big change.

Learn how to re-imagine customer experiences, reduce time-to-market and build self-belief by doing it instead of just talking about it.

Our product-driven approach gets straight to the point: making models and ideas tangible and testable very rapidly by putting them in real people’s hands.

You get a game-changing new product and you get a product-driven transformation for free 👻

One of the most profound and beautiful renderings of the narrative came from one of our engineers Kat Lynch, who wrote a haiku that somehow distils the narrative in the most elegant way - and it’s this that I most wanted to share.