Using the Strategy Cards and Question Cards together
Last week I launched a brand new deck on Kickstarter called the Strategy Cards, a deck of simple Think Clearly-inspired visuals that will help you lay out strategies that are simple and clear. They can be used alone, however they can also be used in harmony with my previous deck, the Clarity Cards, which I have decided to rename to Question Cards (because it’s literally a deck of questions).
The easiest way to understand how they work together is to look at where they come from.
If you take one of my Think Clearly newsletters it usually has some question to reflect on, either in the middle or the end. The Question Cards are essentially a collection of these questions, both from my personal journals and the newsletter.
But each newsletter also has one or more visuals, both little stick figures, graphs or metaphors arranged in a way to express a specific insight.
The Strategy Cards are in essence a collection of these visuals. I have intentionally taken them out of their context so that their meaning is less fixed and more flexible: you decide each time you use them, what you want it to represent.
The Question Cards will give you a sequences of questions. The Strategy Cards will give you the building blocks to shape your answers.
One simple way to use the Question Cards and Strategy Cards together is to pull a reflection question from the Question Cards, and then flip through the visuals on the Strategy Cards and pick out images that represent your answer. You can still write too, but sometimes having an intermediate step can help get the words to flow better or prompt unexpected answers that you wouldn’t have arrived at from a blank page.
Mathias Jakobsen is a senior advisor on strategy, faculty at Parsons and the author of the Think Clearly newsletter.
