Marc Winn, close-up black and white portrait against a dark background, half smiling in a knitted jumper

About

Part soul magician. Part trickster.

Someone once called me a modern-day alchemist. I liked that.

The short version

I help founders, CEOs and leadership teams get to the soul of their organisation, so they can scale what matters without becoming a machine. The shape of the work changes. The thread does not.

I have spent decades in rooms where something was not working and no one could quite say why. I walk in, and somehow the knot loosens. Not always. But often enough that I have stopped pretending I do not know what to do.

I live in Guernsey, a small island in the English Channel. Islands teach you something about perspective. The rest of the threads are below.

The longer story

The accidental diagram

In 2014 I originated the Ikigai Venn diagram by joining the word ikigai to Andrés Zuzunaga’s existing purpose Venn diagram. I was not trying to make something viral. I was trying to help myself think.

It is impossible to measure precisely, but versions of it have since travelled worldwide, likely reaching tens to low hundreds of millions of people and generating billions of cumulative views. Printed in books. Taught in universities. Tattooed on arms. Translated into dozens of languages. It took on a life I never intended or controlled.

It taught me one thing. The things that travel are not the things you engineer. They are the things that help people see what they already feel. That lesson shaped everything that came after.

Ten thousand coffees

Years before the diagram, I started an experiment. I wanted to understand how change actually happens. Not in boardrooms or strategy documents, but between people. So I started having coffee with strangers. Fifty at first. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Ten thousand, and counting.

What I found is that conversations are the unit of change. Not decks. Not frameworks. Not workshops. Conversations. The kind where someone says the thing they have been carrying but have not yet spoken aloud. That is where shifts begin.

The 50 Coffee Adventure became a workbook, a journal designed to help change-makers build social capital around their missions. The real insight was simpler. The best way to understand anything is to sit across from someone and listen properly.

The islands

Islands teach you something about perspective. When you can see all the edges, you understand the whole differently. You notice connections that get lost in larger, noisier places.

That instinct led me to work with other island nations, helping them reimagine themselves as living test beds for the future. Places small enough to experiment meaningfully, connected enough for the experiments to matter elsewhere.

Back home, I spent over a decade helping my community use its smallness as an advantage. Conditions for people to see clearly together, then act on what they saw. No grand strategy. Just clarity, then movement.

Granite cliffs on the Guernsey coast meeting a calm sea under warm hazy light

When you can see all the edges, you understand the whole differently.

The wand

Somewhere along the way I noticed that I do my best work when I am playing. Not entertaining, playing. Treating the room like a living thing. Breaking the spell of seriousness for long enough that the truth can walk in.

People sometimes call this magic. I am sceptical of the word, but I have stopped arguing with it. Something happens in those rooms. People cry, then laugh, then say something honest, then make a different decision. The wand is a small reminder that the meeting is not the work.

If you want to go deeper

I write at The View Inside Me, a blog that has been read by millions. It is where I think out loud about purpose, perspective, and work that matters. A few years ago I explored what becomes possible when a whole community decides to care. That became a TEDx talk that captures much of the philosophy behind the work.

Words people use afterwards

What people say after

Other people, in their own words.

"Marc is one of those rare people who genuinely changes the direction of your life without ever forcing it. He sees something in you before you can see it in yourself, and then creates the space for you to grow into it. There is a depth to how Marc works that is hard to explain until you experience it. It is not just strategic, it is human. If you get the chance to work with Marc, take it."
John M. Sweeney, Founder, Suspended Coffees. TEDx speaker.
"Marc is one of the clearest thinkers about the future of humanity, paired with a relentless desire to inspire others to participate in that future. It makes him a key cog both in Guernsey and worldwide."
James Maskell, Founder, author, speaker. Reversing chronic disease at scale.

Now you know the threads. Find the doorway that recognises you.

Six doorways Book the Magic Wand Session

Occasional letters on the soul of organisations. No noise.