When I was relatively new to innovation, business card games were all the rage. Each consultancy seemed to produce their own deck that was used for various workshops. For the most part, it was a pretty decent novelty team event, people had fun and it freshened things up. In some cases, the decks were also quite useful in solo work for a bit of reflection or provocation.
Then all those card activities seemed to go away. If I’m being really honest, some of them had become somewhat theatric and trivial.
It was easy to target innovation as a bit of a creche, and not a place where the ‘serious’ work took place.
In many cases, these ideas or conversations from these card games didn’t go anywhere.
Management went back to the spreadsheets and slide decks, then reminded the rest of the workforce that serious business thinking had no room for play.
Fine. But it came at a cost. In business, we like to think we’re rational. We analyse data, we study markets and we aim to optimise everything. And yet, some of the biggest creative breakthroughs don’t come from more and more analysis, treating the world like a formula that can be solved with a single correct answer. They instead tend to come from reframing the problem where we can observe patterns that others don’t, tapping into our intuition and sense of play.
We might not like to admit it when we’re trying to be all grown up and serious about work, but play sparks ideas. Those ideas, in turn, create momentum, we start to do things and we have more ideas. This is good, it’s what entire cultures of innovation and entrepreneurialism are founded on!
So what if there was a better business card game?
Not a gimmick for another workshop or offsite activity, but something that leads to thinking differently, asking better questions, seeing the world from another perspective, having more creative ideas and the enthusiasm to see them through to the real world.
That’s what we’re exploring here. And it’s inspired by an unlikely source.
Tarot.
(Yeah, I know, I can literally hear you rolling your eyes from a desk far away, but please, bear with me.)
A Tool for Seeing What’s Hidden
Tarot didn’t start as a mystical fortune telling tool. It began as a game, to be played.
The earliest known tarot decks date back to 15th-century Italy, where they were used for a trick-taking card game called Tarocchi, a high-society pastime for nobles. The early decks featured beautifully illustrated cards, including what we now call the Major Arcana, figures like The Fool, The High Priestess (or the Popess) and The Emperor.
At the time, they weren’t seen as spiritual symbols, just elaborate playing card for playing games. I’d love to tell you a bit more about the games from back then, but I’m actually kinda rubbish at card games, and these ones are kinda complicated. So let’s leave them there.
But how did tarot transform from a game into a tool for insight and mysticism?
In the 18th century, European occultists and mystics, particularly in France and England, began assigning deeper meanings to the cards. Writers like Antoine Court de Gébelin suggested that tarot was linked to ancient Egyptian wisdom (a claim that wasn’t historically accurate, but it stuck, sometimes we don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story). And in time, tarot became associated with divination, psychology and personal insight, rather than just a game.
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in 1909, cemented tarot’s mystical reputation. Designed by A.E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, it introduced the vivid symbolic imagery we recognise today. This made tarot evolve from games to a storytelling tool of self-reflection, intuition and trying to understanding life’s uncertainties.
Which is exactly why it might work so well in a business context. Because whether you’re getting your own reading, or looking into a market trend, the magic is less in the cards themselves, but more in how you connect the dots as a result of them provoking you into asking questions.
The Big Forces at Play
A tarot deck is divided into two main types of cards, each playing a different role in how we interpret challenges and decisions.
1. The Major Arcana: Big Themes and Transformations
The Major Arcana consists of 22 powerful cards that represent fundamental forces, life-changing events and deep transformations. These aren’t typically everyday dilemmas, they’re more the big picture moments that reshape entire industries, businesses or careers.
Imagine you’re considering a career change, leaving a stable job to start your own company. You draw:
The Fool (0) – The naive person taking a leap of faith, stepping into the unknown.
The Magician (I) – The master of execution, turning ideas into reality through skill, willpower and resourcefulness, often reminding us mow is the time to act.
The Tower (XVI) – Representing sudden upheaval, disruption and the collapse of outdated structures. It’s a shake-up, clearing the way for transformation and new growth.
The story starts to unfold a bit. You’re at the start of something new (The Fool), you have the skills to execute (The Magician) …. but you need to prepare for major upheaval (The Tower). These aren’t small things to consider, but perhaps shifts that could redefine your life.
Now, let’s say we do this in a corporate context with an organisation that has lost its edge, perhaps it was the market leader, but now it feels stagnant, growth is distant memory, innovation has stalled … competitors are eating their lunch or maybe the entire industry is under going disruption.
We’ll skip shuffling the deck and ‘draw’ the same cards as before. This time asking questions prompted by their archetypes.
The Fool (0) – Are we willing to take a bold risk to reinvent ourselves? Dare we take a step into what has been unknown? Have we got a sense of the need to explore?
The Magician (I) – Do we have the resources and capabilities to bring a fresh vision to life? If not, how can we summon the ability to rise from our current malaise?
The Tower (XVI) – Are we prepared to break old habits and challenge our own legacy before the market brings the wrecking ball to us?
Suddenly, instead of asking “Why is what we’ve been doing working?” the conversation shifts to bolder questions, that come from a new perspective.
“What do we not understand and how can we discover a new bit of the world?”
“What radical moves might we need to explore to shake us out of stagnation?”
“What strengths are we overlooking or underestimating?
“Are we willing to be our own disruptive force, or are we waiting for it to happen to us?”
In the business context, Major Arcana forces leadership to stop optimising what already exists and start thinking about what needs to be reimagined. Because when companies become stagnant, the real question isn’t always "How do we maintain what we’ve built?" … but more, "What do we need to destroy in order to grow again?"
While the Major Arcana cards represent big-picture themes and transformations, the Minor Arcana focuses more on execution and the actions like the daily decisions, or trade offs that determine whether strategies succeed or stall.
Think of it this way. The Major Arcana asks, "What kind of change is happening?, the Minor Arcana asks, "What do we need to do about it?"
The Minor Arcana is divided into four suits, we’ll align each with a core business function:
Swords (Strategy) – Decisions, competition and trade-offs.
Pentacles (Product & Value Creation) – Money, growth and innovation.
Cups (Customer & Experience) – Loyalty, emotion and connection.
Wands (Execution & Momentum) – Speed, actions and follow-through.
Each suit contains 14 cards, the numbers ace through 10, and 4 picture cards (page, knight, queen, king), that follow a journey from new beginnings to completion.
We won’t go into all those cards just now, but if you want to go into more depth with the full deck, we can assign the numbers a structure and specific questions for how businesses experience growth, challenge and transformation. Some of that can be found in this spreadsheet for now.
A Worked Example with Credit Unions and Gen Z
Examples are always best for demonstrating concepts at work, so let’s take a bit of a stodgy old industry and a mystical customer group almost every organisation is grappling to understand. Credit Unions and Gen Z.
For pretty much forever, credit unions have staked their reputations on trust, community and financial prudence. Those values that have historically resonated with their members, who have broadly skewed older and older over time. Young people don’t typically open accounts with credit unions anymore, and if they do, it’s probably more likely to have been a junior account set up by their parents or grandparents.
In an era of digital, most credit unions have been left behind, slow to adopt online or mobile banking, often due to a lack of financial resources. That has meant the customer propositions have been lagging.
Now before you start, Gen Z is by no means a homogenous group, I totally get that. But each generation grows up with shared contexts and experiences. Gen Z has been raised and educated in a world where much life, work and play takes place online.
And they’re not particularly interested in credit unions.
Despite being the most financially anxious generation in recent history, Gen Z isn’t turning to credit unions for banking. Instead, they’re gravitating toward digital-first financial platforms, fintech startups and even decentralised finance. Despite being pretty savvy and sophisticated, spotting what’s authentic and what’s marketing guff from a mile off, credit unions have never been a terribly compelling alternative to the big banks.
So, let’s say a credit union leadership team sits down to figure out how to make their offering relevant to Gen Z, shuffling the Tarot for Business deck and pulling out three cards:
1. The Moon (Major Arcana) – Hidden Forces
We ask; What subconscious cultural shifts are we missing? and What assumptions, biases or undercurrents might be shaping the future of money or banking?
Gen Z doesn’t just distrust big banks, they distrust all traditional financial institutions. They see them as slow, expensive, responsible for some of their parent’s financial pain. Many of them saw their parents struggle through the 2008 financial crisis, they literally grew up in households overhearing stressful conversations about banks letting people down.
The idea of “local and community-based” financial institutions isn’t one that can be relied upon, for while many will like to shop locally and know where things come from, this isn’t a reason to choose alone. Youth audiences grew up with global mindsets, a bias for digital experiences and a bit wary of institutions that present themselves on safe choices first.
Perhaps we discuss how the the credit union concept isn’t broken, actually it could be very appealing, but the distribution and the messaging is. Gen Z doesn’t see it as community driven, and instead perhaps as somewhat irrelevant or historic.
2. Six of Cups (Customer Loyalty & Experience from the Minor Arcana)
We ask; How do we create emotional resonance with this audience? If we do, is there a way to develop some form of relationship, or dare we even say ‘loyalty’?
This card represents nostalgia, trust and relationships, which might be a good thing as there’s a bit of a thing for nostalgia in almost every emerging generation, despite their different perspective on the future. We do have a problem mind, credit unions are relying on nostalgia for a generation that has no nostalgia for them.
Older generations might associate credit unions with trusted relationships, lower fees and a human touch. Gen Z? They associate them with paper forms, crappy websites and irrelevant product offerings.
Gen Z does engage a bit in what we’ll call ‘borrowed nostalgia’, romanticising eras they didn’t actually live through. Think how The Office is getting a Gen Z reboot, or the 2000s tech aesthetic (digital cameras, flip phones, wired headphones) or even low rise cargo pants.
So what if credit unions need to reinforce that positioning of themselves as the “friendly alternative to big banks”, but in a smart, digital enabled and understanding choice for financial independence in a pretty challenging world.
3. The Chariot (Major Arcana) – Momentum & Speed
We now ask; What moves could create disproportionate momentum? How might we be bold, brave and authentic in proving ourselves?
The Chariot represents momentum, urgency, and taking control of the narrative. We’re not doing long term planning here, but looking for the smallest possible things we can do right now that will set us on the path to the biggest possible version of the futures we’re starting to consider.
Youth generations do like a bit of instant gratification, that’s always been true. But Gen Z is smart enough to not just seek the sugar hit and empty calories, of a generic banking customer bribe (sorry, I mean offer!). They want financial brands to provide not just a bit of immediacy, but also transparency and control over their money.
That means the credit union is now considering their brand image, the first engagement, the experience to set up an account, spend some money, get paid back from a friend, put a bit of money away for the future. Without the cliched lecturing, and financial planning that typically comes from the suit.
There’s some big structural investments required here, but also immediate actions around how we present ourselves.
Now What?
At this point, the credit union leadership team isn’t just asking, “How do we get Gen Z interested?” They’re asking: “How do we completely reposition credit unions to make sense for the next generation?”
So, rather than running another generic ad campaign on a limited budget about “trust” and “community”, the focus is shifting toward what these different people actually care about.
We’re ditching the outdated “local and friendly” message.
Stop selling “personalised service” the way they did to Boomers and Gen X. Let’s forget the Millennials because they didn’t give a shit either.
Positioning as the financial platform for independent, entrepreneurial and self-reliant Gen Z customers.
“Your Money. Your Rules.” instead of “Your Neighbourhood Credit Union.”
Building financial education into the product, not just the marketing.
Providing financial literacy so people can make informed choices, not generic ‘money advice’ that often comes with a sales pitch.
Serving that in a timely manner that is borderline entertaining … the whole ‘gamification’ thing was a gimmicky bit of jargon served to their elder siblings and even they saw right through it.
Instead of a boring blog post about "How to Build Credit”, what if there was an actually intelligent “Credit Power-Up” system built into the banking app to get them started.
Make the digital experience effortless.
If credit unions still require customers to visit a branch decorated in their distinct shade of beige to sign paperwork, they’ve already lost Gen Z.
The experience needs to be inspired by fintech with its mobile experience, where onboarding is instant, fees are transparent and customers feel empowered rather than locked into a system? These people are going to bank with multiple people, that’s cool.
So we’re going to be the best possible partner, the money they have with us is going to be interactive with other apps, because that’s not just the expectation now but reality.
Tarot for Business has helped us transform a vague business problem into the outset of an actionable strategy.
The Moon forced us to admit that Gen Z sees credit unions as irrelevant.
The Six of Cups reminded us that credit unions rely on outdated and irrelevant versions nostalgia instead of real emotional connection.
The Chariot told us that Gen Z needs urgency, momentum and the feeling of control over their finances.
The Science Behind Why This Works (or Why The Business Tarot Isn’t Just Mystic Nonsense)
This isn’t about fortune-telling. It’s about thinking differently, through asking better questions. .
And if that sounds like the just kind of thing a consultant says before charging you a fortune to rearrange your Post-It notes, bear with me, because there’s real cognitive science at play here.
1. Metaphor & Pattern Recognition Using Tarot as a Language for Business
Business already speaks in metaphors.
We talk about “growth engines”, “market battles” and “brand loyalty.” We say companies need to “find their North Star” and that industries are “ripe for disruption”.
How about we stop using the same, tired metaphors?
Instead of “market penetration” what happens when you think about alchemy and transformation (The Magician)?
Instead of “defending market share” what if you imagined shedding old skin like a snake (Death)?
Instead of trying to “win” an industry battle, what if you saw competition as The Lovers. where collaboration and partnerships could be more powerful than rivalry?
Tarot forces us to swap stale, restrictive business metaphors for ones that unlock new ways of thinking. If you only ever describe your business in terms of warfare, you’ll always be looking for an enemy to fight. If you only think in terms of growth, you may never ask whether focusing on agility and decentralisation could be your superpower.
If we reframe how we talk about problems we will open ourselves up to solutions that we never saw coming before.
2. Construal Level Theory or Thinking Like The High Priestess Instead of a Middle Manager
Most businesses are trapped in the obsession with the immediate and all the reactionary, sometimes toxic, reactionary behaviour that results in. Hitting quarterly targets. Submitting weekly reports. Attending and updating the daily stand-ups.
When everything is measured in short-term increments, businesses fall into incremental thinking. It’s no wonder they struggle with innovation and disruption of their own choosing when the biggest breakthroughs don’t come from optimising what already exists.
Construal Level Theory tells us that when we engage with abstract ideas, like metaphor, storytelling and symbolism then we naturally start thinking in bigger, more creative, and more strategic ways.
The core thesis of CLT is that the closer an object is to an individual, the more concretely it will be thought of. The further away, the more abstract.
If you’re staring at a spreadsheet, you’ll optimise. If you’re telling a story, you’ll invent. Got it?
This is why visionaries don’t tend emerge from Excel models alone. They need to be seeing patterns and possibilities where others see constraints, and tell the story. It’s a bit like The Big Short really. Seeing the real world that brings your model to life.
Tarot makes this shift in thinking, faster.
The moment you pull The Moon, you’re not just thinking about market trends, but asking, "What unseen forces are shaping this industry?"
The moment you get The Chariot, you stop debating minor optimisations and start asking, "How do we build unstoppable momentum?"
The moment you see The Hermit, you’re no longer caught in the rush for the immediate, but you realise that stepping back might be provide a new lens on the world.
Great strategy comes from shifting perspectives, and tarot forces that shift faster than any PowerPoint presentation ever will.
3. Counterfactual Thinking or Seeing The Tower Before It Falls
Some of the best business breakthroughs don’t come from analysing what’s working. They come from asking: “What if things had happened differently?”, “What if we stopped doing this entirely?” or What if we did the opposite?”
This is called counterfactual thinking, the ability to imagine alternative realities and different outcomes.
It’s why Netflix killed late fees instead of optimising them. It’s why Ryanair nixed all frills, offer basement fares, and made up with ancillary revenue items that also gave passengers greater flexibility. It’s why Tesla or Chinese EV manufacturers sells cars like more like fashion, or software, instead of through old dealership structures.
The best companies don’t just iterate, they flip the questions. And tarot makes flipping the question natural.
Pull The Hanged Man? What happens if you flip the problem upside down?
Draw The Tower? What’s on shaky ground that will collapse if you don’t act now?
Get The Fool? What would you do if you had nothing to lose?
Instead of waiting for a stroke of genius, Tarot for Business forces teams to challenge assumptions, think differently and reimagine what can really be possible.
Why This Works in the Real World
Most businesses say they want innovation, but what they really want is certainty.
They want risk-free, fully mapped-out solutions that require no real leaps of faith. They want strategic foresight that confirms what they already believe.
This is a delusion of the highest order. Breakthrough thinking cannot be expected to be an outcome of logical processes, dashboard culture, the copying of ‘best practices’ or the same consultants peddling the same frameworks.
Actually innovative thinking like The Magician, acting curious like The Fool and being willing to tear things down when The Tower tells you it’s time.
Tarot for Business won’t solve all your problems, but it will give you a new way to think about solving for them more creatively, strategically and ambitiously.
In in a world where everyone else is just optimising, the ability to see differently is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Let’s Prototype This Together
We’re developing Tarot for Business further right now, but we need a little help. We want to test it with people who are curious, open-minded and ready to challenge conventional thinking.
So if you want to test the deck in your company, run a Tarot for Business workshop or to get a bit more of a sneak peak into it, drop us a comment or an email and we’d love to follow it up.
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