Photos by Magenta
Tarot cards, long associated with divination, can actually be a powerful tool for problem solving in the boardroom. Tarot can help businesses uncover creative solutions to their challenges, inspiring new ideas and strategies. So while it might feel a bit ‘out there’ to present a box of tarot cards at a team away day, you could discover fresh approaches to your business objectives or develop a more fluid, collaborative approach to decision-making if you try.
Benefits of Using Tarot in the Boardroom
There are many benefits to using tarot in the boardroom. Tarot invites us to look beyond the tangible, the logical, and the obvious to explore the intangible and the unknown.
With the help of tarot, business owners can tap into their collective wisdom and create innovative solutions to their business challenges. For example, through the use of tarot, businesses can unlock their teams’ creative potential, boost problem-solving skills, and gain insight into the future of their business. When used to come up with creative solutions to business challenges, tarot can also help you expand your thinking and see new opportunities.
This means that tarot can be used to facilitate decision-making and provide insights into the outcomes of your decisions. For example, you can use tarot to spark new ideas, think outside the box, and come up with innovative solutions to your challenges. Using tarot to facilitate decisions can help you define your objectives and potentially create a creative road map for how to achieve them.
Tarot as a Creative Problem-Solving Tool
Many people associate tarot with fortune-telling, and while the cards can be used to look into the future, we prefer to think of tarot as a tool to help us solve problems in the present. A lot of our work here, at Magenta School of Magick, with tarot is focused on providing guidance for personal issues. This can be scaled outwards by using tarot as a problem-solving tool in team based activities to discover new solutions to your challenges.Â
So next time you’re presented with a problem to solve at work, try using the cards to generate new ideas. If you’re short on inspiration, you might choose to draw a few cards at random, or you can choose a Signifcator from the tarot to represent your challenge. Doing either of these things will prompt you to think about your challenge from a different perspective.
Tarot as a Collaboration Tool
When you use the cards collaboratively, you’re tapping into the collective wisdom of the team, encouraging everyone to look beyond the tangible and the logical. By doing so, you’ll all be able to tap into a rich source of untapped creativity and insight. Using tarot to make decisions at work can help you create extra opportunities to collaborate and gain clarity around your business objectives using the collective unconscious. For example, you can ask each team member to select a card, which will prompt everyone to think about the problem from their unique perspectives, which facilitates discussion and brainstorming.
How to Use Tarot in the Boardroom
To use tarot in the boardroom, you’ll first need to familiarise yourself with the cards and know how to interpret them. If you’re new to tarot, you’ll want to practise with a few sample readings before using the cards in a business setting.
Once you’re comfortable with the cards, there are a variety of ways to use tarot in the boardroom. To use the cards for business planning, you could begin by shuffling the cards and selecting 10 cards. With these 10 cards, you can create two layouts: one for the past and one for the future. Alternatively, you could choose five cards and use them to create a layout for each year in a five year business plan.
With either of these layouts, you interpret the cards against the backdrop of your business objectives and stimulate ideas for growth, uncover lessons to learn or see the direction your business could be heading in.
When you use the cards to problem-solve, you can use them in a variety of ways. For example, you may want to take a card from each suit and create a layout to represent your challenge. Or you may want to shuffle the cards and select five cards to represent different aspects of your challenge. You could also select one card to represent your thoughts about the challenges and one card to represent your feelings. This combination of thoughts from the first round with the feelings from the second round, will give you a clearer idea of how you feel about solutions and challenges.
You can use the cards when looking retrospectively and conducting project reviews. A 3 card spread could be used to gain insight into the past, present, and future of your business. You can use this spread to come up with a plan for the future as well as gaining a new perspective on how your business has evolved.
Looking at the cards can be great to gain extra information for all those Strategic Questions. You could select cards to represent your question, and further cards that represent the areas of your business that are related to that question. Building on this, you can also use the cards to create a decision matrix, which involves generating two columns of options and one column of criteria to help you make your decision. One column represents the pros of each option, and the other column represents the cons of each option.
You can use tarot for organisational change and corporate policy. For example, you could select three cards to represent your company’s three core values or three high level goals for the year. Or choose five tarot cards to represent the strengths of your business and the challenges it faces. You can choose additional cards to stimulate discussions around your objectives for addressing these challenges. By selecting cards to represent your objectives and challenges, you can consider a broad range of factors in your decision-making process when it comes to organisational change and corporate policies.
Things to try
Tarot cards have been used for centuries to explore the wisdom of the collective and unlock the creative potential of individuals. In recent years, business leaders have begun using these cards to help make decisions, solve problems, and plan for the future. If you’re interested in tapping into the creative potential of your team, consider bringing tarot into your next board meeting.
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