Admittedly, the prime source of this posting is a posting by Dev Patnaik among Fast Company’s Expert Designers blogs. Patnaik is CEO of Jump Associates, a somewhat see-it-differently strategy firm. But, hey, they’re in San Francisco!
More importantly, for this post, Dev Patnaik’s “2009 book Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, makes the audacious argument that the human power of empathy is the source of all innovation.”
And that’s where I jump in. The power of empathy is the power of engagement. The power of engagement can certainly contribute to one’s power of empathy.
Here’s the nut-and-bolt of Patnaik’s theme:
Widespread empathy is about getting every single person in an organization to have a gut-level intuition for the people who buy their products and services–the folks who really matter. When your organization develops a shared and intuitive vibe for what’s going on in the world, you’re able to see new opportunities faster than your competitors, long before the rest of us read about it in The Wall Street Journal.
And please notice how empathy, like engagement, is a product of intuition.
Patnaik’s point is that the more every employee feels the customer’s vibes, the more fast-moving, idea-generating, product-innovating and customer-satisfying such a company will be.
My point is that the more the business provides opportunities and resources for employees to engage in discovering such empathy, the more fast-moving, idea-generating, product-innovating, and customer-satisfying, not to mention employee-engaging, the company will be.
Patnaik suggests 3 principles to achieve widespread empathy:
1. Make it easy by providing lightweight methods for employees to connect with the outside world.
2. Make it everyday by surrounding work environment with information about the customer’s life.
3. Make it experiential by feeling what the other people are feeling.
I know I like Patnaik’s ideas because he encourages providing a business culture that promotes engaging in empathy. Also I dig that my Culture of Engagement programs help participants identify and build ways employees can engage both inside and outside the company’s walls.
Tags: business culture, Customer Empathy, Employee Engagement
