Creating Widespread Empathy
Just back from the 2010 Heathcare Design Conference in Las Vegas where Nurture had another excellent showing — an awesome booth, including a creative and engaging interactive component; a Nightingale Award for Pocket workstations (yea!) and on top of all that — a chance to mingle with and sit in on a bunch of fantastic presentations from some of the brightest minds in healthcare and design.
The initial keynote featured Dev Patnaik, the founder and chief executive of Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm with offices in New York and San Mateo, Calif. and the author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. 
I thought, and a number of others who heard him agreed, that Mr. Patnaik was an excellent choice to kick off the conference. He focused on the disconcerting reality that many organizations have lost critical connections with their key constituencies and how to remedy that situation by working to create widespread empathy that leads to innovation, growth and success.
You’ll be best off picking up the book but here are a couple of quick highlights from the presentation that stuck with me:
Patnaik’s main premise: people are wired to care but companies need to work at it. Companies succeed when they reconnect to their humanity, their empathy and their creativity.
Empathy = the ability to connect with others and see the world as others do. Patnaik used a single company, Microsoft, and two different products, the Xbox and the Zune, to quickly show how empathy can impact product design and ultimate success.
The designers of the original Xbox “were the guys” they were building it for. Hardcore gamers all – they “were” the target audience, knew 100% what they wanted and they nailed it. The Xbox and its successor Xbox 360 are a huge hit.
When it came to developing the Zune (mp3 player), the design team given the task to design Microsoft’s response to the wildly popular Apple iPod asked “who are we building this for?” and apparently had so many differing opinions — the design ended up being a clunky, unpopular, mess. (BTW, I love the Zune — so I’m not sure what that says about me…)
Stark contrast: Patnaik contrasted the story of woefully out of touch airline executive who truly believed that his personal VIP customer experiences in flying was the same for the rest of us with the executives and employees of Harley-Davidson Motor Company – who consider themselves “riders” – and live, breathe and participate daily in the community they serve.
How to do it? Make it easy (avoid piling on extra work); Make it experiential (empathy is not a powerpoint); and make it everyday (empathy and connecting with your customers is NOT a special event.)
Patnaik says that the real payoff of creating widespread empathy is developing a real sense of mission — a reason to come to work every day that will help you make better, faster decisions. That’s something that I’d think all of us can empathize with.
