Empathy seems to be having a moment - at least on our Sense & Signal podcast.
In two recent episodes, guests Dan Torres and Brad Topliff talk about the importance of empathy in leadership and design. They come to this from the tech sector where product managers and user experience designers consider empathy a foundational part of their process.
Product designers ask: How can I walk in a customer’s shoes to identify the problems they are trying to solve and how they might go about adopting a new product that may help them?
Empathy & Design Thinking
Coming from the higher education environment, I find it odd that empathy is not often an explicit topic educators discuss. By explicit, I mean that it’s built into our vocabulary about how we deliver instruction and student services. We may talk about walking in the student’s shoes, but rarely apply frameworks like design thinking which foregrounds empathy as a foundational part of the design process.
I know higher education often resists ideas that come from corporate America. Faculty often have a justifiable bias against anything that smells of capitalism or business. I can visualize an instructor recoiling at the idea that the curriculum they are presenting to students is a product. Associating education with something as reductive as commerce is anathema to many educators.
But what would it look like if more educators - and educational leaders - investigated the lessons learned from the tech sector using strategies such as Agile, Scrum, and Design Thinking? Could these product development strategies help revitalize a higher education sector that seems to be calcified in its approach to educating and credentialing students?
Dan Torres at Google says he looks at everything like a product. And he always assesses a product’s value to customers and considers their pathway to adopting it. What problem is the product solving for the customer? And how are they going to find and use it?
Creating Directors of Innovation & Collaboration
In addition to continuing our consideration of the importance of empathy as an essential function of design thinking and leadership, Brad Topliff offers a solution to how we can cultivate an innovative culture in complex organizations - create directors of innovation and collaboration.
We know complex organizations are prone to creating siloed departments and teams. But what if you created a director of innovation and collaboration position as Brad Topliff did within his organization? The person in that role could use their bird's eye view of the organization to connect different people and departments working on comptable initiatives. This silo busting and collaboration building creates a fertile space for innovation.
Again, I wonder what colleges and universities - notorious for their siloing of departments - would look like if they started creating director of innovation and collaboration positions?
Add to the Conversation
Both of these episodes are fascinating explorations of the importance of empathy in product development and innovation. Let us know what you think in the comments section of these videos to extend our conversation around empathy, design, and innovation.