I just read an article on SmashingMagazine.com that talks about the power of empathy to foster innovation. It chronicles Pete Smart's journey to solve 50 problems in 50 days by inserting himself into the situation to understand it from the user's experience.
He started with a traditional approach to problem solving: observe, analyze, interview. He came up with predictable solutions but none seemed adequate. Essentially, Smart concluded, he came up with nothing.
Smart finally did find his solution by actually becoming the participant himself. It was only then, when he "felt" it himself, that the real problem was revealed. In his own words: "the constraints of our design process can allow us to neglect a vital [tenet] of creating truly effective solutions: it can allow us to miss real empathy. Real empathy is not naturally fostered in focus groups. It's not uncovered in analytics. It doesn't start with personas or empathy maps. Real empathy starts with people. The quality of our problem solving is directly linked to our ability to understand the problem."
This is true in many facets of society and government in particular. It seems a strange reality considering government is essentially made up "regular people," politician or bureaucrat or consultant. But somehow we've lost touch with the very key to unlocking the innovation inherent in all of us. The idea of empathetic research is not new and sounds so tangibly simple; the ability to recognize and understand a person's state of mind, to figuratively live inside someone's head. And yet it is so effortlessly and often neglected.
It's easy to lose sight of this truth when one is sitting in an office, or behind the wheel of a car or watching television or in a council chamber. How terribly constrictive it is to our collective ability to make decisions and design vibrant communities when we neglect the on-the-ground realities and the wisdom of the "innovator" in all of us.
So how do we deconstruct a system and an approach that stymies empathy, kills innovation? Smart came to a simple yet wonderful conclusion: introduce play. By doing so he turned a "logical problem into an enjoyable experience that people actually want to engage with."
I need to think harder about this possibility and how it reflects on how we function and its direct applicability to solving some of Squamish's conundrums. But more importantly, we should all be part of finding and communicating solutions.
I'd love to hear from you.
To read Part 1 of Pete Smart's article and to find out how he inserted play into his solutions, go to: goo.gl/gbf1b
