photo courtesy of D. C. Atty

How was your day? It’s all relative, but I bet it was better than this guy’s.    Today is all about empathy.

The most famous design firm, IDEO is huge on this. At FailCon today Brandon Schauer from Adaptive Path was big on this. Empathy is all about putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. Pink writes about the life or death differences in healthcare that empathy can bring.

My favorite exercises:

• Eavesdrop: listen to nearby conversations and imagine yourself as a protagonist.  Now you have an excuse to eavesdrop at restaurants: “sorry, just exercising my right brain, didn’t mean to intrude”
• Play “whose life”: this sounds fun – go through someone’s backpack, purse, … (removed of stuff bearing their name) and divine their life.  This section mentions the IDEO Method Cards  – $49 for a bunch of their techniques.  If you get one good idea from one of these techniques its covered the cost.
• Empathize on the job: Experience a day in the life of your colleagues or customers.  Very illuminating.  I like shadowing.  Pink suggests having people guess their colleagues highs, lows, frustrations and rewards and then have them describe reality.   Results will vary with culture and individuals.
• Do a home made greeting card: we do this each Christmas.  Its fun and very easy with digital cameras, and shutterfly or Kodak Gallery.  I also like doing calendars because they force you through that exercise of picking the best 12-20 shots for the year, which is a delight because you reflect on what you’ve done and get to see a bunch of photos you didn’t watch when they were first uploaded.

Tomorrow: Play.  Much more upbeat.