X: The Experience When Business Meets Design

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NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

ARCHITECTING EXPERIENCE BEGINS WITH EMPATHY

Changing the way businesses create experiences starts with defining what the experience is and should be. The challenge here is how we see the world.

When we surround ourselves with people like us, as so many executives do, the work we do together is often based on shared perspectives and ways of thinking. Our personal and professional experiences can be enormously valuable in making business judgments, but they can also make us biased and work against us.

The secret ingredient in creating any meaningful experience is empathy: the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings. Seeing the world through the eyes of others gives you a competitive advantage because so few businesses truly have a disciplined method for doing so.

In his remarkable commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005, novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said, “The most obvious important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

Our revenues keep falling. Managers agree that customers keep jumping on these silly technology trends and they’re not listening to us like they used to. I think we need to cut budgets, but also talk louder so customers hear us again. We just earned a raise. ...