Empathy and innovation: they seem like an odd pairing: the first sounds squishy and touchy-feely, while the second seems cool and hip and sleek. But the two concepts have a lot to do with each other.

If you’re in the business of designing products for other people to use (and no matter how esoteric your work, sooner or later, there is a customer out there somewhere), then empathy is really the first order of business. Since it’s only by setting aside your point of view that you can clearly see another’s needs, the IDEO Design Thinking process begins with structured empathy-building exercises.

But the connection between empathy and innovation goes deeper than that. Consider that your most deeply ingrained and habitual frame of reference is self-obsessed thinking. You were built that way. For obvious reasons the brain prioritizes self-preservation, and the most fundamental survival skill is the ability to take care of your own hide. So we’ve become experts on optimizing things for ourselves, everything from food and shelter to psychological self-protection. We have some natural capacity to extend that survival instinct to our immediate family and maybe some members of the extended tribe. Teams that work together for an extended period have some of this ability: they come up with a lot of inventive ways to protect themselves and their immediate tribe, but all that invention revolves around the same theme of self-preservation. Interesting, yes. Innovative? Not really.

But making a habit of seeing things from another’s point of view, someone far outside your usual frame of reference: that gives your brain a real stretch. Even if you set aside the social and ethical benefits of such practices, empathy has real value as a way to develop creativity.

Some of my favorite artists—writers in particular—were extraordinarily good at building deep empathy for characters who were nothing like them. Melville’s Ahab, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Charlotte Brontë’s Heathcliff; these memorable characters came into being because their creators could set aside their own limited worldview and experiences and expand their horizons to see the world in a completely different way.

All around your team, there are other people and other teams that operate by very different rules from those you have established and gotten comfortable with. If you ca step outside the safety of your habits and conventions and project yourself into their world by practicing empathy, your team’s creative capacity will flourish.

Try It: How can your team make the practice of empathy an integral part of building your capacity for innovation? What would it take for you to step into the shoes of your customers? The team down the hall? Your management group? Do it in an altruistic way, or not. Use it to build connections and develop mutual understanding, or not. But if you can genuinely see the world through their eyes, you’re pushing your brain into unexpected and interesting configurations. And new and creative ideas will flow.

Image:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/karen_roe/7955557300  Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)