Emotional Intelligence & Design Thinking, the forgotten link?
First, what is emotional intelligence, otherwise known as Emotional Quotient (EQ)?
“Your EQ is the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates them and how to work cooperatively with them,” said Howard Gardner, the Harvard theorist who researched and studied the theory of multiple intelligences.
Yes, there are 3 major models to EQ. Yes, they all have pros and cons, but we are not going to debate that today.
As experts in Design Thinking (DT), it’s imperative that we understand how to articulate other people’s feelings, emotions, thoughts, and behaviours. We need to translate those into actionable steps to achieve our goal with the customer. Design Thinking uses the word “Empathy” to lump many elements into one “word” to fit a method/framework. While this is certainly not wrong, but by doing so, people tend to forget what other capabilities are needed to make the “Empathize” stage successful.
To keep it simple, let’s use the “mixed model” as a way to categorize the major elements of EQ. See below.
· Self-Awareness: recognize an emotion as it happens
· Self-Regulation: determine how long an emotion will last
· Motivation: reframe negative thoughts into positive terms
· Empathy: ability to recognize how other people feel
· Social Skills: developing good interpersonal skills
Anyone who has used Design Thinking can easily recognize and relate to these elements in the Empathy stage. While we certainly are not about to suggest a change to the Design Thinking model, we just think it’s important to understand the importance of having a high EQ when problem solving and innovating.
Food for thought…studies have shown that a persons success could be as much as 85% EQ and only 15% IQ (Intelligence Quotient).
