How you can wire your company to care

I recently read a book called “Wired to Care” and I wanted to write a quick note about it. We started MotivIndex because we wholeheartedly believe in the message Dev Patniak delivers through his book. And it is the reason why we get hired by innovation and research divisions of Fortune 500 companies.

Developing empathy towards one’s consumer isn’t easy. Traditional business education has trained us all to think about people in a very impersonal manner. In the organizations we work for, we get accustomed to talking about people as a bunch of numbers (age, income, market size). And we rarely discuss the things that make our customers who they are — shared beliefs, values and motivations.

This becomes our job. By helping our clients think about their markets as made up of groups of consumers with shared beliefs and motivations, we allow them to think differently about who their end user is, both today and in the future. We give them the ability to develop empathy towards their consumers because they either share some of those beliefs with the consumer, or know someone close to them who does.

Consider this example — As a 32 year old man, I may find it difficult to empathize with an 18 year old woman. But if you told me that she believes in amassing culinary knowledge because it enhances her food consumption and preparation experiences, I can imagine who she is, picture her in my mind, and even begin to think about what she’d need from my organization to better her culinary learning journey.

It’s amazing how much of a uniting force powerful, empathetic research can be. We have seen it break down barriers in large companies and create paths to innovation (that never existed before). As Dev points out in his book repeatedly, we are all wired to care. We just need the tools and mechanisms to do so.