First two are stories in the book that stood out for me.
Power of metaphors: In the “Inspire” chapter Pavan
invokes Aristotle’s quote “To be a master of metaphor is a sign of genius” and
cites several examples to illustrate it. One of them is Mahindra XUV500. A
market survey of a couple of thousand customers across the world got translated
into a design brief – to build a car that offers aggressive styling, muscular
looks and a macho stance. And then the team adopted the metaphor of cheetah
indicating speed, agility, aggression, and muscle. The design team visited Masai
Mara, Kenya to watch the beast in the wild terrain. So much to internalize the
metaphor! The design cycle also involved
testing 250 prototypes across half a dozen terrains in the world.
Perils of “just do it”: Pavan is also careful to
bring out stories from innovative organizations that highlight leadership
admitting to mistakes. For example, he illustrates the principle that “just do
it” without an appropriate pilot or prototype can hurt badly with two big
decisions from Flipkart that backfired. In the first case, Flipkart went for a
Big Billion Day sale in October 2014 without doing any prototyping. The site
couldn’t withstand the heavy traffic and became dysfunctional for some time. In
the second case, leadership decided to take Flipkart towards app-only mode by
forgoing desktop customers without any pilot. They had to revert the decision
after backlash from employees and customers.
Now we turn to questions that got raised in my mind that rubbed
some of my long-held beliefs. It means I need to explore them further.
Can empathy be engineered? Pavan suggests in the
chapter “Empathy and define” that empathy can be engineered. This section
builds on the work of several reputed thinkers like Daniel Goleman
(self-awareness), Thich Nhat Hanh, and Dalai Lama (mindfulness). And then
suggests that with the tools like mind mapping, stakeholder map, and customer
journey mapping, empathy can be engineered. If listening with openness and
deferring judgment are important for empathy then it is not clear how using
tools will cultivate empathy. “Engineering” carries a sense of control and
precision in the design process and I don’t know how empathy can be controlled.
But maybe I am seeing engineering and empathy in a narrow sense.
Can biases be overcome? Citing research from
Francesca Gino, Pavan mentions that confirmation bias can be overcome through
curiosity. The solution is hiring and cultivating curiosity. My limited
understanding of biases is that they are deep-rooted and extremely hard to
overcome. Daniel Kahneman who has researched biases for fifty years keeps
saying in the interviews that it is difficult to overcome biases at an
individual level. After writing the bestseller “Thinking, fast and slow” Kahneman
feels he hasn’t changed much and he is still overconfident. It is possible that the study of Kahneman’s work has biased me. So I need to study this further.
Sources:
Book image: amazon.in
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