This Business901 Podcast featured Seung Chan Lim, nicknamed SLIM. We discussed his journey and finally his project, Realizing Empathy. Through this project Slim hopes to share ideas, tools, and other ways to facilitate a meaningful, sustainable, and constructive conversations between and among diverse perspectives whether that's between people or between people and materials or between people and machines by using "making" as the shared metaphor.

Realizing Empathy is a project that asks what it means to make something, how it works as a process, and why it matters to our lives. Slim believe that making is a process that is shared across cultures and disciplines. Slim told me, “People use different words like "experimenting", "painting", "acting", "directing", "dancing", "choreographing", "writing", "translating", "crafting", etc... but what I have found is that the underlying principles are identical. Not only that, but there's a direct line of connection between making and empathizing, which is at the heart of how we form meaningful relationship with everything we come in contact with.”

You will find this podcast very different and one of the most engaging podcast that I have had.

If you find what Slim says intriguing, please take a look at his websites;

Website: http://realizingempathy.com/

Facebook: http://facebook.com/realizempathy/

Blog: http://realizingempathy.posterous.com/

What did Slim do before this project? For about 10 years, Slim was a computer scientist / interaction designer at MAYA Design where he last served as the Assistant Director of Engineering. Half the time, he helped fortune 500 companies design innovative products and services, and half the time he worked on both human-computer interaction and software systems research. Then he decided to take an art class.

Related Information:

Framing the Act of Innovation, as an Act of Empathizing

Side Effects of our Desires and Abilities to Empathize

Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry

A Good Architect is an enabling Orchestra Leader,

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Ankit Patel, principal partner with The Lean Way Consulting firm while doing some work with the Cleveland Clinic, discovered Appreciative Inquiry and saw an opportunity to blend it with his work in Continuous Improvement. I found the work fascinating and this is the subject of this Business901 podcast. An excerpt of the podcast can be found on this blogpost, Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry. 

Ankit told me before the podcast, “The basic concept is use AI as the starting point (in the case of the ppt. it's the starting point to a strategic initiative) and then go into the traditional tools once there is a "pull" from staff on what they want to become. It's a great way to do strategy and other process improvements.  Basically the best way I've seen to introduce changes via an AI methodology and then go into the specifics, strategy, process improvement, etc.”

More about Ankit Patel: Ankit was a Lean consultant for Dell Inc. overseeing Dell's Manufacturing and Re-Manufacturing production processes in Lebanon, TN. He has helped guide the multi- billion dollar plant in strategic planning, coaching executives at the plant, facilitating Kaizen events, and training Lean leaders at all levels of the organization. Ankit combines a unique approach of positive psychology, culture improvements, strategy, and process improvement to get companies results. His latest venture is in bringing Appreciative Inquiry to the field of continuous improvement.

Related Information

Lean Engagement Team Book Released

Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change

My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

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“Man, they said we better Accentuate the positive Eliminate the negative Latch on to the affirmative Don't mess with Mister In-Between No, do not mess with Mister In-Between Do you hear me, hmm? The music was written by Harold Arlen and the lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and it was published in 1944.

You wonder why it has taken organizations this long to follow this approach.  My podcast guest, Sara Orem, co-author of Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change (Jossey-Bass Business & Management) expanded on this in the podcast:

Lions and tigers and bears. We lived in caves and there were wild animals and there were maybe not an ever present danger but there was an often present danger so we were wired to look for danger. The worrier in us will look for danger in the fact that we didn't get a raise or we'll look for danger in the fact that our significant other didn't say good morning to us. We are negative beings and to some degree that's also genetic.

Sara L.Orem, Ph.D. has twenty years of management experience and fifteen years management consulting in and to major financial services companies in the U. S., Britain and Australia. Her current focus is on the development and use of positive methods including Appreciative Inquiry in coaching and group processes. Appreciative Coaching describes in detail the method Sara has developed for her coaching practice which serves women and men looking at self-started transitions.

P.S. My favorite rendition of the song is a Bette Midler & Bing Crosby rendition.

Appreciative Inquiry (sometimes shortened to "AI") is primarily an organizational development method which seeks to engage all levels of an organization by taking an "asset-based approach." It starts with the belief that every organization, and every person in that organization, has positive aspects that can be built upon. It asks questions like “What’s working well?”, “What’s good about what you are currently doing?” David Cooperrider is generally credited with coining the term ‘Appreciative Inquiry’.

Related Information:

Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?

The Strength of an Architect is in their Collaborative Abilities

Lean Engagement Team Book Released

Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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My initial interest for this podcast was the perspective of Design from an Architect’s viewpoint. How does it differ from an industrial engineer or even an industrial designer, or other Design fields such as marketing? What makes an architect thought process different? I was surprised not in the answers that I received from my guest, Zachary Evans, an architect and partner at Kelty Tappy Design, Inc. What did surprise me is the lens that they looked at things. In musical terms, they were not the composer of magnificent musical piece but rather the orchestra leader that enable a variety of talents to perform at their best for the audience (the customer).

I might have been just lucky selecting the right architect to interview but I found that the strength of design was in the collaborative ability of the designer. There was no shying away from customer involvement, it was welcomed and actually a sign of failure if it was not solicited. Thinking like an architect has many similarities to SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch) where the premise that products and services only create the opportunity to provide value. Value is created only when the customer uses the product or service. Enabling the use is the central theme of most architecture and Zach does a good job in relating that concept.

Zachary Evans is an architect and partner at Kelty Tappy Design, Inc., a Fort Wayne architecture, planning, and urban design firm. A Ball State University graduate (Muncie, Indiana), Zach holds professional architectural registrations in Indiana and Ohio and is certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB). He is an active member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Fort Wayne Chapter, and currently serves on the City of Fort Wayne (Indiana) Downtown Design Review Committee.

Related Information:

Should your Organization start Thinking like an Architect?

How to Design like an Architect

An Architects view of Prototyping and Modeling

What’s New in Business Model Generation?

Critical and Creative Thinking benefits the Problem Solver

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