To make empathetic engagement with customers as rich as possible, it’s essential to immerse in and observe them in the wild, and to do so regularly. Some tips from an outstanding innovation leader.

Senior leaders unwittingly jeopardize their organizations by insulating themselves from the pain their users experience. By removing insulation, orgs can feel the pain they should be solving!

Your company’s next product might be hiding in plain sight: where you’re already servicing your own needs. Thinking about yourself as the first customer among many, instead of the total addressable market, is a game-changer.

To make empathetic engagements with end users as rich as possible, it’s essential to immerse in and observe the world of your user, and to do so regularly. Some tips from an outstanding innovation leader.

Due to tight delivery schedules, it might seem faster to skip deep customer research and just start building something. This is wrong. Empathy fuels both insights, and the stories that enlist enthusiastic collaboration.

We all like to deduce, to prove, to know for certain. But the most interesting opportunities for innovation are a function of wonder. Specifically, of a team willing to be humble and vulnerable enough to not know.

Imagination is sparked by surprises. So if we want to stimulate fresh thinking, we ought to be seeking out surprises. Customer insights leader Kelly Garrett Zeigler tells a story that highlights the importance of welcoming an unexpected direction.

To describe Fenty Beauty as having revolutionized the beauty industry is an understatement: by obliterating the “acceptable spectrum” of color, they literally changed the definition of beauty. Such “experience gaps” are an incredible opportunity for innovation.

The best entrepreneurs are just as deft at disqualifying customers as they are at attracting new ones. Pat Brown is delighted by the fact that many vegetarians refuse to try the Impossible Burger because it disgusts them — but that’s ok: they’re not his target customer!

My friend Philipe Barreaud runs the Customer Innovation Lab for Michelin. He’s the kind of guy who tells the technicians to “hang the sign upside down” in the main office, just to signal the value of seeing things differently and challenging people’s perceptions…

In conventional business settings, logic is king. All decisions are stripped of any seemingly unnecessary information (including emotion) just like a hospital is sterilized of germs. Only the facts. Reason must prevail. And yet, all too often, data-rich but emotion-poor meetings end in the same outcome: a resolution to have another meeting…

It's tempting to think, "We shouldn't let them know that the product isn't perfect yet, that we're still trying to get it right..." when working on something new. But often, that's the exact wrong instinct…