The Pathway at the Intersection of Insights

I sometimes get this overwhelming feeling that all bodies of work or knowledge tend to converge at a certain elevation. Be it psychology, strategy, innovation or leadership, they tend to point towards a common path.

These three anecdotes will help illustrate my point.

#1| I was listening to an acclaimed child psychologist the other day.  She had been invited to share her perspectives on how to help children to focus. The audience was mostly comprised of young parents. She gave us the ten principles of child engagement but there was one non-negotiable principle which was a pre-requisite for the rest nine. And that was to show empathy towards the child. A genuine sensitivity towards the child's feelings and a keen understanding of her core set of challenges (and sharing those perspectives with the child) is what makes her open up to her parents. And when that barrier gets broken, the child usually reciprocates.

#2|  I was reading a seminal book on Business Strategy yesterday. It talked about how people typically confuse Goal Setting with Strategy. Having an audacious goal isn't really strategising. Actually, strategy is all about diagnosing that 'significant' constraint of that organisation (which could be internal or external) and drawing up an action plan to circumvent or solve that. But the most important pre-requisite for that is keen observation (of the situational factors) and that requires tremendous empathy. 

#3| As part of an executive management program that I am currently pursuing, I had the opportunity to listen to some of this generation's most venerated professors talk about innovation, entrepreneurship and design thinking. They elucidated on the 4 phases of innovation: Observation, Insights, Ideation and Experimentation. But guess what! they categorically said that the core pre-requisite for 'Observation' Phase is empathy which imbues in you the ability to think from the other person's perspective. Observation helps uncover those 'critical' constraints or challenges which human beings face and that is actually the genesis of innovation.

So, be it any (seemingly) diverse body of work or knowledge, it seems like they converge on to the following master tenet or at least on to a subset of it:

# Have the Ability to Listen Keenly. Listening would enable you to See from the other person's perspective. That would help you to gradually Unravel the 'real' challenge.  Once the challenge (or a set of challenges) is diagnosed, create a Roadmap to tackle it and finally build a Prototype to test the solution's efficacy.

Would love to hear your thoughts.