Lacking empathy

I spent a fascinating couple of hours on Tuesday afternoon at the Royal College of Art, at an event organised by Design London, a joint venture between the RCA and neighbour Imperial College. The aim of the group is to fuse academic disciplines from design, engineering and management schools to help develop new products and services to take to market, improve the education of some of the two institutions' students, and help foster a better approach to design within British industry. Heady stuff.

Alongside the astute observation from speaker Sir George Cox that most MBAs don't teach people how to manage creativity, there was also a reflection that most inventors don't know what it is they have invented. Cox, whose Report for the last government was the catalyst for the foundation of Design London, cited Marconi's invention of radio (as a communication tool for shipping, not a mass medium) and SMS (a tool originally designed for debugging of mobile networks) amongst other examples of this.

Something that I have noted in the past is that there is a distinct lack of empathy exhibited by many in the IT industry. I guess it is the nature of the products and services, but there tends to be an over-representation of thinkers rather than feelers (to use the MBTI terminology) in both IT departments (at Reuters there were only three of us in an extended leadership team of about 40) and, it seems, big software companies.

In my simplistic mind, there have been three ages of information technology: the first was of pure computing – the replacement of rooms of people known as 'computers' by machines to do complex mathematical operations (bomb trajectories and so on); the second was of business process automation where Taylorist approaches to the streamlining of businesses through specialisation, standardisation and simplification was applied to white collar work; and the third was of communication and collaboration from which stems the social networking revolution.

The three ages have overlapped and intertwined, but the first two were very scientific in their outlook and so were a logical extension for control by the people developing the underlying technology (even if most of the failures experienced in the second age were as a result of not getting the human and social factors right). The third phase, however, is so far away from the natural motivations of an industry that is "thinking" rather than "feeling".

The general reality is that most communication and collaboration projects are deployed by the techies and then left up to everyone else to adopt. The idea that this will happen without facilitation by people who have experience of facilitating such change before is crazy… but is what most organizations do. This is the new discipline that I have spoken about before – the realm of the Chief Collaboration Officer, and driven by people who understand how you can get people to work together more effectively using (or sometimes not using) technology.

That's probably not a group to be found in today's IT department, but just in the same way that mobile network engineers didn't work out the market for selling ringtones via SMS, or radio engineers don't make great DJs.