Jocelyn Wyatt
Social Innovation Lead, IDEO
Designing with Empathy
A decade or two ago, the brightest young talents in business school headed straight for Wall Street. But many of today’s newly-minted MBA’s are thinking twice about where they want to devote their energies. They want their work to mean something. They‘re looking for social engagement.
Jocelyn Wyatt, who leads an IDEO group that promotes design for social impact, took her MBA straight to Nairobi, Kenya. Here, she worked as an Acumen Fund fellow, assisting in the financial structuring of an agribusiness consisting of 7,000 farmers who were growing Artemisia, a plant used in malaria treatment medication. The year before, she was in Hyderabad, India helping local vision entrepreneurs to supply affordable reading glasses to people in their communities.
“The social sector can learn a lot from business,” Wyatt explains. “It needs people who are business-savvy or have that background. There’s a new movement for people who really want to do things. What I really want is to do something that’s good for the world—something that I feel good about.”
At IDEO, social impact is one of the “really hot things,” according to Wyatt. “People are dying for opportunities to take on projects,” she says.
But such ambition does not automatically translate into successful start-up enterprises in developing countries. One of the things Wyatt learned in her trips to Africa and India is that sustainable projects require much more than American business and technological finesse; they must also be grounded in the cultures they are intended to benefit.
Wyatt calls this “designing with empathy,” which she views as a critical tool for social impact. “Design-thinking is an approach that we use to look at any of our projects,” she says. “Given a big challenge—such as access to clean drinking water in rural India—we start by first engaging with the customers, talking with them, understanding their needs and aspirations.”
When she was in Nairobi, for instance, Wyatt said she spent most of her time talking with the management team in the agribusiness field. Upon reflection, she wishes she had gotten to know the farmers themselves more intimately. She stayed with one farming family in Tanzania, an experience that she says allowed her to more fully understand the strains they were going through—which built up trust.
“The traditional NGO approach is to do these drive-by field visits,” Wyatt explains. “You spend half an hour in a place, take pictures, ask a farmer, doctor or patient a couple of questions, and then you go back to your SUV. But when you really spend time with the people of a village, the stories and information they give you is so much richer. They feel more comfortable with you, and that’s where you learn their values, their beliefs and the different roles people play in their own society.”
Roles are difficult to get around. “When you do work in emerging markets, hierarchy really does matter, titles matter,” Wyatt says. “In Silicon Valley, there’s an emphasis on non-hierarchical organization; we try not to distinguish between different positions. But when you’re trying to bring innovation to places where the culture of hierarchy is very strong, you have to do that in different ways.”
Wyatt finds these challenges inspiring. It’s not just about American business bringing its technology and innovation to the developing world. It’s also about Americans learning from cultures that do not value consumption as much as we do here, or where traditional social relationships are integral to the functioning of an organization. “How can we learn from those business models and bring them back here?” Wyatt asks.
Bringing more people together is the key to expanding IDEO’s reach, according to Wyatt. She hopes to spread the word about design thinking, especially to more traditional aid and development organizations like USAID and the World Bank. Such bureaucratic institutions are not “nimble” enough, she says, to engage developing cultures in a truly empathetic manner.
“Social entrepreneurs are risk-takers,” she says. “Some of these huge traditional organizations are set up so that they need to know what they’re going to get out of it before they do something. But when you’re selling innovation, you have to believe that the process is going to end up somewhere good—and it always does.”
