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.

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…