Empathize.
Going to a real person — with real attention — before you build anything.
A packet of five interview notes — what you heard, what surprised you, and what you refused to interpret too quickly.
The Innovation Challenge begins not with an idea but with a person.
This week you will identify a real human being whose life is touched by the thing you have chosen to lift up — its keeper, its user, its neighbor, its inheritor. A librarian. A coach. A shopkeeper. An elder. A parishioner. A longtime resident. A younger sibling. A friend. Not someone you imagine. Someone whose actual day is shaped by this place, this practice, this institution, or this person — someone who knows it from the inside. And you will sit down with five such people, in person where you can, and you will listen to them.
This stage is the easiest stage to skim and the hardest stage to do well. Most innovation that fails — at any level, in any company, by any founder — fails because the team did not actually understand the person they were claiming to serve. They imagined that person. They optimized for the version of the person who looked most like themselves.
You will not do that. You will go to the actual person, you will record what you actually hear, and you will refuse to rush the story toward a tidy explanation.
We share the rest with the people building this with us.
The full stage — the disciplines, the formation note, the reference essays, and the weekly deliverable — is part of the cohort experience. Tell us where you fit and we'll send you the rest.