Convene - August 2015

22 PCMA CONVENE AUGUST 2015 PCMA.ORG PLENARY Practical Empathy + UIA’s 2014 Rankings

RESEARCH

More Cities, More Countries

Last issue we presented ICCA’s 2014 rankings of the most popular cities and countries for international association meetings. This month, it’s the Union of International Associations’ turn.

SOURCE: International Meetings Statistics Report, Union of International Associations ( uia.org/publications/meetings-stats)

City Meetings Country Meetings 1. Singapore 850 1. United States 858

2. Brussels 787 2. Belgium 851 3. Vienna 396 3. Singapore 850 4. Paris 325 4. South Korea 636 5. Seoul 249 5. Japan 624 6. Tokyo 228 6. France 561 7. Madrid 200 7. Austria 539 8. Barcelona 193 8. Spain 513 9. Bangkok 189 9. Germany 439 10. Geneva 173 10. United Kingdom 354

UNCONVENTIONAL

How Much I Feel

Think empathy is a nebulous, New Age–y, hard-to-apply concept? User-experience consultant and author Indi Young begs to differ. In this excerpt from her book Practical Empathy:
For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work, she discusses
empathy as a skill to be studied, developed, and mastered:
Here’s the situation: most organizations are out of bal-
ance, but they don’t know it. They do know that creative
ideas are important. They know that strong collaboration
forges better solutions and execution. But they still scramble
to make both creativity and collaboration produce a more
reliable return on investment in their product development
and operations. No matter how many agencies and manage-
ment consultants they hire, no matter how many promising
experts they bring on board, things still don’t go as beauti-
fully as they hoped.

At a certain level, you know opportunities exist to enrich what you are creating and improve how people in the organization work together. But you’ve seen how reality gets messy and how your leaders don’t always make the decisions you’d hoped for. Improvements you’re trying to make for the good of other people aren’t happening. You hear similar stories from your peers, and it seems to all come down to one reason: You’re not being heard. You keep repeating what you know to be important, but nothing seems to improve.

A significant portion of this failure can be assigned to each person in the organization, from the very top of the hierarchy to the very bottom. Each person has, to one degree or another, a cloudy awareness of his own motivations and guiding principles. Each person has, in one way or another, failed to explore the deeper currents of reasoning in the people around him. Each person has spoken but failed to listen. It’s true that awareness of other people’s perspectives allows you to develop much stronger solutions together. Knowing someone’s perspective involves empathy. Empathy requires listening. It is empathy that will have a huge impact on how you work. It’s empathy that will bring balance to your business. .