In early January, I wrote a post on six serious ideas for 2013 that included the concept of SED, which is short for serendipity, empathy and discovery. SED is a term I coined to inspire association leaders to shift their conversations about the future in a more generative direction. Here is what I wrote about SED in that post:

In 2013, I want to challenge association leaders to prepare for the vast serendipity that lives all around them, experience genuine empathy and embrace new possibilities of discovery. To fully capitalize on the power of SED, however, leaders must find the courage to be open, vulnerable and filled with the humility that comes from understanding what they know isn’t as important as what they can learn.

Serendipity, empathy and discovery are essential ingredients of new value creation that can be combined in appropriate measure through the work of innovation. Among these three elements, I have always believed that empathy is what opens our hearts and minds more fully to the other two. It is our empathic understanding of others’ lives that expands the natural human desire to discover the world beyond pure self interest, and creates a lens through which to see the serendipitous connections among seemingly disparate experiences more clearly.

But there are different views on what constitutes empathy and how it is achieved. On the one hand, blogger Sara Wachter-Boettcher describes empathy in sharp emotional terms:

We can’t begin being empathetic when another person arrives. We have to already have made a space in our lives where empathy can thrive. And that means being open—truly open—to feeling emotions we may not want to feel. It means allowing another’s experiences to gut us. It means ceding control.

Empathy begins with vulnerability. And being vulnerable, especially in our work, is…terrifying.

On the other hand, Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, argues for an emotionless form of “sterilized empathy” such as that practiced by the famous fictional detective:

Usually, when we think of empathy, it evokes feelings of warmth and comfort, of being intrinsically an emotional phenomenon. But perhaps our very idea of empathy is flawed. The worth of empathy might lie as much in the ‘value of imagination’ that Holmes employs as it does in the mere feeling of vicarious emotion. Perhaps that cold rationalist Sherlock Holmes can help us reconsider our preconceptions about what empathy is and what it does.

Whether empathy itself is more about emotion or imagination, the decision to adopt an empathic approach to new value creation will challenge many association leaders to work through deeply-held feelings and beliefs. Even as the stakeholders of the future envision and create remarkable new possibilities for their lives and careers, there are more than a few association leaders who still hold the conviction that those stakeholders don’t really know what they want or need. I hear this view frequently, and while leaders often argue that it is based on past experience, it is actually rooted in the fear of losing control over who will define the terms of future relationships between associations and their potential stakeholders. This fear is misplaced, of course, since the stakeholders of the future are well on their way to asserting such control, if they haven’t already.

For association leaders committed to building their organizations to thrive in the years ahead, empathy is anything but a threat. Empathy imbues the work of innovation with greater meaning, and surfaces richer insights into the best opportunities to co-create radical new value with passionate stakeholders. Along with serendipity and discovery, empathy is a critical driving force of association success in the years ahead, and now is the time for association leaders to capitalize on its extraordinary power.

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