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Nearly 86% of executives and employees think poor collaboration is the cause of most failures in the workplace. Image Credit: Shutterstock
The Sub Rosa design company think they’re onto something when it comes to conflict resolution in the office or on the factory floor. It’s especially useful for the client/company relationship when misunderstandings and miscommunications threaten to come between customers and their vendors/service providers. And it’s not a complicated set of rules or time-consuming techniques. It’s a simple but specialized deck of cards!
Surveys show that nearly 86% of executives and employees think poor collaboration is the cause of most failures in the workplace. At the same time, poor office design, poor leadership, and unhealthy cultures obviously play a role as well. According to Best of Luxury Realty co-owner and broker Tracey Schmitt, “you can tell a lot about a company’s success by their attitude in the office for sure, but even more so about the office itself. Success thrives on positivity.”
Sub Rosa is calling their card set ‘Questions and Empathy.” The card game is available online and is also being offered at their New York City store -- and, depending on how well the innovative card game is received, it will be on sale at other central locations throughout North America, and possibly Britain.
So far, these cards have had an amazing effect on employee/client interactions in the testing phase.
The entire deck is based on traditional tarot cards, used by so-called fortune tellers during the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. But Sub Rosa is quick to point out, for any company or individual that might have religious objections to using such things, that while the concept was taken from the tarot deck, the Sub Rosa cards do not use any of the symbols or imagery of the old superstition. There are forty-nine cards with questions and 7 ‘empathy archetypes,’ along with 7 queries for each one of the archetypes. These 7 archetypes are a bit postmodern, and include titles like ‘questioner’ and ‘scientist.’ Every question in the pack has been designed to pull employees and clients out of their comfortable zones, to encourage open and honest dialogue.
The Sub Rosa research team that put together the card deck idea says that it can work wonders with people who are open and honest, willing to take a chance on having their feelings and opinions examined and commented on by others. Which, in the modern workplace, is pretty much a requirement anyways!
The whole inspiration for Questions & Empathy started five years ago, after the Sub Rosa agency looked back over more than ten years of agency assignments to find a commonality that was uniquely their own. CEO and founder Michael Ventura says the idea of using a card game to explore this concept further was a team effort.
Ventura also added that after further research and discussion it was clear that the major theme of all the agency’s most successful work was that of empathy. So Ventura told his research team to invent an empathy enabler that was both simple and basic, and also completely user friendly, to enable more empathy in the workplace.