As summer is approaching and the half way mark of the year, our teams from across Spain and the UK got together to reflect, review our kick-off goals, our progress and accomplishments while pausing to look ahead.

Our annual empathy day is a time when we all get together, close our computers, turn off our phones, ok that’s not quite true unfortunately, but it’s when we take some time out from our normal day to spend time with each other, share ideas, reflect on our achievements and have some fun, oh and eat a lot!

At the heart of this get together is creating the conditions for learning, innovating and growing together as a team, stimulating and fostering creativity, ideas and original thoughts across all aspects of the business. Moreover, as our team is continually growing it’s also a fantastic opportunity to get to know new members and help them to integrate into the empathy family.

Creative Humans

This year, we were lucky to be joined by Matt Hart, a world renown innovator and educator known for helping brands nurture creativity and drive something he calls Fan Innovation. He talked to us about the qualities that form part of humans, that drive our creativity and how to think about customers and consumers as fans, attracting them through a lens he called Fandom based on understanding their behaviours.

“That what makes us human is that which makes us thrive. Robots don’t dream – this is what humans do. We have hopes, dreams, fears. We imagine.”

He got us thinking about the creative process, how ideas work, how we can re-learn to be creative, and how we can build this into our corporate environment to create a culture of creativity. We looked at the different brain frequencies and how important it is to keep tapping into, and exercising, our creativity.

And, after all that thinking and creativity we rested our brains with some meditation.

Gazing Back to Look Ahead: Achievements and Goals

Now was a moment for reflection, to look back at our goals from the beginning of the year to see whether we’d set out to do the rights things, how well we were progressing and where the challenges lay ahead.

This year has been one of great momentum, we’ve made some good advancements with some really large projects helping to propel us forward and achieve the challenging objectives we set out for ourselves. H1 2019 has been our most productive period so far in terms of moving our products forward, getting the approach right and innovating through enhancements to existing components while also developing new products with our customers.

There’s still a lot to do but we’re on the right track. Our ideas and dreams are now starting to become realities. We also looked ahead to the future of search, and whether that’s more textless experiences through imagery and voice, whether it needs to be more entertaining, expressive and fun through the design or if discovery will be key, search without the search box.

Finally, we discussed a new idea for building a data feedless search! Overcoming one of the largest challenges and biggest pain points that can also cause the most delays; data and the tagging of that data. Creating a search that is frictionless, has no data feed and can be added to any site with a few simple clicks is our next challenge: watch this space!

“Innovators aren’t born. They’re made.”