SPENCE … Empathy puzzle ready to kick butt,
Empathy puzzle gains traction after three daunting years
Be glad your business doesn’t face all the challenges Ilana Ben-Ari’s has. Her Toronto startup, Twenty One Toys, has been trying for three years to encourage empathy in business and re-introduce “play” in education. As if that weren’t daunting enough, she sells just one product — a set of wooden puzzle pieces that isn’t really a toy.
Now, Twenty One Toys is finally emerging from its chrysalis, ready to kick butt — if it’s OK to say that about a company devoted to empathy, communication and collaboration.
Growing up in Winnipeg, Ben-Ari, now 32, was torn between her skills in math and science, and her passions for the arts and design. As an industrial design major at Carleton University, she won awards for designing a “toy” consisting of multiple puzzle pieces that look like some mutated form of Lego for adults. But instead of building houses or cars, this toy has a grander ambition: to build bridges between people.
“We’re not just asking kids and students to be innovative and creative, but also adults,” Ben-Ari says. It’s for all ages, “from six to CEO.”
The Empathy Toy consists of two identical sets of five uneven, asymmetric puzzle pieces that resemble either arrows or hubs. Those five pieces can be connected in thousands of ways. Two players are blindfolded, each given a set, and instructed to build the same construct. The test isn’t what they build; it’s how they explain to each other what they’re doing, which of these baffling pieces to use, and how to put them together. It’s a test of patience, listening, and building a common language that leads to understanding.
Observers can barely contain themselves as they see players leave out important information, misunderstand each other and grow increasingly exasperated. In the group discussion that follows, participants learn empathy and communication skills by talking about what it feels like to be in the dark, the difficulties of understanding imperfect instructions, and the frustration of not being heard.
Ben-Ari, who developed the toy as an empathy tool for the visually impaired, realized it could be used in education, business and even health care to improve communication and collaboration.
“When I started Twenty One Toys, it was fuelled by rage, my anger about my own education,” says Ben-Ari. She rejects the notion that books and rote learning are the best ways to teach the communication and collaboration skills needed today.
“You can’t teach creativity and innovation from books,” she says. “We need to rediscover play. We need more toys in the classroom, and in the workplace.”
After graduation, Ben-Ari hoped a company would commercialize her toy, but no one was buying. After working in industrial-design jobs in Montreal and Britain, she attended a startup incubator at Aalto University in Finland, to learn to do it herself.
After again winning a “best in show” award, she set up shop in Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation, a social-purpose hub that welcomes entrepreneur idealists.
Ben-Ari’s challenges since have been many and daunting, from raising money — mainly through grants and awards, including the Spin Master Innovation Fund, run by Canada’s biggest toy company — to
We need more toys in the classroom, and in the workplace
researching best practices for using the toy. She also had to learn more than she wanted to about production. After having her first commercial run of 100 toys made in Toronto at a cost of $200 a set, she reluctantly accepted she had to manufacture offshore. Spin Master made an introduction to a quality-conscious Chinese factory that produced 1,000 units last year at a much lower cost, enabling her to reduce her price to $250 from $450.
In three years, Twenty One Toys, or TOT, has pieced together total sales of $196,000 — in part because of a Kickstarter campaign that raised $52,000. (How else do you sell a new product with no marketing budget?) Along with her own credit line, that revenue allowed Ben-- Ari to hire two staff and start segmenting her marketing efforts. So far, 60 per cent of sales have been to 800 schools around the world (including public schools and universities and colleges). Another 30 per cent have been sold to homes, where Ben-Ari believes the toy is often used to connect with family members suffering from autism or other developmental disorders.
Now she’s targeting the business sector. After working closely with a major consulting firm that uses the Empathy Toy to teach team-building and innovation, TOT released its first corporate package. It includes an 80-page “Facilitator’s Guidebook” that explains how to use the toy to improve communication, leadership, conflict management and managing change.
But the big breakthrough is still to come. Last year’s Kickstarter campaign prompted coverage by media such as Time and Wired magazines, which has helped Ben-Ari get meetings with regional and national distributors in the education market. She expects to announce some distribution deals by this fall.
Which is important, because she is bursting to move on to Toy 2, a tool designed to teach participants how to deal with failure. Then will come a toy that encourages innovation.
“I know the next nine toys,” says Ben-Ari, “but I’ve learned not to talk about them.”