Empathy, Data, and Risk (Coursera)

The course guides you through techniques to gather risk information by understanding a stakeholder’s thoughts, feelings, and goals. These techniques include interviewing, brainstorming, and empathy mapping. The course concludes by using this risk information to enrich data analysis. You will learn basic data visualization concepts in Tableau and use these concepts to explore and explain data. Throughout these analyses, the course challenges you to identify risks by focusing on unmet stakeholder needs.

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Course Orientation

This course develops your ability to conduct empathy-driven and data-driven analysis in the domain of risk management. Throughout these analyses, the course challenges you to identify risks by focusing on unmet stakeholder needs.

Module 1: Psychology of Risk

Module 1 begins by exploring the concept of risk and how it can affect decisions. In addition, you will explore some of the psychological biases that affect how people evaluate risk, as well as how emotions influence responses to risk. Finally, the module introduces different categories that organizations use to identify, categorize, and manage risks.

WEEK 2

Module 2: Empathy & Risk

Module 2 explores the link between risk and empathy. This module discusses the psychology of making decisions for others, and how lack of insight into others can lead you to make different decisions for others than you do for yourself. We will focus on variables such as risk, information volume, and errors of commission and omission.

WEEK 3

Module 3: Empathy, Data, & Risk

You will begin applying the ideas of empathy, risk, and self-other decision making to data analysis. You will explore simple ways to gain insight into others’ beliefs and preferences, and ways in which you can present risk information to others in a manner they can understand. The module concludes with contrasts between empathy-driven and data-driven analysis, and some basic tools to link empathy-building to data analysis and some basic principles of data visualization.

WEEK 4

Module 4: Bringing Empathy to the Data

You will learn how to combine principles of empathy, risk, and data with a focus on approaching problems using analytics and empathy. The module discusses these issues in real-world contexts, with examples drawn from business and from issues of systemic bias.