Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  Pushing that sort of thinking further, we started talking with a whole host of other groups willing to lend their perspectives to our work. We brought in religious leaders, female designers and technologists, and documentarians expert at drawing out personal stories from their subjects. Our interaction with them was exceedingly valuable, highlighting insights derived from each of their unique perspectives and helping us think differently about ways we might reengineer the experience for the patients and, ultimately, help GE to think differently about its business as a whole.

  OUR PROCESS TURNS UP THE HEAT

  Perhaps the most astounding of our solutions came from a simple but constant complaint from many patients. The second biggest factor patients negatively cited about the procedure, after the memory of pain, was the room temperature. More than three-quarters of the women we spoke to told us that the exam rooms were uncomfortably cold. Now, was that alone driving their decision on whether to schedule a screening? Probably not. But it was coming up too often for us to ignore. We had to consider it from an empathic perspective. If more than three-quarters of the people we spoke to cited discomfort with the room’s temperature, we needed to understand that problem further. So we decided to ask the technicians who actually conducted the test: Why was it always so cold in the exam room?

  We learned that the exam room temperatures are set in accordance with the machinery guidelines. We spoke to the engineers who’d actually designed the machines and they told us that the optimal temperature for the life span of the machines is around 65º Fahrenheit.

  That’s cold—especially when you’re wearing a flimsy gown and a stranger is squeezing your breast between two cold metal panels. We asked more questions and weren’t surprised to learn that none of the people we interviewed had given much thought to the patient’s comfort. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about the patient, but it wasn’t their job to consider the patient. Their primary concerns were the machinery, the procedure, and the test results. But if women hate the test so much that they don’t get it done regularly, what good is it?

  We asked the (seemingly) obvious question: What if the room were slightly warmer? Would that adversely impact the machine or the exam?

  It turns out, not so much. We ran a test with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and our partners at IDEO. We brought in volunteers who had received a mammogram recently and asked the technicians to screen them again at a warmer temperature. We hypothesized that many of the women who had found the procedure painful would complain less when it was performed at a more comfortable temperature. We were thrilled to be right. We saw a double-digit decrease in the complaints of pain! That was just one small change, and it had already made patients substantially more comfortable during exams.

  But that wasn’t even the most significant finding. By increasing the temperature of the room by only 10 degrees, our test showed that the efficacy of the exam increased significantly.

  That’s right, a warmer room not only produced fewer complaints of pain, it also helped technicians and doctors detect more cancer cells in the breast tissue. When the room is warmer, the patient is more relaxed, which in turn keeps muscle tissue from tensing up, thereby allowing more rays to travel through the breast tissue and the test to be performed with greater clarity.

  How had that simple change been overlooked for so long? It was no one’s fault, really. No one had ever taken a holistic look at the experience and poked and prodded at the findings the way we did. We were being curious. We were trying to understand. And in that pursuit of understanding each element in the process, we found an opening. We found something so minor yet at the same time so major it might actually save lives.

  We were elated and began to develop a whole new approach to the business, which we would share with our clients at GE. We took our findings to them and proposed that they grow their business by doing more than simply selling their product to hospitals and leaving it at that. They needed to take into consideration every aspect of the exam outside the exam equipment itself—from the terminology used by the staff to the gowns, the temperature, the lighting, and perhaps even the scent of the room. For GE, that meant a combined product/service offering, which ultimately became known as GE Imaging Centers—physical environments tailored to improving the comfort and well-being of patients.

  That was something they had never considered. In essence, we were telling them that the way to improve their imaging business was not just by selling machines but by providing services that put their machines into the best, most empathically designed environments possible.

  After our full presentation to the people at GE, we held our breath—waiting for their reaction. They smiled and said that our work was exactly the sort of thing they had been hoping we’d uncover, and all of us shared a moment of relief and pride. As a next step, they asked us to attend the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, a trade convention being held on a subzero Thanksgiving weekend in Chicago. (An unempathic time and place for many conference attendees, but so be it.) Despite having to cut our holiday weekend short, we were pretty stoked because we were going there with some big news, and to make it even more exciting, it was being presented by a pretty powerful spokesman for our work, GE’s chairman, Jeff Immelt.

  Mr. Immelt was scheduled to give the keynote address, and during one part of his talk, he would tell the story of our experiment and announce the new offering to the room full of hospital and clinic managers. As soon as his speech was finished, GE’s people started receiving inquiries, and before they knew it, they were signing up customers for the new service on the spot. That was completely unexpected. They’d assumed they’d get some inquiries, perhaps a hit or two in the trade media, but orders right there in the room? It was amazing to see it happen. Over the next few years, the business continued to grow and evolve as GE became more invested in the category and its emphasis on the power of empathy to solve problems for their customers.

  In a larger sense, I believe that our work with GE helped change the way the organization thinks about its customers in all categories of its business. It was enormously gratifying to realize that we helped our client solve a complex challenge and expand its reach, but just as significantly, we helped to improve the mammography experience—which we hope has led to an improvement in the well-being of many people.

  GOING WHERE EMPATHY TAKES YOU

  That’s the thing about this sort of work. You never really know what’s going to happen when you start, but as you dive in and trust your empathic instincts and intuition, you are led into exciting new territories. For us, the work gave us a powerful foundation in our Applied Empathy approach. We didn’t know it at the time, but while we were testing our thinking and prototyping our work, we were also discovering our true north.

  Years later, I would look back at that assignment and see it as our origin story. At the time we were just doing what we innately knew best. But somewhere further down the road, we’d proudly see that important work as the start of everything that was to come.

  CHAPTER 1 EXERCISES

  Establishing Perspective

  Honing your ability to view a situation from a perspective other than your own is one of the first things you must do to gain a stronger sense of empathy. The challenge comes in dropping your biases and points of view, which will free you to truly “see” from someone else’s vantage.

  To begin, take a moment to identify an issue you are trying to solve. It can be a personal or a professional challenge.

  Some workplace examples might include:

  • How can I build a better product for our customers?

  • What is the smartest way to grow my organization?

  • Who are the people I need on my team in order to be successful?

  Or personal questions such as:

  • Why do I have a hard time communicating my emotions to my partner?

  • How can my family connect to each other on a deeper level?

  • What d
o my friends rely on me for the most?

  Once you’ve identified the right question, you’ll want to establish three (or more) different perspectives you can use to evaluate it from new angles.

  For example, if I were to take “How can I build a better product for our customers?” I might consider:

  • My own perspective

  • My customers’ perspective

  • My competitors’ perspective

  You will discover distinct insights as you consider the question from different perspectives. Let’s say I’m a smartphone manufacturer and I want to improve my product. I might think I should increase its functionality, but it turns out that my customers care more about paying a lower price than having more features. Or perhaps I think the phone would be improved by faster speed, but then I discover that my competitors’ greatest concern is that we have a more powerful design capability.

  If I were to pursue this from only my perspective, I would focus on increasing the smartphone’s functionality and speed. But taking into account the perspectives of my customers and my competitors, I realize that I need to deliver a more affordable product that continues to push the limits of good design while also fulfilling the function that I believe is right for the product.

  Considering a question from multiple perspectives will help you make more well-rounded and better decisions.

  Play around with the idea of perspectives. The “personal/customer/competitor” configuration is just one of many you can devise. You might find that some problems benefit from being viewed through another set of points of view, such as “colleague/elder/child.”

  You may find you need to do some research to understand the different perspectives. Talk to your customers or your competitors. Read articles or watch content that you think different audiences might consume. Play the part. Embody their point of view. Think of it as part ethnography and part method acting.

  There’s no wrong way to do this. Experiment with a variety of perspectives; just be sure they are varied enough that they cause you to step outside of your own point of view.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Seven Faces of Empathy

  “I suppose it is tempting,” the renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” We all have cognitive biases—pesky predilections that keep us from acting rationally and get in the way of our growth.

  Think about it: when you’re tackling a problem that’s in your sweet spot, something you know how to do and have been doing for years, you can pretty easily find your way toward a viable solution, even if there are times when you risk the folly Maslow warns us about. But what happens when the problem is outside of your perspective or skill set? Typically we reach for our quickest, most facile tools—observation, deduction, cleverness—things that have helped us get by in the past. But often, big problems require greater perspective and deeper understanding to solve them, and this is where Applied Empathy comes in.

  Unfortunately, few of us have received a formal education in empathy, and as adults, we end up intuitively feeling our way through to solutions based on our prior experiences and skills. That’s not necessarily wrong, and many of us get by that way, but when empathy is overlooked, we are missing a key ingredient that can prove enormously helpful as we build our careers. Things get hairy when we face a challenge that requires us to get outside of ourselves and see the world from a different perspective. We feel uncomfortable, and as humans, we generally avoid the problems we don’t understand. That often leaves us at a professional (and sometimes existential) standstill.

  Early on in the development of our Applied Empathy philosophy, I started noticing where empathy was missing. You can fault the easy ones like the DMV or the local post office, but I also saw a lack of empathy in retail stores that treat customers dismissively—as an inconvenience to a sales associate busily engaged in an Instagram bender. I also saw it in the way some airlines and doctors’ offices interact with their clientele—absent any sense of human connection or empathy for what an individual might be going through.

  A few professions—social work, counseling, caregiving—already lean quite heavily on empathy as a job requirement, but for most career paths, empathy isn’t mandatory; it’s not sought out by human resource teams in the recruitment process, and hiring managers don’t make it a priority. As my team and I started to see empathy become a foundational part of our work, we began to wonder if that “muscle” could be trained—if we could intentionally improve our empathy and refine its capacity to play a role in everything we do. We even asked if the ability to be empathic could be (re)awakened, even if it has atrophied.

  I’ve come to wholeheartedly believe that everyone has the ability to do this, but I’ve learned that making this happen requires us to get back in touch with different parts of ourselves, different ways of being and showing up in the world.

  I recognize that empathy sounds great, and of course everyone wants to be perceived as an empathic person. However, what we’ve discovered is that using empathy in your work often makes it harder, not easier. You have to listen, and you might not like what you hear. Real empathy, deep understanding and connection, is tough to create and even tougher to maintain day after day.

  That was not an easy realization for me to come to, and it doesn’t make empathy an easy thing to pitch. But it is worth the effort. I wish I could say I woke up one morning during our GE assignment and exclaimed, “The reason this is working is that we are using empathy to drive our problem-solving!” But it didn’t happen like that.

  EMPATHY IN APPLICATION

  When we took on the GE mammography project, Sub Rosa was growing quickly. We were midstride on our path to fifty people. We were moving so fast that we didn’t have a chance to hit “pause” and closely analyze what we were doing. We didn’t have a deep understanding of all the elements at play in our work, and admittedly, we hadn’t had a chance to crystallize a sense of our methodology. We were simply living it.

  As we were finishing the mammography assignment, we continued to take on new projects from companies that were looking to tackle all sorts of challenges. Sometimes they were focused on corporate culture and change management. Other times, they were asking us to establish or reorient their brand in order to connect with their audiences more readily. We were “building the plane while we flew it,” as the expression goes. But throughout that time, we were honing our practice of empathy and refining our thinking and problem-solving skills.

  About a year later, the other leaders in the company and I realized we needed to have a better understanding of our underlying philosophy—essentially, how we do what we do. Having worked with so many clients going through their own growth spurts, we knew how valuable it would be to take the time to do a proper assessment of our company, its culture, and its processes in order to establish a clear point of view. After all, we were the company our clients had partnered with to do that kind of work. We decided to make ourselves our own best client. We pulled together a team of some of our best and brightest people. We drew up a scope, one that was similar to the type of assignment we used with our own clients, and we got to work.

  Our first step was to examine our best client case studies and ask what we’d done well and why it was so effective. The GE mammography assignment was one my colleagues and I dug into intensely. We knew it shone a light on our ability to delve deeply into a situation, to understand it from all sides, and to use that insight—that empathic understanding—as a way of pushing through a problem and into a solution. We believed that if we studied that case and others like it, we would unearth something powerful—our own empathy origin story.

  IT’S ABOUT TO GET PERSONAL

  During that time, my own personal reflections on empathy became more and more apparent. I am a person who’s pretty open and unafraid of self-work. I’ve studied with all sorts of gurus and masters, though many wouldn’t refer to themselves by such haughty titles.
I’ve also gained a greater understanding of my inner self through analysis and therapy, as well as a host of spiritual and alternative medicine practices. All of those efforts have helped me get closer to my inner self. And all of those things, every last one of them, were helpful in preparing me to better understand my own relationship to empathy because they had given me a more diverse perspective and capacity to understand myself and others from many sides.

  I began looking for moments when my thoughts and actions were coming from an empathic place and realizing how often, to my disappointment, they were not. For instance, you may be surprised to hear that I am a linear, methodical thinker. Yes, I’m a creative at heart, and I spend a lot of my day cooking up ideas for clients that help solve their problems. But I have a process that isn’t conducive to working off the cuff. If you throw me into a room with zero preparation and give me some markers and a whiteboard, I’m probably going to sit there staring at it for an hour or two before anything happens.

  That’s not so for a lot of the creatives I know. They can dive straight in and spitball ideas endlessly. I need to more fully understand a situation before I can do that. I need to see the bigger picture. I need to do some research. I need to talk with a few people and hear their perspectives. Otherwise I feel as though the ideas I generate are just built on “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” propositions with little meaning. I want, and expect, more than that from myself and from the work my team produces.