Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  Leaders must also act as Seekers, daring and unafraid to take risks or pivot. Not bringing this sort of behavior into a business will leave it struggling to keep up in the rapidly changing world around it.

  There are times, however, when empathic insights can be gathered more covertly. Direct conversation isn’t always a feasible way to get the information needed to gain new perspective and plan your business or team’s next move. Sometimes people are reluctant to share their experiences or thoughts. When this occurs, you may have to try “undercover” techniques (such as being a secret shopper at a rival’s store) in order to get the information you need. Edward de Bono is a well-known proponent of parallel thinking, in which a participant supports his or her point of view on the subject while others present their own perspective. De Bono is the creator of the “Six Thinking Hats” method for carrying out this parallel thinking through role play.

  Unlike the more common dialectic approach, in which two people debate a point from opposing positions (e.g., the prosecutor and defense attorney in a courtroom), in parallel thinking participants inhabit assigned roles and they analyze the topic from various sides. De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” method uses six colored “hats” we can wear when we need to think about problems. The blue hat, for example, focuses on managerial questions, such as “What is the goal of this?” The black hat is more focused on logic, using caution and realism to determine flaws and evaluate ideas. Each “hat” presents us with a way of looking at a particular situation in isolation from our own perspective. The challenge in this work comes in playing a role that may be contrary to your own instincts, but it can be essential to making sure you’re not just “getting high on your own supply” and falling in love with ideas based on your cognitive biases.

  The same is true for the Empathic Archetypes. Though we all have the capacity to think from all seven different archetypes’ perspectives, changing from one to another comfortably takes practice. But the exercise will give you a more holistic understanding of a topic, a problem, or your business, which lets you see it in its entirety and, just as important, shows you what it is not.

  Any attempts to create alignment within your business are essentially a clarification of what you are and what you are not. During this process, a period of integration can occur, during which some people step up and fly the new mission’s banner while others reject it, disagree with it, disengage from the work or their team, or simply resign. You have to expect and accept uncomfortable moments during a time of change or transformation, yet still know the work is essential to any company’s success. To function empathically and effectively, the leaders of a company must have a clear understanding of its mission and goals, its audiences, and their needs—and the company culture must be in alignment.

  FROM COWORKING TO LIFELONG LEARNING

  Many of the companies we work with are large, complex multinationals, but we also get to work with the leaders of new, progressive companies seeking to disrupt an industry and create new models for success. One of those is General Assembly.

  General Assembly (GA) started as a coworking space in New York City. It was a beautifully designed, 10,000-square-foot full floor located in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, a bustling neighborhood sometimes dubbed “Silicon Alley” because of its concentration of high-tech companies, similar to the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. The neighborhood has been a home to hot-to-trot start-ups for years, and GA was located right in the center of it.

  The company built up a good business leasing desk space to many start-ups that weren’t ready for their own office or whose owners found the camaraderie of a shared space more to their liking. GA provided the snack stations, coffee machines, and common areas appointed with eccentrically shaped and colored seating that have become the norm in most start-up offices, making the space a thriving community.

  But the 10,000 square feet filled up fast, and GA didn’t have room for more tenants. At the same time, it opened a few similar spaces in other cities and the same thing happened. The company could have taken more space on other floors or in other buildings, but its founders knew they would no longer be a community but a real estate business, which wasn’t their goal. They needed to take on the Seeker archetype and think about a pivot.

  That caused them to stumble upon a perk they’d been offering their tenants: weekly programs that included lecturers, teachers, workshop organizers, and skills trainers. Some classes were even taught by the start-up tenants. There was great demand for the programs, which people loved, so the founders began a hard pivot toward a new business model centered around skills development and training.

  GA slowly let its leases with existing tenants expire, and as square footage became available, it expanded its educational programming to include technology development, data, design, and business training. Demand continued to be high, and soon the classes were oversubscribed. The feedback from students was great, but still the brand needed help articulating its new mission.

  That was when we were brought aboard.

  In applying empathy, our work started with conversations among the leadership team, the staff, instructors, and students as well as several of the company’s investors. As we’d seen before, things can become challenging for a company’s culture in such moments of change. While GA’s leaders were redefining what the company was, they couldn’t help but define what it was not. Some of the GA staff had signed on to work at a coworking space, and now that the company was in the education business, they saw that their skills didn’t match with what the new business required.

  Our conversations with GA students told us that even though they got a lot out of the programs, they felt a lack of community. Interestingly, the center of the company’s coworking business had somehow been stripped out of the education business. Students told us that when they were in a class, they had a sense of community, but once it finished, there was no way to stay tethered to GA or the people they’d met. GA (and its competitors) needed to realize something that colleges and universities have known for years: that your alumni are your strongest allies.

  Our goal was to help the company develop a new mission that would broaden its focus from ad hoc course work and education to a mission we called “lifelong learning.” Anyone who works in the start-up and technology world knows how important it is to update one’s skills regularly—at least as often as new programming languages crop up (which is pretty often these days). The same is true with design software and user experience and even business modeling. We guided GA to stand up and commit to all of its students, past, present, and future, promising to be their lifelong learning partner. GA would dedicate itself to maintaining relationships with its alums and ensure that it would be there for them anytime they needed to level up their career, take a step toward a new skill, or even connect with other people who have the skills needed for a particular business.

  This was a new way of thinking about the company. GA’s brand and marketing team now had to expand beyond the new-student acquisition market to maintaining contact with alumni, building a network of students from campuses around the world, and designing a physical space so that no matter what GA space a person was in, from New York to Melbourne, he or she would have the feeling of being part of the same family.

  Our team worked side by side with GA to develop a new brand system, evolving the logo and other elements from its coworking days in ways that aligned to the new mission we’d created. The internal culture galvanized as the language became more and more real. People began to speak differently about what GA did in a way that was aligned to a mission that felt real and connected to the community it served.

  This alignment showed up in the words the leadership team used when communicating with their alumni and current students, and, most important, it was part of the services GA was delivering. The GA team understood what parts of the company’s story would appeal to the media and its investor community, and the company quickly became a press darling as a le
ader in the field of continuing education. They also discovered that this work helped them recruit new talent into the organization with skills that were aligned to the brand as well as a dedication to service, education, and community.

  In six short months, as the alignment was realized, the GA brand evolved into something new while still retaining important parts from its past. The company’s spaces around the world felt united visually and evoked the sense of community we all envisioned. And most important, GA’s students and alumni were being engaged in a deeper, more meaningful way. They knew that GA was committed to being a partner to them as they grew in their career. It was a beautiful thing to watch, and it showed us that when we work with empathy—getting a comprehensive picture of the business from all sides—great things are bound to happen.

  FOUR TENSIONS

  The work we did to help General Assembly change its business had powerful results, but not every company is ready to accept change, and even the ones that say they are often discover that it’s not as easy as they’d hoped. That’s because one of the hardest things to change is entrenched behavior, especially if your organization is not set up for it.

  In my years working with companies and organizations, I have observed four key tensions that consistently emerge as stumbling blocks and can slow down the change process. The only way to get past them is to approach them with empathy for where the business is today and where it wants to go. This will ultimately give you powerful insights into how your organization is presently organized and what shifts might be necessary in order to bring about the right changes. These four tensions are:

  • Objective versus subjective decision-making

  • Top-down versus bottom-up culture

  • Human-centered versus ecosystemic thinking

  • Passive versus proactive leadership

  These are not binary choices. No company can be wholly one or the other. Instead, think of them as a spectrum. As you read the next section, consider the distinctions between each and where your company currently sits on the spectrum. It’s useful to understand this so you can identify where improvements can be made to help make your culture and your company accept empathy more readily.

  It’s important to remember that no organization can effectively practice empathy in a vacuum. Empathy reveals big, complex, and nuanced topics that draw in the larger world. As leaders throughout a company make decisions, they need to keep in mind “close to home” things such as the company’s culture and team dynamics while also considering the outside social, political, and economic climates, which can be hard to measure, making it sometimes difficult to determine how much they directly relate to the business. But balancing them strategically allows empathy to be built into the organization, often with profound results.

  OBJECTIVE VERSUS SUBJECTIVE DECISION-MAKING

  Objective decision-making is relatively simple to get a handle on. When a problem is approached objectively, facts are considered without feelings or bias to confuse them. Either things happen, or they don’t. A light switch works, or it doesn’t. A train is on schedule, or it isn’t. If the solution is clear and factual, objectivity is easy to come by.

  The problem is that today’s businesses, and our roles within them, need to operate more and more on subjectivity. And subjective decision-making takes some getting used to. When things are subjective, there can be multiple right answers, which can be influenced by a person’s feelings and biases, which can lead to confusion and indecision. Perspective, personal taste, intuition, and a host of other individualized attributes play a role in making subjective decisions.

  Take, for example, the hiring of a new team member. You’ve objectively narrowed the candidates through your requirements for a university degree, industry experience, and specific hard skills. Two finalists come in for interviews, and now everything will depend on subjective decision-making. This is likely something you already do instinctively: you evaluate prospective employees’ cultural fit and presentation style, even how they make you feel when you talk with them (whether you consciously recognize that or not). Even knowing what you want to see in the candidates, it can still be hard to make a subjective decision. For example, let’s say the first of the two candidates walks in with confidence, looks you straight in the eyes, and answers questions directly but doesn’t offer anything exactly memorable, while the second candidate is a little meek, fumbles with their résumé holder, and makes little eye contact but does answer your questions with depth and passion.

  It’s not an easy choice. You must know the type of person who will thrive in the company culture as well as what skills are needed versus those that are nice to have. An insecure candidate might not thrive in an aggressive culture. Ultimately, a hiring decision comes down to having an empathic read on the candidates relative to the organization. It’s a subjective call to make but one that will have real consequences.

  One way to approach subjective decision-making is to consider what factors are important to the decision and put them into a hierarchy. Taking the example above, we might say that cultural fit within the company is highly important, along with other considerations such as writing style, creativity, and demeanor. The interviewer will evaluate each of those factors through his or her own perspective. Perhaps they shouldn’t all be weighted equally. For example, it is best to know from the outset if the interviewer’s opinion of the candidate’s creativity is more important than that of his or her ability to fit into the company culture.

  The same could be said when evaluating ideas presented by your team for a new marketing campaign. What’s most important to you? How an ad looks? How it reads? What you think your consumers will think of it? What your boss will think of it? Giving all of those considerations equal weight can be overwhelming and prevent you from making a decision. Well-informed decisions are best made after you determine what subjective criteria matter the most (and what don’t) so that your empathic intuition can be directed at the right things.

  Decision-Making in Action

  In 2015, I was invited to visit Princeton University as a guest speaker to talk about empathy and how it can be used to solve problems. The students’ feedback was so positive that the university approached Sub Rosa about creating a class on the topic. We had never created a curriculum centered around empathy, but we jumped at the chance to immerse ourselves deeper in the topic than we’d ever been.

  We called the class Empathic Design because we wanted students to understand that “design” is much broader than what people typically think when they hear the word. We design everything—products, cultures, services, and so on. We knew we wanted to give the students a perspective that would open the aperture on design. The more design thinkers we have out in the world making things work better and behaving more empathically, the better off we’ll all be.

  We based our curriculum on our experiences developing brand and business solutions for clients so the students would be able to see empathy being applied practically in the real world. The class was offered through Princeton’s Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, and the majority of the students were studying mechanical engineering, computer science, and entrepreneurship. The students came with a wide range of disciplines and approaches to problem-solving, which led to an interesting tension in the class of comfort and discomfort with objective versus subjective decision-making.

  Through a mix of readings, case-based learning, and participatory labs, our budding young empaths would work through a series of challenges, not unlike the exercises in this book, that taught them how to apply empathy in order to become more and more comfortable with subjective work—which for many of them was foreign territory.

  Mechanical engineering, for instance, though at times dependent on subjective choices, is most often evaluated objectively. Either a machine works, or it doesn’t. Either it performs its desired task, or it fails. The way it performs its task could be described in subjective terms, but most of our students majoring in
mechanical engineering were comfortable with mechanically engineered solutions that could be judged objectively by the results they achieved.

  Straightforward computational and analysis-based code, from our computer science majors, is also evaluated objectively by whether or not the task was performed, but app development, on which so many of today’s computer science students are focused, depends on a programmer’s ability to make a variety of both objective and subjective choices. The best apps are solidly engineered (meaning that they don’t crash and they run efficiently), but they also offer alluring interfaces and an appealing user experience. This sort of app design is in high demand and represents the confluence of great objective and subjective skills manifesting in a single product.

  Students in the entrepreneurial program especially needed to hone their proficiency in subjective decision-making. No doubt about it, entrepreneurs must know when to remain objective, but great entrepreneurs rely on their subjective skills to push their ideas, teams, and businesses to greater heights. Our entrepreneurial students knew how valuable this skill was for them, and many of them took our class to try to improve this part of their thinking.

  Even though our class was taught at the Keller school, it was open to enrollment campuswide, so it was also peppered with budding philosophers, architects, political scientists, and economists. No matter where the students came from at the university, we saw that the ones who could step outside of their own shoes and see problems from varied perspectives were the ones who could most readily recognize opportunities for improvement. They were also able to grapple gracefully with the paradox of choice among multiple right answers better than their peers who could not.

  Early on, we got the students involved in a real-world experiment that called on subjective decision-making. We sent them to a part of Princeton’s main street and asked them to report back on the specific design flaws they saw there. We also wanted them to suggest improvements that could be made. Typically they went out in small groups and observed traffic patterns, how pedestrians moved around the neighborhood, the types of stores that lined the street, and other key elements. With few exceptions, each student returned to class convinced that he or she had discovered the most important and flawed aspects of the town’s design. To their surprise, they found that many of their peers had identified the same issues and had reached similar if not exactly the same solutions.