Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  A SOLDIER’S VIEW OF EMPATHY

  I listened in on one of the groups and overheard a general talking about how things had changed since he had graduated from West Point. I thought he might start objecting to the sort of training I did or say it felt wrong for the army. Instead he noted that the theater of war had changed. Soldiers no longer fight in rural areas, far away from civilians and the lives of everyday people. “Today we fight our battles in cities,” he said, before asking his group, “Are we training the type of soldier who’s going to walk down the street of a village in Afghanistan and unempathically ignore everything at play around him or her, or are we training them to see differently?” He gave an example.

  “Let’s say we have a soldier walking down a main street of a city. You see, in war, there’s times when we’re fighting the enemy, but there’s also downtime where our soldiers are out among the local community. Now let’s say they are walking down that street and they see a scared little kid standing outside their parents’ market. That kid is looking at this big, foreign, military fatigue–wearing soldier, and they might be scared. They might be confused. They might have no idea who we are and why we are there. Are we training the type of soldier who walks right by and goes on with whatever they’re doing, or are we training the type of solider who will see that kid and stop to think that maybe they can do something to ease their worry or confusion? Are we training a soldier who will take a knee and talk to the kid, and maybe their family, trying to explain why we are there and what we are trying to do to help them? I hope that’s the kind of soldier we are training, and I think empathy is at the heart of that.”

  Since making that visit to West Point, I have told that story many times. It was eye-opening and inspiring to hear that general speak with such earnest and heartfelt perspective.

  At the end of the session, West Point’s superintendent (the head of the school) spoke to the group and said that empathy should be the number one new skill taught to West Point cadets. Without it, he said, the army cannot know what’s happening outside its ranks. “The American people are our clients,” he said, “and if we are going to be successful for them, we need to know how they perceive us and our work.”

  I was packing my bags to leave when another general approached me. Her name was General Cindy Jebb, West Point’s dean of the Academic Board. She reached out her hand to shake mine and in doing so, she palmed me a coin. I thanked her for it, and she thanked me for bringing empathy to West Point, smiled, and walked away.

  Later, when I asked Captain Bokmeyer about the coin, his eyes lit up, letting me know it was something pretty awesome. He said it was called a “challenge coin” and is given only in recognition of special achievement or appreciation of a visitor. That coin sits proudly on my desk, a reminder that the power of empathy is alive and well in the people who serve bravely for us every day.

  PUTTING EMPATHY INTO PRACTICE

  Whether you’re a decorated military officer, a renowned CEO, or an up-and-coming entrepreneur, our approach to using empathy to solve problems always starts from the same place. The first step in the process uses a framework we call the Empathy Venn (EV) to guide a person or team in gaining perspective on a problem they need to solve. The EV is made up of three circles, each representing one of three “Cs”: company, consumers, context.

  The EV serves as a kind of empathy entry point to start thinking through a particular situation. Once you’ve used it a couple of times, you’ll begin to apply empathy without even having to think about it.

  COMPANY

  The first step is to examine your company’s inner workings. We use the word company here, though it could be an organization, as at West Point. We break down the company by considering the following elements. Of course, your business could have other elements and questions, so consider this a starting place for your own exploration.

  • Products and services: What does your company make or provide to your customers? How many products or services? Why? Do your company’s products or services lead the market? If so, why? If not, why not? Have the products evolved over time or remained relatively the same?

  • Team: Who is at your company? Do the people who work at your company have shared characteristics, skills, or beliefs? If not, how and why are they different? Is the team centralized or decentralized? How do teams work together? Are there processes or behaviors that are unique to your company?

  • Leadership: How does leadership show up? Is it innate in everyone or limited to a select few? Does your company have clear principles and values? Do those principles and values trickle down into the products and services? Why or why not?

  • Brand: How does your company talk about itself? Does it have a distinct point of view? Are its messages clear and differentiated? How does it appear in outward communications such as social media and advertising? What tone do the communications take? Does it have any reputational damage that needs repairing?

  • Behaviors: What are the commonly recurring terms, actions, and themes that the company espouses? How do they connect to the overall mission?

  This list can include additional or different elements depending on the situation you’re trying to understand. But the exercise is meant to determine what makes your company tick, why it’s unique, how it functions (or doesn’t) so that a map can be created that allows you to understand the company in its entirety.

  CONSUMERS

  We use the word consumers to refer to the various audiences relevant to the company. Too often businesses think only of their end consumer, but in addition to those who purchase a company’s product or use its service, there may be many additional audiences that consume information about the company. In order to help a company build empathic connections with those audiences, we must have a full picture of who they are. Consider the following.

  • End consumers: How many end consumers are there? Who are they, and what is their demographic and psychographic makeup? Are they price sensitive? How loyal are they? Why or why not?

  • The media: What is reported about your company, and who is responsible for disseminating information about the company? Is your company covered in the news regularly? Why or why not? What are some of the common themes?

  • Intermediaries (e.g., wholesalers, retailers, B2B partners): What role do these groups play? What are their priorities or interests in relation to your company, and how well are they being met? How strong or long-lasting are these relationships?

  • Shareholders: Is your company private or public? Who has a financial interest in it? Why should people invest in it? How do investors communicate or consume information? At what frequency? Through what channels?

  • Potential employees: Who seeks employment at your company? How do they find you? Is the information they encounter about your company accurate and consistent with the company’s goals? Do you wish to extend beyond this pool of candidates? What other companies do candidates consider, and where can they find information about them?

  CONTEXT

  Contextual perspective takes into account the ecosystem surrounding a company. For me, this is like a camera pulling way back, seeing a company with a wider, more inclusive lens. It includes the consideration of several factors:

  • Direct competitors: How do your competitors differentiate themselves from your company? How do they perform relative to your company? What do they see as their competitive advantage?

  • Indirect competitors: Who is drawing attention or spending away from your company? Why and how? Does your company think of them as a threat? Do they even know they exist? Could alignments with those organizations help your company succeed?

  • Cultural zeitgeist: What’s happening in the world around us? Do any cultural hot topics have meaning for your company? Is that relationship being developed? Why or why not? What are the trends that could upend your company’s growth should they not be addressed?

  • Technical trends: Are new technologies being developed that might enhance or thre
aten your company’s growth? What technologies are consumers currently being drawn to? Do those technologies have a role to play in your company’s business? Why or why not?

  As you can imagine, this list could easily lead you down a pretty big rabbit hole if it isn’t managed carefully. As you expand the lens, more and more things come into view, and we recommend focusing on no more than five to six categories for each of the EV circles.

  Once the information for each circle is gathered, connections will emerge. Most important, the shaded part of the diagram, where the circles overlap—and where the three C’s connect—is what we call an Empathic Opportunity. This occurs when company, consumer, and context align and each element in the EV is understood. When an Empathic Opportunity emerges, powerful growth can result. For an example of what can happen when this occurs, let’s look at the photography company Polaroid.

  THE LONG ROAD TO INSTANT SUCCESS

  The Polaroid Corporation was founded by Edwin Land in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1937 and seemingly overnight became a “juggernaut of innovation,” according to the Boston Globe. Land was a gifted inventor whose work on products such as polarized sunglasses led to an early version of night vision goggles, which were first used by the army during World War II. The company continued building a culture of innovation over the decades, and then, in 1976, a major breakthrough happened when it figured out how to create “instant film” that would allow customers to see a photograph develop within minutes of taking it. Before long, the company was selling millions of its cameras and film to photographers around the world.

  Putting the company through an EV analysis, we can see that its success in 1976 didn’t happen overnight. It possessed a culture of innovation dating back to its origins, a reputation in the market that had been developed over time, and a new breakthrough product built on the back of the company’s historic growth. Its success with instant film happened at a particular time when it hit a sweet spot in its end consumers’ desire for fast, cheaper film processing. That was the 1970s, and the culture was changing at a quicker pace than in previous decades. Every industry was embracing technology, and consumers were responding to each “new” and “next” thing that offered greater speed and efficiency.

  The 1970s was a decade when a new consumer with disposable income came of age. The freewheeling hippies who had spent their late teens and early twenties indulging in 1967’s Summer of Love were now beginning to start their own families. The baby boomers, who described themselves as “switched on” and living in the “now,” were primed to be one of America’s biggest and most influential consumer groups. They had a strong desire for “immediacy,” and culturally they valued the “present moment.” Polaroid offered them a camera that gave them instant mementoes. That’s when magic happens—when all three circles have a common intersection point, presenting an empathic opportunity that meets the needs of all three C’s.

  Polaroid’s business spread like wildfire. But the company would eventually learn—to paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus—that the only thing constant is change.

  Over the coming years, the company maintained its focus on two of the three C’s. It continued to work on the company as well as the consumers by innovating and developing new products for its film business. But it could be argued that it lost touch with context, when they failed to recognize the massive increase in the use of digital technology and, most important, the emergence of digital camera technology. It’s common for market leaders to become so enrapt in their own business, looking toward the next linear move on their growth plan, that they miss a nonlinear tidal wave coming at them from the side.

  By the mid-1990s, digital cameras had hit the mainstream, and though Polaroid attempted to compete, it was too little, too late. By 2001, other leaders in the category had taken away Polaroid’s market share, and on October 11 that year, the Polaroid Corporation filed for bankruptcy.

  How could the Empathy Venn have helped it? When we keep the three C’s in focus, we are applying empathy to empower more informed decision-making. It enables us to nurture both the company and our consumers but also helps us maintain a broad aperture on context, which allows us to see the world around us with greater clarity. If Polaroid had used an approach like this, it might have seen clues that digital photography would overtake the film business early enough to have made investments in digital technology, allowing it to provide consumers with the cameras they were now demanding. That approach would have kept the company connected to their founder’s origin story, which was centered around innovation.

  It’s worth noting that since 2001, Polaroid has been resuscitated. In 2009, the brand was relaunched with a new suite of digital and instant film cameras. In 2010, it appointed the musician Lady Gaga as the brand’s creative director in a relatively short-lived attempt to capture relevance and audience through her stardom and marketing sense.

  Though it’s unclear where the brand will go in the years ahead, hopefully the company will draw insights from the lessons of the past and use a more empathic approach. Being informed by the trends of the consumers and context around us help ensure we’re not navel-gazing but looking out into the world around us and discovering ways to empathically connect and share our messages, products, services, and purpose more meaningfully.

  Building from the Empathy Venn, let’s look at what we can do when we’ve uncovered an opportunity. How can we act upon the point of intersection of company, consumers, and context? It starts with an internal gut check.

  EMPATHIC OPPORTUNITY: INTERNAL

  Business leaders and brand builders often want to rush out into the world with their product or service, shouting from the hilltops that they have something special that everyone needs to see. But empathic leaders know how to balance that excitement with a sense of rigor, making sure there is a strong connection among company, consumers, and context. The first check of this is an examination of your company’s internal workings.

  The marketing team of a client in the automotive industry gave us a clear, direct brief that the company wanted to be “known as the most innovative car company in the world.” I knew the right thing was to say, “That’s great!” letting them know I appreciated their desire to think big and bold. Still I had to ask, “But are you?”

  They looked at each other with half smirks. A few rolled their eyes and admitted that their company wasn’t the most innovative, but that’s what it wanted to be. They’d seen that Tesla, the new darling of the industry, had been growing rapidly, largely on the back of its culture of innovation, and they felt that they, too, should attempt to ride that wave.

  We knew we could work with them on some sort of marketing campaign that might grab initial attention, but in the end, it would likely blow up in everyone’s faces. The idea was too thin because the company actually wasn’t innovative. This highlights an interesting aspect of working with empathy. Often a lack of empathy leads organizations to seek out solutions that don’t entirely fit their needs. But they can get so caught up in their own business that they fail to see the bigger picture. Ultimately, applying empathy to our leadership style and our overall business can help us see challenges from new and diverse perspectives.

  As our conversations with this team continued, they revealed that they wanted to be innovative; they just didn’t know where to start. My team and I tried to understand their desire to be innovative and also why they felt it was important to have consumers see the company that way.

  What had begun as a marketing conversation evolved into a discussion about the company’s internal culture and how a culture of innovation might be created. We talked about how the company’s design team might be inspired to think differently about the cars it designed, and we even discussed expanding the company’s business beyond the automobile to the more broadly defined area of mobility. That got the team’s wheels turning (sometimes the puns are too easy).

  In this case, our client had already focused on an Empathic Opportunity—the
intersection of company, consumer, and context—through its desire to be seen as innovative. It was time to introduce its team to our internal assessment of the Empathic Opportunity, which examines an organization based on different facets within the company.

  On one side, we look at the internal people, processes, and principles, which greatly determine the company’s culture and have an impact on its behavior. It is important to overlay these elements atop the Empathic Opportunity to see if there’s a fit or if, as in the case of our auto client, a gap needs filling.

  Every major company has something it calls its brand guidelines, brand book, brand bible, or something similar. This is where the company articulates its mission, vision, values, and other core principles. Our automotive client wanted to pursue innovation. That showed up in its brand book, but if the book isn’t followed, it’s not worth much more than the paper it’s printed on.

  Our client’s gap was in the company’s people and processes. It didn’t have innovative thinkers who could champion the aspiration for innovation into reality, and it was without an innovation process that would guide thinking, decision-making, and overall behavior toward progress. We took a closer look at the team to help them identify the skills that were missing. Change management doesn’t always involve making sweeping layoffs and hiring new people, though sometimes that is necessary. More often it’s a balance of bringing in new team members along with thoughtful training and skills development programs. That’s what our auto client did. A new design leader was brought in to bring fresh thinking to the automotive design, while employees in other divisions were given skills development training to help them approach challenges with a focus on innovation.