One day my colleagues asked me to join an impromptu brainstorm. I was paired with a few other collaborators to quickly ideate a solution for a new client we were courting. They started firing out ideas and landing thoughts on the board, and I noticed my discomfort level start to rise. I was feeling adrift. I was aware of how little I understood the problem, the client’s needs, and the audience it wanted to reach. That greatly hampered my creativity. I looked around the room and saw other people thriving—and that’s when it dawned on me: being an empathic problem solver takes many forms. There isn’t just one way to do it. There are probably loads of ways we can develop understanding. Perhaps my problem wasn’t one of inability but one of flexibility.
I flashed back to my first personality-type test in high school. It was the famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and it opened so many layers of understanding about who I was and how I was wired internally. As I sat in the brainstorm, I wondered if people approach things empathically in multiple ways. The idea was too exciting to ignore, and I leapt from my seat and rushed out of the room to begin outlining the idea.
I found myself scribbling notes whenever I observed different ways that others on our team and I were being empathic. Some people couldn’t resist asking “Why?” until they got to the heart of a problem. That approach, popularized by Sakichi Toyoda of the Toyota Motor Company, has become known as the “5 Whys.” It is based on the belief that after asking “Why?” five times, you can get to the root of what’s happening. That was Toyoda’s way of being empathic, of seeking to understand a person or problem in its most essential state.
Another colleague was great at creating and holding space. She spent time before a meeting organizing and orienting a host of objects within a room so that everything was designed to elicit the best possible experience for the participants. She knew that some people would want snacks; others liked a little music; and others liked to load up on caffeine. She cued the music and poured the coffee before anyone else arrived. When you walked into a meeting with her, you could immediately drop into a state of comfort, and she had a much easier time getting the team to work with her toward a viable solution.
These and plenty of other examples started to give shape to the empathic archetypes and behaviors at play within our company. But as they became more defined, we realized something profound: no individual operates solely from one archetype. We all have within us a distinct set of work styles, though we are stronger in some and weaker in others. I like to be methodological and linear in my thinking, but that’s not the only way I know how to solve a problem. I can still call on other styles within me when I need them for those rapid-fire idea sessions I dread so much. I might not love doing so, and I might not be the best at it, but I can do it. It’s within me. The more we explored that notion, the more we saw a fuller spectrum of empathy come into focus.
I’ve also learned to marvel at others who thrive and are productive in situations where I am more challenged. This is all part of experiencing empathy at such moments and learning by observing other work styles. I’ve even taught myself to improve my own dexterity in styles where I’m less comfortable. By “limbering up” or sharpening those behaviors, I have become a better collaborator with a wider array of people.
LIMBERING UP
If we can “limber up” mentally, we will be able to improve a whole host of things. As creative thinkers, it will give us more flexibility to work in different ways. As managers, it will help us better understand and connect with our team members and provide them the sort of personalized mentorship they need for their growth. And as leaders, it will give us the confidence and sense of nuance necessary to undertake increasingly complex problems for some of the world’s biggest companies.
At that point, we were a few months into developing our point of view on empathy, and we were ready to put our thinking into action. We had already begun talking about empathy with our clients, testing to see if it was something they felt was needed in their own companies. Happily, we found that clients from every sector were grappling with the same challenges:
• How could they better understand their customers?
• How could they build an internal culture befitting the individuals on their team?
• Which products or services were they developing that would align with the ever-evolving marketplace?
Those questions and others like them begged to be solved with empathy.
It occurred to us that we were essentially running an ethnographic study of empathy. We were looking for places where it was showing up in business, in culture, in the news. We started an archive into which we gathered as much literature and conversation on the topic as we could find. Brené Brown’s work on the subject stands out for me as particularly intriguing—not just because of her elegant and clear-minded thinking and presentations on the topic but also because her online videos were garnering millions of views in amazingly short periods of time. The sheer virality of all this, coupled with the news alerts coming in daily to all of our RSS feeds, showed us that the keyword empathy was on the rise in the zeitgeist and being covered in publications as diverse as Wired, Harvard Business Review, Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic.
At the same time, we were witnessing a significant shift in the human resources side of many of our corporate clients. No longer were companies interested in people who exhibited only subject-matter expertise. The trend was shifting dramatically toward a hybrid skill set that was first defined by the management consultancy McKinsey & Company in the 1980s and was now experiencing a resurgence. “T-shaped” people—as they are called—are depicted with the “T’s” vertical line representing a person’s depth in a single expertise, the horizontal line his or her ability to operate broadly across disciplines. A good example of this is a doctor whose specialty might be in infectious diseases but who operates as a general practitioner. Leaders in many different industries were saying that most, if not all, workers in the twenty-first century need to have some sort of “T-shaped” profile if they expect to be competitive in the job market of the future.
We are all born with a vast, three-dimensional dexterity. Your raw skills are a core part of your ability to do your job well, but perhaps the concept “T-shaped” is selling all of us a bit short. After all, where does our ability to be empathic, persuasive, or compassionate fit into the “T”? The real limiting factor on realizing our fullest potential is often the strictures of our professional roles. Jobs with specific functions that require us to work within guardrails can limit our ability to bring forward everything we have to offer. Many people work in organizations that still have outdated hierarchies and processes.
Today’s most effective companies are flatter, more collaborative, and more dynamic than ever before. They know how to “fail fast,” to “move at the pace of culture,” and to do all the other buzzy phrases that fill our office corridors. But buzz phrase or not, companies that behave this way open the door to being more empathic, making themselves more able to understand the world around them and the people who work within their walls. Leaders of such companies get more out of their teams because they recognize that this kind of dexterity is an essential part of our modern work style.
Armed with this realization and a newly minted articulation of our empathic methodology, it was time for us to find a way to help ourselves, and our clients, break away from old conventions while achieving their growth goals and delivering inspiring work to the world. Their outmoded corporate structures and behaviors were like big boulders, and we needed a pretty big fulcrum to move them away. Empathy is that fulcrum. With empathy, complex problems become more understandable, teams become more effective, and companies become more nimble. A key part of sharing this thinking with our clients is done through something we came to call our Empathic Archetypes.
THE ARCHETYPES CRYSTALLIZE
Our goal was to create a set of archetypes people could identify with and use to help them pinpoint their own empathic strengths an
d shortcomings. We all have our own preferences and cognitive biases, our “default” modes of thinking, feeling, and being. These preferred modes often limit our ability to go beyond our norms and expand our perspectives. The archetypes help shake us out of old patterns and guide us toward new, exciting paths. Through their application, we hope we can cultivate a more deft style of thinking that leads to solutions that are more insightful and well rounded.
We designed the seven Empathic Archetypes as personas that an individual can slip into and use as a way of getting out of his or her own head, role, or organizational hierarchy. Even during the process of creating the archetypes, they began to lead us toward new perspectives and greater understanding.
Before we dive into what the archetypes are, it bears mentioning that I’ve always been drawn to the mystical. The iconography, language, and symbols of ancient texts have been a fascination of mine for as long as I can remember. These elements even influenced the creation of the Sub Rosa brand. The logo subtly forms a triangle—a key symbol of sacred geometry evoking stability. Even the phrase sub rosa is a Latin term used to denote confidentiality. To speak “sub rosa” means you are speaking to someone you can entrust with your secrets. That captured the spirit of what we wanted in our client relationships. We wanted people to know they could come to us with their concerns and challenges. Those were the kinds of topics we wanted to tackle. I wanted clients to know it was safe to share their most important issues with us—things they needed a trusted partner to understand and keep in strict confidence.
Whether clients knew this about us or not, it was important for me to imbue the company with this sensibility and to build upon its ancient foundation. I wanted the archetypes to have the same association with antiquity while also being firmly rooted in what it is like to live and work in the modern world. We wanted words and imagery that would inspire a reverence for the past as much as they provoked and inspired people to move forward.
Our early inspiration for the archetypes’ design was found in the tarot. A deck of tarot cards contains an extraordinary fount of fantastic imagery and nuanced symbolism. The cards help people draw on infrequently accessed parts of the psyche as a way of bringing forth new understanding. In a tarot reading, the symbols on the cards are used to offer insights, and it is believed that, intuitively, the “right” cards will be drawn for the situation at hand. Some call these patterns and associations random, others destiny, but whether you think tarot cards are powerful mystic tools or occult hooey, their complex symbology is powerful and born from an artistry that inspired us to develop a set of cards that we could use to provoke new thoughts and challenge existing biases.
A typical tarot deck is divided into two sets of cards called the major and minor arcana. The minor arcana—fifty-six numbered cards divided among four suits—resembles a normal deck of playing cards inasmuch as each suit has a theme and the cards in it have certain hierarchies or numerical order. The major arcana consist of archetypal figures such as the Fool, the Empress, the Magician, and nineteen others. In a reading, these cards and their rich symbolism are used as guides for thinking differently about a problem.
We narrowed our empathic archetypes to seven, and each one was crafted to elevate and celebrate ancestral and sacred practices for understanding the psyche, creating deeper connections, and practicing self-discovery. These archetypes are not gimmicks; their iconography is as old as time. They come to life through their behaviors. An archetype and its behavior represent a way of being that can be applied to almost any task. We now use the seven empathic archetypes to govern the way we work and collaborate.
Think about your own workplace. You undoubtedly have colleagues with vastly different styles of working and collaborating. This is true in every organization. When we were deciding on the archetypes, we intentionally wanted them to represent not only the different behaviors an individual can exhibit but also behaviors that can be expressed between two people who are working together on a project.
The personas are an innate part of all of us—each one tremendously powerful, though distributed within us unequally. We often have different “individuals” within our own psyches, and they vie for attention and control during each situation we face. The archetypes are a way of putting a name to the behaviors most commonly called upon when we are attempting to act with empathy. We all have different comfort levels with the archetypes. Some fit with us naturally, while others can feel entirely foreign.
At the functional core of each archetype, both emotional intelligence and self-observation are at play, reinforcing the importance of emotions and actions and revealing our own strengths and limits, as well as the perspectives of others, always reminding us to take an active interest in ourselves and in other people.
SEVEN EMPATHIC PERSONAS, SEVEN ARCHETYPES
1. The Sage
Be present: Inhabit the here and now.
We discovered the Sage during our work with GE when we realized that deep insight can emerge when we are fully present in a space together. During this project, we had a few ground rules that helped us to remain fully present in our SoHo space: no phones, no computers, no cross talk. Those simple behaviors led our team members to be respectful, contemplative, and fully in the moment with one another. We saw how those simple behavioral adjustments created an environment in which deeper understanding could be attained.
The Sage represents wisdom and the ability to be fully in the moment, sensing truths about the mind, body, and surrounding space, examining what is brought into the moment and what is meant to be taken away. Look to the Sage when a situation becomes untethered from the present and disconnected from reality. Relying on this archetype will help you bring people and their ideas back to the here and now.
2. The Inquirer
Question: Interrogate assumed truths.
The Inquirers on our team have strengths that harken back to the lessons of the “5 Whys.” They are deeply curious question askers who don’t stop at the first response but probe deeper, looking for more complete understanding. We saw this emerge in the mammography assignment when we began asking why the examination rooms were so cold. By asking this over and over, going deeper down the rabbit hole, we eventually reached an opportunity for improvement that was a key to our success.
The Inquirer is one part reporter, another part therapist. This archetype challenges preconceived notions and pushes for deeper, more authentic truths. Inquirers neglect small talk in favor of “big” talk: deep questions that demand contemplative responses. Always intrigued by the “why” behind each answer, Inquirers dig and dig until they reach the root.
3. The Convener
Host: Anticipate the needs of others.
So much of the overall experience we created in SoHo was a result of this archetype. The Conveners on our team knew that establishing a sense of community would bring out the truth from everyone with whom we interacted. Everything from the furnishings to the food and drink was selected to inspire a sense of safety, security, and comfort. That provided all of our participants the comfort they needed so they could drop into deep conversation quickly. From that we got loads of information—both verbally and nonverbally—that helped us design a better overall patient experience.
The consummate host, the Convener understands the importance of space and space holding. Recognizing that every detail is critical, the Convener creates a purposeful, appropriate setting for the work at hand. The space we share is an active member of the experience. The Convener anticipates what you need before you do and brings the space surrounding you to life.
4. The Alchemist
Experiment: Test and learn at all costs.
The Alchemist emerged when we built waiting rooms and prototype exam rooms. They were spaces where we were able to experiment and test different ways in which women experience a mammogram. Such behavior is prevalent in many of the projects we analyzed in developing the archetypes and is a powerful tool often used in many innovation and design firms
. The willingness to test and learn is an empathic behavior that delivers powerful understanding and impactful solutions.
Never afraid to fail in the pursuit of knowledge, the Alchemist tests everything, confident that the best work comes only from countless hours of experimentation. The Alchemist is curious, persistent, and patient, takes a chance on a new approach, and closely studies the results. Turn to the Alchemist when the only path to a solution lies through the brambles of resistance.
5. The Confidant
Listen: Develop the ability to observe and absorb.
Creating a sense of confidence is paramount to the work we do. For GE, we knew that once we created a private, safe environment, the participants would become more open about describing the fears and anxieties involved in the mammography experience. We had the space covered by the Convener, but we needed to show up in the space and listen. Our team brought a sense of patience and a willingness to open up to each participant. We listened fully and absorbed every ounce of information the women shared with us. In many ways, this is a strategist’s first and primary skill: to shut off the inner dialogue and purely listen. Over time, I began to see how the Confidant was showing up not only on this project but on many others as well.
Your trusted ally, the Confidant hears to listen—instead of simultaneously planning what to say next. The Confidant embodies stillness; listens, observes, and absorbs. Keeping what you hear safe on behalf of another is what gives them a sense of integrity and strength. Look to the Confidant when asked for advice or when others need to share something of importance. The Confidant provides emotional security and comfort.
Applied Empathy Page 4
