Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  This was often our first step in teaching Applied Empathy: helping students see that they were looking at problems from only their own perspective. Their inability to step outside themselves prevented them from going further than scratching the surface of the underlying design challenges and caused them to miss the chance to be more creative with their solutions. After all, there are only so many ways you can address a lack of late-night dining options or a shortage of available bike racks (two common complaints of any college-age student).

  We then sent them back to look more deeply and see what they could discover when they peered beyond the obvious. We asked them to take on different personas, to consider life in Princeton from a perspective greater than their own. Some went out and looked at the town from the perspective of a mom with kids and found opportunities for better stroller parking outside stores. Others looked at the town through the eyes of the elderly, noticing that much of the town center was designed for the young academic community but lacked certain accommodations for older residents. Some students even interviewed the subjects they were observing. The deeper they went, the stronger their insights became, and this sort of immersive research quickly demonstrated the array of solutions they could reach by utilizing empathy.

  Our goal in the class (and in this book) was to teach the tools needed to process information differently and more diversely. The students learned to gather insights and important information from potential users, audiences, and customers, and also how to develop more complete, well-rounded solutions—as I hope you will. The class ended with the presentation of a semester-long group project that challenged teams to take on a real-life campus issue and suggest an empathically designed solution. We saw students make hard choices about what problem to tackle, what data and insights to trust, and ultimately what solution to put forward.

  Becoming comfortable with subjectivity is one of the most important first steps in harnessing the power of empathy. It’s as true as it was for the students at Princeton as it is for the managers and leaders of every company we work with. Empathy for the people around you—be they customers, clients, employees, teammates, or family members—provides critical levels of understanding that will help you make subjective choices from a more informed place, ultimately making them more effective.

  TOP-DOWN VERSUS BOTTOM-UP CULTURE

  Leaders wanting to build a more empathic company must grapple with how information and decisions flow within their organization and how that process may need to change so that empathy can play a bigger role. The two classic examples of misalignment in this area are top-down and bottom-up cultures. The first comes from a rigid command-and-control structure, with directives flowing from above and being implemented unquestioningly throughout the organization. Top-down organizations often benefit from the efficiencies of having only a few decision makers. But they can also struggle with low employee engagement and morale if individuals feel they have no real influence or sense of agency.

  We have also worked with bottom-up companies that seek feedback from teams in both formal and informal ways. These organizations sometimes cultivate stronger, more inclusive cultures, but they can also struggle with too much information coming into the system, putting senior leaders into a state of “analysis paralysis”—unsure of what to do and where to go based on mixed or divergent feedback. This sort of culture often exists in start-ups that have grown quickly and expanded their teams by sometimes as much as ten or a hundred times in only a few years. They began as most start-ups do—leanly. In the beginning they had a small, nimble group of people, and decisions were often made by consensus. The team talked out every major decision because all of its members were invested in getting the company off the ground. As a company grows and head count swells, the old culture of decision by committee may still be seen as democratic and “millennial-minded,” but too much of it can destroy a team’s ability to make any real decisions.

  A top-down business, which often focuses on efficiency and clarity, has the advantage of providing its teams with clear, direct marching orders they can understand and adopt easily. However, we often hear employees in these companies say they don’t feel their “voice is being heard,” and intuitively, one would think that a rigid, top-down organization squashes the spirit of those who work there and creates a “cog” mentality. But many companies operate successfully with this structure—and some employees even tell us they sought out a culture like this because they could do their job more efficiently and would have clarity about their place in the company and how it operates.

  The bottom-up company picks up empathy points for elevating the voices of the whole organization and for taking employees’ perspectives into account when decisions are made. But it can be challenging to run a business, particularly a large one, from the bottom up.

  Some companies have used technology to add a layer of input into the company. A tech start-up that we worked with, which had more than a thousand employees, installed a series of buttons at the office exit. Each button was a response to the question “How was your day?” Each day the “pulse” of the company was delivered to senior leaders so they had a sense of employees’ morale and how recent decisions were affecting the company’s culture.

  Do I think this tactic on its own is a particularly effective way to run a company from the bottom up? Not really. Will this feature have a major impact on decision-making throughout the organization? Perhaps. But it is an example of the effort some companies are making to stay connected and to create some sort of feedback loop that puts bottom-up information on leadership’s radar.

  In reality, few organizations are strictly one or the other, and most operate with elements of both.

  Constant Calibration

  It’s important that a company’s leaders consider where they are in the life cycle of their business and where their company is in its growth and trajectory. As empathy is applied during growth periods, it can create information overload for decision makers, making it even more important that they have a clear perspective on how much top down versus bottom up they want for their business.

  An effective corporate culture, if designed and communicated effectively, should behave like a magnet, attracting behaviors and talent that are aligned to the culture and repelling those that are not. And repelling is a good thing. It means you’re being clear about who you are and what you expect from people. Leaders looking for a one-size-fits-all company culture will find themselves disappointed time and again. Culture is an evolutionary element of a business, and over time it will change to accommodate the organization and its needs.

  I saw this at Sub Rosa during one of our most pivotal growth spurts. We were doubling our head count from twenty-five to fifty employees pretty rapidly and moving our studio to a new, larger space to accommodate the expansion. It was an exciting time, and it was encouraging to see the company grow at such a pace. But we were also losing some of our top talent.

  Many of the people who had been with us the longest wanted to move up into positions that earned more money, most of them managerial. That presented us with a challenge because some were more talented as “makers” than as managers. We were looking for creative solutions to help them find their right place in the company. In some instances we proposed giving them an increase in compensation without changing their responsibilities. We were effectively giving them an opportunity to make more money by continuing to do what they did best.

  It felt like a good idea that could give us room to evolve our culture—to empower legacy team members while also bringing in new leaders. To me, it also seemed like a pretty empathic approach, and I was convinced we were onto something.

  It didn’t work.

  Some members of our team were confident that they could manage as well as they made, and they insisted on pursuing new positions. The pressure, the various responsibilities, the company’s change from a smaller, scrappy entity to whatever we were becoming brought on some major challenges both culturally an
d operationally, and eventually we lost some of our early power players.

  That was devastating to me and went against the familial spirit I had tried to develop for the company.

  One day, I went out for a drink with Jeff Kempler, Sub Rosa’s chief operations officer, to talk through some things that were weighing on me. Jeff has seen the inner workings of a lot of different companies over the years. Before coming to Sub Rosa, he had held senior executive positions at music and entertainment multinationals and gaming companies, and he had been a practicing attorney for more than a decade. He had been particularly focused on working with creative individuals in the film and music industries, so his empathy for the type of talent in our business was pretty spot-on. He was around forty-eight years old at the time, going into his second year at Sub Rosa. He was a trusted confidant with a brain too big for his head and a heart to match. I was a young founder, and I was happy to have a thought partner like Jeff in moments like this.

  I asked him why we were losing people whom we were wholly invested in trying to retain. I had hoped to see them grow and thrive with us. I couldn’t figure it out. What had we done wrong? Why were they resigning?

  Jeff drew up a perfectly fitting analogy of the evolution of our company’s culture. He said that in a company’s early days, the founder is the sun. The founder provides light and warmth to help the company grow. He (in my case) is also a big force that holds the planets in orbit. Without the founder, all the planets would spin out, and the solar system would cease to exist.

  But as a company grows, it is often impossible for one person to remain the sun. It is frequently too much responsibility. And that was happening for us.

  Jeff recognized how disappointing it was to lose those team members, but he insisted that it was an inevitable part of growth and that, in the end, more and more leaders would emerge and contribute to playing the role of the “sun” in our solar system. In truth, that was already happening. Jeff was one of them, along with our CFO, Julie Puccio, who had earned my trust years earlier and had moved up the ranks from a midlevel position to one of my most trusted thought partners.

  As we talked more about that analogy, it became our shared goal for the business. It seemed like the right thing to do, and it gave me permission to delegate some responsibility and let me focus on growing the business instead of running the company’s day-to-day operations. But in time it would also be unhealthy for our management team to be alone at the center. We wanted all the leaders in the company to feel that they had influence and to know that collectively, each of us had a meaningful place in the “solar system.”

  Jeff was right. The company was changing, and as a result, we needed a new culture.

  After a rocky year passed, we hit our stride, and things felt great again. There was a new sense of leadership emanating from new people we brought in with fresh thinking, as well as support from some of our leaders who were with us for the long haul. I was no longer the sun holding everything in orbit. Neither was Jeff or Julie. We were surrounded by passionate people who believed in the mission we had articulated, and we all wanted to share the responsibility for making that vision a reality.

  This sort of thing doesn’t happen just once in growing companies; it happens often, and good leaders anticipate such changes and are undaunted by them. Change is inevitable. By being aware of it and embracing it with openness and empathy, we can calibrate our strategy quickly and effectively in order to meet the needs of the business.

  Empathic companies train dexterity into the fabric of their culture. They have a true understanding of the dynamics at play on a variety of levels within the organization, and they know that great cultures are built by constantly calibrating the top-down aspects of their operations with the bottom-up feedback from the organization as a whole. Applying empathy to an organization or team is a constantly evolving process, but with careful attention, it can inspire and empower leaders to steward the company through change time and again. And again and again.

  HUMAN-CENTERED VERSUS ECOSYSTEMIC THINKING

  “Human-centered design” is a philosophy that creates solutions expressly designed for a specific audience. “Ecosystemic thinking” refers to a group of interrelated elements working together. They are ten-dollar marketing terms that have been bandied around so often that they have lost a lot of their power. But in working our way through the tension between them, we can learn a great deal about more fully harnessing the powers of empathy.

  Human-centered design is a cornerstone of modern design theory. Popularized and refined by IDEO more than thirty years ago, this form of thinking incorporates a variety of human factors and usability studies into the design of any product or service. Look no further than the safety caps on your prescription medicines or the mouse you use to navigate your computer to see how important human-centered design thinking has been to problem-solving.

  But the increased popularity of human-centered design has often caused it to be seen as the solution to all problems instead of being just one ingredient in a more elaborate recipe for good design. As its name implies, human-centered design is ultraempathic, but it also misses some important things that are key to wholly empathic design solutions.

  An example is the rise and dramatic fall of General Motors’ Hummer business. In 2005, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Hummers all over the road. They were cruising down the freeway above the other cars, stretched versions ferrying prom dates and rappers to and from parties, and they were militarizing the suburban combat theater of supermarket parking lots and drive-through windows.

  Why did the Hummer become so popular? In essence, it was because human-centered design was working well. General Motors capitalized on the demand of a specific audience who were clamoring for bigger, more visually powerful vehicles. The United States was coming out of two wars, and a segment of the population was looking to park some of its patriotic fervor in their own driveway.

  GM capitalized on this desire with the Hummer. The Hummer driver wanted to sit high and see the road from a powerful, in-command vantage point, and the vehicle was designed to provide that.

  But the company mistook its human-centered insights as static versus variable. General Motors assumed that what had been true at one time would be true forever, and it didn’t take into account other factors coming out of those two wars. First, the United States entered a recession, and gas prices soared to an all-time high. As the economy worsened, with massive job losses and the shuttering of many businesses from Main Street to Wall Street, many drivers turned against the gas-guzzling monsters.

  That alone would probably have been survivable. The company could have taken a knock on the chin and managed through the recession. But it wasn’t being dealt a single blow; it was a one-two punch that ultimately knocked it out.

  The second, and arguably more powerful, shot was something brewing in the national consciousness, and it had an unlikely hero: the Toyota Prius. That was the US auto industry’s first hybrid electric mass-market vehicle, and it brought about an immediate shift in the marketplace.

  I don’t want to suggest that the Hummer and Prius were fighting for the same consumer. But the Prius brought about a shift in the cultural zeitgeist to a new era of eco-consciousness and consideration for the planet. Electric vehicle (EV) parking spaces started showing up, and owners of those vehicles were given special HOV-lane exceptions. All of a sudden, driving a Hummer became a sort of scarlet letter denoting environmental carelessness. And that—coupled with the downward-spiraling economy and high gas prices—ultimately led to the Hummer’s demise.

  Hummer wasn’t changing to accommodate the new ecosystem, and, as a result, it couldn’t survive. If the company had introduced a hybrid model, could it have been saved? Maybe. It did invest briefly in a third-party company called Raser as an attempt to bring electric technology into the business, but ultimately it was too late, and in 2010 GM discontinued the brand.

  This is an example of the importance of b
alancing the influences of ecosystemic versus solely human-centered perspectives in decision-making.

  A Bigger World

  Empathy with the end user is important—and is perhaps the most important thing for meeting consumer demand. But it’s not the only thing. Empathy extends beyond the one-to-one interactions we have. We also must consider the one-to-many inputs that empathy helps us to capture.

  Do we truly know what’s happening in the broader ecosystem? Do we know what our competitors are thinking or doing differently? Are we current with important trends and behaviors the world around us cares about? Staying with the auto industry for another example, the nimble, insight-led company Tesla has capitalized on its understanding of the whole ecosystem to become one of the highest-market-cap automotive brands in the world with only a fraction of the total sales of its next biggest competitors.

  It didn’t make and sell more cars than the next guy. Tesla became a success by seeing a world that is bigger than car sales and leases. It sees itself as a mobility company that is helping to write the future of the industry. Everyone from consumers to financial analysts understands that that’s what it’s doing, and it has been rewarded commensurately.