Leading With Empathy
A conversation with Michael Ventura, CEO and Founder of Sub Rosa.
Michael Ventura is the CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design firm whose clients include Johnson & Johnson, Pantone, Adobe, the TED Conference, Delta Airlines, and The Daily Show. He’s long been a close friend to and collaborator with Burning Man Project, and has also sat on the board of or advised organizations like Behance, Cooper-Hewitt, and the U.N.’s Tribal Link Foundation. He is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and the United States Military Academy at West Point, and leads a thriving indigenous medicine practice in New York City. His first book, “Applied Empathy,” was published in May 2018.
We were thrilled to explore the concept of empathy with him and to learn about his Burning journey, self-care routines, and the one question he always employs to develop a better understanding of the people in his orbit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was conducted before the coronavirus outbreak.
Mia Quagliarello: Let’s start with your Burning Man origin story.
Michael Ventura: I’ve had many different experiences at Burning Man over the years, but my first one, in 2008, was my bachelor party. It was me and six friends, and we didn’t really know what we were getting into. We had some friends who had been the year prior, and they came back with all the fantastical stories that you get. We went and had an amazing time. Everything was bigger and exceeded our expectations in ways we could have never imagined.
The next year, I went back with my wife, who had never been. She and I had a great experience, and at the end of that she said, “I totally get this. I understand why you love this. I won’t be coming back anymore.” She enjoyed it, but she also enjoys and requires two to three hours of silence every day, and there’s no way of getting that out there.
After five years [with that camp], we splintered off and created a sister camp inside a village — called La Calaca — and I’ve been running that ever since. It’s affiliated with a Day of the Dead festival in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. The folks whom I originally camped with run an art car called the Axolotl, and then we provide services in two big domes, where we do massage, reiki, breath work, and yoga.
What do you do at Sub Rosa?
I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 23; I’ve started digital agencies, magazines, stuff like that. I guess you could say Sub Rosa is the culmination of all of those efforts. It is one part design studio and one part business consultancy. We often get brought into large organizations to help them figure out problems around mission, values, purpose, and corporate social responsibility. And then we also have a seat at the table when they’re thinking about, ‘OK, based on all of this, how do we create messaging, storytelling, tactics — whatever it might be out in the world that helps make what we want true internally, true externally?’
It’s all founded and grounded in a philosophy we call “Applied Empathy.”
Oh, tell me more about that.
It’s a design- and systems-thinking approach to problem solving and leadership development. I wrote a book a little over a year and a half ago now with Simon & Schuster called “Applied Empathy,” which was all about the history of our business, getting to this idea of how do we use empathy as a tool and as a practice — as opposed to it being a gift and rarefied, like some people have it and other people don’t. It can really be embodied and trained.
Of course individuals can be empathetic, but how do you cultivate empathy in a company or organization?
On the proactive side, you’ll need an approach that is meticulously designed in that you go through a program and understand the different tools, methodologies, and behaviors you can use to show up more empathically for people. But it’s not going to work if you don’t practice it. If you’re not actually putting in the work, you’re not going to see the shift or the change in the way you engage with people or the way that they engage with you.
It’s also something we try to measure and cultivate through our different review processes and client postmortems. There are always questions about how well we’re using empathy. There are formal ways to measure and track this.
Really? What are the metrics of empathy?
Well, you can measure it based on brain activity, but we’re not putting caps on people’s heads and tracking their brain waves, necessarily. What we measure is the knock-on effect of practicing empathy. So, recruitment and retention of the right type of talent, not just for us, but also for our clients.
The emergence of high performing teams starts to really happen after about six months of practicing this. I think of it in terms of the ‘no-look-pass effect’ sports analogy — how at a certain point, our interaction and our relationship has become so entangled in a positive way, that I know your movements without having to see them. That is the practice of continual perspective taking and understanding where you come from and where your strengths and weaknesses might be, what you’re working on, and what you’re trying to develop more of — and vice versa.
By being transparent and having those kinds of conversations, the bonds get stronger and the teams get more effective. Then, when you survey the team, you can start to look at things like: Do people feel decisions are transparent? Do they see themselves in the decision? Do they have a sense that their perspective was heard and incorporated? You see the knock-on [effects] more so than the actual-in-the-moment empathy, sometimes.
So how can individuals become more empathetic? Is this something that you’re born with or can you cultivate it?
Everyone has it, but, like any other muscle, it will atrophy if not trained. So if you’re not flexing it, it’s not going to develop to a point where you have the deftness that it becomes part of your toolkit.
When we go into organizations and train this, what we often find is that there are folks who have perceived empathy to be a gift, not a skill set. And so they’re like, “Oh, so-and-so is a lost cause. You’re not going to be able to help them.” But based on the work we’ve done, we’ve learned that if you show people what the benefits of empathy are, how to start practicing it and the right tools…then all of a sudden people start to find their way of practicing it and that gets things moving in the right direction.
Do you think empathy should be one of the 10 Principles?
That’s a good question. I’m not going to quickly say yes, because I should tell you my thought process first. Just to be nerdy for a second…
There are three main types [of empathy] that psychologists talk about:
- There’s Affective Empathy, which is like Golden Rule empathy: “I perceive so-and-so is sad. I’ve been sad before, and when I’m sad I want to be consoled, so I console that person.” Well, what if when they’re sad, they want to be left alone? This is the folly of affective empathy — that we allow our bias to inform the behavior as opposed to understanding what they want. That’s why empathy often gets conflated or connected to sympathy and compassion and being nice. But because it’s attached to your own bias, it’s not perfect.
- Somatic Empathy is about physically feeling the emotions of others. So spouses who have sympathy pains when their wife is pregnant, or nurses who have empathy burnout because they’re feeling the folks in the room all the time. It’s hard to train, maybe not the easiest thing to track, and not always the most beneficial to all parties involved.
- Cognitive Empathy is where applied empathy really begins. I think of it kind of like the Platinum Rule — ‘Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.’ The only way you’re going to know that is through actually asking. Because if you’re guessing, you’re doing the first kind of Golden Rule empathy.
So the reason why I hesitated on saying should empathy be one of the 10 Principles, is that it would depend on which kind of empathy…because good sociopaths are actually good empaths, right? You can’t manipulate someone if you don’t understand them.
Empathy unto itself is neutral. It’s only in the application of empathy do we determine its positive or negative effects on those around us. So I think as a Principle, we should be talking about the act of perspective-taking and ensuring that you’re showing up for people in a way that feels open, inclusive, collaborative, willing to learn, and selfless. You’ve got all of those things? Sign me up.
To practice Cognitive Empathy, you’ve got to really know a person. What kinds of questions do you ask to start to understand someone on a deeper level?
One of the first ones I like to ask is, “What’s it like to be you?” That can be a two-sentence answer or a two-day answer. We sometimes shorthand refer to it as everyone has climate and everyone has weather, and we want to understand both about the person. Your climate is the more concretized, perhaps more predictable, certainly more long-term way of being. It’s your habits, your belief system, your rituals; things that have been imprinted on you over time.
But weather changes all the time. Weather’s circumstantial and influenced by things outside of us. So when people explain ‘what’s it like to be me,’ are they describing their climate or are they describing their weather, and are they aware that there’s a difference? Do they know that some things are permanent or at least more stable, and other things are passing clouds that are going to come in and out of their life based on what’s going on around them, today?
But then, once you have knowledge of someone’s climate and/or weather, what do you do with it? How do you move the conversation forward?
The most important thing is to receive it and to understand that that perspective they’ve just shared is a window into their world, but it’s not their whole world.
Now that new understanding might inform how we work together. In a professional setting, I know there are certain colleagues of mine who, if we have to have a harder conversation or a personal development conversation or something like that, I know some people are going to be fine having that in a room with three other people and others are going to need to probably go for a walk with me and have a coffee, because that’s a safer place for them to receive that kind of feedback.
You only learn that through conversation, through understanding people’s past experiences. You only learn from how much they’re willing to open the door to showing you what has taken them to this point. But then if you use that knowledge to be a better collaborator, teammate, whatever it might be, then ultimately your bonds get stronger.
You also teach at Princeton and West Point, you have your own private practice in which you see 10–15 people per week, and until recently you also had a popular retail business in the West Village called Calliope. This is an insane amount of activity. How do you do all of this?
I get restful sleep, and try to take care of myself.
What other elements are part of your self-care routine?
I have a Daoist practice for myself that every morning is a mix of Chi Gong and meditation and things like that, that I don’t miss. Doesn’t matter if I have red eye, or a flight at 4AM, I will get up at 2:30AM if I have to in order to get that hour in before I go.
It’s a mix of physical and spiritual work. There is physical movement, not really much cardio, but there’s definitely a lot of opening and bodywork to get my machine moving every day. And I haven’t missed a day in over four years for sure.
And what are some systems you use to keep organized?
That bulletin board that we’re sitting in front of, actually… I’m a very analog organization person. I like lists; I like Post-it Notes. For me, the act of writing something down and seeing it on a piece of paper on my desk is more valuable than an email note I send myself that I can ignore or delete.
Where do you find inspiration? You mentioned travel.
Travel is a good one. Nature. I mean, being out in the desert is such a special time and way to do it. But then also, even just hopping in the car with the dog and going to a park for half a day is a really nice thing too.
The other place, which is not a place, but a mindset, if you will, is isolation. I actually am not an extrovert and, despite appearances, I like to be alone often in order to really think and see problems or challenges from multiple angles.
Why do you think you’re attracted to Burning Man?
Making, first and foremost. I mean, as sacrilegious this may be for some people, my favorite week is Build Week. Building with 25 of my best pals, and using our physical bodies and getting splinters, and fixing stuff and using tools that you don’t get to use every day. All of that’s really interesting and engaging physically, but also cognitively. It just feels like a different me showing up there.
I always try to tell people, especially new people who are entering their first or second time, that it’s not a week in the desert. It is a 52-week a year organization with things happening around the world and regionals and philosophies and programs like Burners Without Borders.
There’s much more to this than the thing you’ve seen on Instagram. Try to explore as much of it as you can, because you don’t know what the thing is that will spark your imagination.
Burning Man is a global cultural movement rooted in the 10 Principles, with a vibrant network of events and communities in 37 countries around the world. Burning Man is actively influencing art, design, civic engagement, placemaking, and business, and Burning Man Project is the nonprofit organization that supports that ecosystem. Get the latest news from Burning Man Project in the Burning Man Journal, follow us on your social network of choice, and sign up for our email newsletter, The Jackrabbit Speaks.
