Empathy in Action: Reframing Failure
What might we [un]learn by reframing our point of view (POV)?
This was the provocation we were asked to respond to as I spoke on a panel at a national insurance company this past Wednesday. Other panelists and I were asked to speak towards empathy through various lenses:
- Empathy and failure
- Empathy as practice
- Empathy and possibility
- Empathy as reframe
What’s remarkable about this past week’s conversation is it helped me completely reframe my past experience, point of view, and how I frame failure.
Empathy and Failure
The first question was posed to me:
Tell us about a time where you were part of a team that experienced the failure of a project. How did empathy play a role in how you and your team dealt with this failure?
First off, I set out to reframe the word “failure.” In the world of design (whether you call it Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking/DT, or just “design”) there aren’t words for “failure.” Instead, it’s a conversation around finding new learnings and growing from the new knowledge we’ve gathered — we often call these learnings “insights.” Reframing failure is something I’ve learned in the last chapter in the incredible book: Designing Your Life.
On a related note, another practice/process that I use in my work is Lean Startup. In short, Lean Startup approaches our work as small experiments, where we identify our assumptions, have a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis out in the real world to see if our assumptions are valid. If we don’t validate our assumptions, we then have a decision to make. If we choose to go in a different direction, that is called a “pivot.” It’s shifting our mindset to something else, because we learned something new in our experiments. And, sometimes we even pivot once we validate assumptions, too.
Both the insights and the pivot gained in these ways of working keep us on our toes, and our focus on people, and allow us to be emergent to needs. When a new insight or assumption is tested, we grow and understand the problem in a deeper way.
My Big Pivot
The story of “failure” I shared is a shortened version of a story I’ve told quite a few times over: of being an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the White House, and I reached a crossroads where I needed to lean into my values. As a result, three years of work was undone. This is a story that I often discuss and have examined from too many angles to count.
What followed in those days after this change was about going from a place of hurting and into healing. Empathy was central to this. I leaned more into self empathy: discerning my own perspective, feeling my feelings, and finally giving myself what I needed. For those who haven’t read my book, this is the head, the heart, and the hand. I had to look into myself first before exploring the world outside of me.
We build resilience by going through tough challenges and then overcoming them, a point I recall Monica Curca, Executive Director of +Peace, say in my book. Growing stronger after difficulties is called “Post-Traumatic Growth,” and is only acquired if we lean into self empathy and do the introspection needed to learn and grow from it.
As I wrote my talking points above, I had an epiphany: I can take a different perspective on my own experience. This experience for me is what I now call: My Big Pivot. In the years since this experience happened, I have grown and learned about myself, my values, and what I want to do next. It wasn’t without its challenges, yet it had immense insights that I’ll carry with me for years to come.
Empathy as Practice
Next, we heard from Dr. Anita Ravi, the CEO and co-founder of The PurpLE Health Foundation, which stands for Purpose: Listening and Engage. The Foundation advances the health of our communities by investing in the physical, mental, and financial health of women and girls who have experienced gender-based violence. She is looking into how doctors can make these patients who have experienced trauma feel seen and heard — by creating scales of empathy.
In 2015 Dr. Ravi started a clinic for survivors of human trafficking to do everyday routine care for survivors, whether it was diabetes management or something acute. As she did this routine care she witnessed scenarios that she was not taught in medical school. Due to the past traumas of these groups, she was worried that she was doing a form of gaslighting by not understanding their true experience.
She had to unlearn medicine to treat vulnerable patients. In this article, Dr. Ravi shows the ways she has used stick figure drawings to show how she’s brought a deeper empathy and insights into the patient experience.
These cartoons depicted “a new normal” that Dr. Ravi was seeing each day, she says in the AMA Journal of Ethics. She believes that: “the opportunity to draw and share lessons learned, to advocate for underrepresented viewpoints, and to put forth clinical scenarios I struggle with ties me back to the clinical world of medicine that at times abandons me to algorithms and guidelines that are stubbornly inapplicable to the clinical scenarios I encounter.”
In the cartoon below, she shows that a smiling face can mean so many things — that you can’t see what’s behind the face — it can be an array of many feelings that may be hidden. It more accurately paints a picture of what her patient’s realities may be.
Dr. Ravi has also been looking at how healthcare workers might use Nonviolent Communication and practices. She’s been mindful of language and absolutism that is commonly used in medicine. She’s proof that we might communicate differently — in language and drawing — to holistically understand a patient’s experience.
She witnessed that patients expect failure from systems that support them because they’ve been exposed to so many bad systems. They’ve either struggled or had to maneuver the system to get what they need. Changing the healthcare worker’s language and approach builds trust that this time will be different, that you understand their challenges through the system. Understanding the larger system helps you interpret how to move forward, together.
Empathy and Possibility
Dr. Ellen Langer kept dropping incredible wisdom from her nearly 40 years of research to help us understand how reframing our point of view, through mindfulness or agency, can help us learn or unlearn what we think we know about what is possible in the world. Dr. Langer paints a world that is uncertain, that we make decisions based on subjective experience, and leading with absolutes like we were taught in childhood is a false premise.
Dr. Langer is a social psychologist and professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University where she was the first woman to be tenured in the department. She has been described as the “mother of mindfulness” and has written extensively on the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health. She is the founder of The Langer Mindfulness Institute and consults with organizations to foster mindful leadership, innovation, strategy and work/life integration.
She has written six books on mindfulness and her work as an artist, and over 200 research articles. She shows that creativity is not a rare gift that only some special few are born with, but rather an integral part of everyone’s makeup. Here’s an On Being with Krista Tippett episode where Dr. Langer speaks more about the science of mindfulness and mindlessness.
Unlearning and Mindfulness
Dr. Langer takes an entirely different perspective when it comes to unlearning. “I don’t think that we have to unlearn. I think that the one thing that we have to learn is the inherent uncertainty and everything….everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives, and we never know.” Dr. Langer suggests that we need “to come away with a different appreciation of uncertainty.”
She also brought up the false premise of our teaching around absolutes. The world we know tells us that one and one equals two. Dr. Langer refutes this concept, saying it’s not always true. If you’re adding two piles of laundry, it’s just one pile, not two. The solution is thus for us to accept the fact that no one knows which is the right way, and we need to pay attention to what’s in front of us as things can change in an instant, and we rarely know what is true.
“When we’re talking about people, behavior makes sense from the actor’s perspective or else the actor wouldn’t do it.” So, we don’t wake up on a given day and say that we will intentionally be prejudiced or impulsive — it’s part of our being and values system. It’s all about subjective experience, too. We also must recognize that there is “an equally potent by opposite valid alternative,” or a different perspective to every perspective we put forth. It’s all a matter of the perspective we take on it.
Throughout her decades of research she finds that “virtually all of us are mindless, almost all the time.” So, we don’t pick up on the nuances of people and “we’re oblivious to mild changes.” Dr. Langer states that the worlds’ suffering “is the direct or indirect consequence of our minds.” A solution to this is to increase mindFULness to look closer. So much data is available today, and when you’re mindful you’re able to take more in and process it all and notice what we may not have seen before. When we notice new things, we are present, and it “makes you sensitive to context and perspective and that’s how to get people to recognize alternative perspectives.”
Empathy as a Reframe
Last up was Mona Patel. Patel is the Founder and CEO of Motivate Design in NYC. She also founded Gray Zones, an immersive experience where we play with the gray zones of life — that there are various interpretations of each scenario. In Gray Zones, Patel plays with people’s resistance, to explore the edges of the unknown, and helps answer the question: can I hold that everything I have is not everything I need?
When you’re in that state you can have empathy, she shows a mirror where you can see opposite behaviors, to see the “grey zones.” So people can stop making excuses and start changing how they see an issue. One example that Patel puts forth is drawing from real life — about a time when a colleague experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. The first scene shows an aggressive man who goes up to a colleague to squeeze her shoulders and rubs her neck. Audience participants vote to see who thinks that the man crossed the line. The second scene is with the same actors, but with a different tone and intent. After the vote, she found that half the people changed their mind. In the focus group afterwards Patel explores the boundaries and resistance that people have in the scenarios presented to them.
Internal Resistance and Uncertainty
Patel has spent much of the last three years thinking about her own resistance to having empathy for people and things that are happening in the world that she may not agree with. She says: “how can I hold those two thoughts, at the same time, so that I might find out something that I would have first dismissed?”
What she’s found is that resistance is related to suffering. When you are resistant to an idea, it’s much harder to have empathy for that person, she believes. Spaces like Gray Zones help us to be mindful: to look at the world with clarity and an observer mindset, to say there is no objective truth, and that we are really never certain of any outcome. As a result, she says failure is an inevitable part of our growth, and we need to learn how to thrive in uncertainty to be successful today.
Patel’s relationship with uncertainty is high because she’s been an entrepreneur, saying ‘it’s taught me a lot in my life…to be in a state we’re uncomfortable, knowing that somebody or something can rock my boat and I’m still I’ve everything I need to take it to where I need to go.”
She has struggled with failure herself — and recently learned about “her toxic relationship with death.” Growing up as an Indian woman she: “had to be perfect, I had to get the 100, or I wasn’t worthy of love.” So her failure was a kind of death, an ending, and showed how she wasn’t good enough.
Patel has taught us that to be okay with failure we need to confront our internal resistance to it, and our obsession with perfectionism. As she explores further, her goal is to reframe failure that it seems like a natural cycle of life and loosen our grip on being perfect. She admits that the corporate world is still coming to terms with failure and learning. Failure in the corporate world means a hit to our internal egos and costs real money, which affects the bottom line.
Final Thoughts
Every experience is subjective, and there is no thing as objectivity. We always see things through our own lens, and what we think is right and just. But perhaps if we lean into empathy we’re able to reframe “failure,” shift the way we meet patient needs, explore the possibilities of real living experience, and can reframe our point of view. We are not able to see just what is right and just within us, but instead be open to the possibilities that exist around us.
Here in Washington, DC, I was part of a storytelling organization for 15 years that tells autobiographical storytelling on stage based on a theme. Hundreds of people would show up to the shows just to connect and hear someone’s story. Each person kept coming back because they’d invariably find something that they can connect to in each story: the universal themes of being human — of being more alike, than we are different.
What happens on those stages is transformational. When someone gets on the stage, we have immediate assumptions about the person about how they look, how they carry themselves, how they’re dressed. But the second that they get up on stage, they start speaking their truth and story, your worldview around them changes. Sharing someone’s living experience is deeply impactful — they have more agency and control of the narrative — they have power on how they’re portrayed. It’s an authentic experience, seen through the eyes of someone telling their own perspective through a shared human experience.
“Being authentic carries with it a much greater prize than people realize, says Dr. Langer. “People can see it. And as a result they think you’re trustworthy and charismatic and it carries with it all sorts of advantages. So if you’re trying to be empathic with other people perhaps the starting place is to be authentic. People will feel safe and the interaction will be real, and much more important.”
