Empathy: Beyond the Jargon
5 insights from relationship therapy, zoos, ethics, and journalism on bringing empathy to the forefront
Empathy has long been touted as a critical component for business success and positive employee and customer outcomes. As designers, we frequently discuss the value of empathy in our industry. But the word has become almost meaningless through its regurgitative over use, frequent misuse, and under implementation.
Often this is a result of a mismatch between positive intentions, like “Let’s have more empathy!” and implementation like “How?” and Where?” In addition to understanding and practicing empathy, organizations also need the capacity to scale empathy, translating intention into reality and sustaining it.
As a strategist, I partner with universities, Microsoft teams, and companies around the world hoping to bring the value of empathy into their culture and processes. We tend to start with similar questions:
- How can we go beyond interviewing customers, finding problems, and fixing things to truly building innovative experiences that amplify, augment, and unleash human potential?
- How can we teach the importance and nuance of empathy at scale? For example, how do we take the one-on-one experience and ensure that thousands of employees can feel, think, and act empathetically?
We explored these questions through different lenses. For one project, we took cues from ethics, marriage therapy, zoology, and community management to understand components of empathetic experiences and identify ways to scale them.
Deconstructing empathy
Since the concept of empathy can be nebulous and misunderstood (this film from Brené Brown is a good intro), it’s important to seek others’ expertise on the micro-interactions necessary for a successful empathetic experience. Dr. Patricia Worthey, a psychologist certified with the Gottman Institute, has made a career out of understanding empathy and its role in improving relationships.
“A requirement for empathy is openness,” she said. “To be willing to suspend your fear, your judgment, and step into a situation and be willing to learn.”
She laid out five steps to practice empathy in any interaction:
- See the issue from someone else’s point of view.
- Allow yourself to feel emotions underneath the experience.
- Connect the issue to your own experience.
- Don’t pass judgement or give advice.
- Communicate back to the other person that you understand.
Putting empathy into action within our habits, behaviors, actions, decision making, and communications is difficult. We struggle in our personal and romantic partnerships, so practicing empathy every day at work to serve customers is a challenge. It requires constant practice, mindfulness, self-awareness, and knowledge of how to listen, especially when we fail.
Extending empathy
Scaling empathy for many organizations means moving hundreds or thousands of people from awareness to a deeper understanding and consistent empathetic behaviors. It’s the difference between knowing what empathy is in the abstract and grasping the difference between empathy, pity and sympathy. When we commit to scaling empathy, we can inform positive, equitable outcomes for the largest number of people. Here’s are the top 5 insights we’ve learned:
1. Create train-the-trainer / master-apprentice strategies
Harnessing a ripple effect of knowledge can help ensure everyone actively practices and integrates empathy into daily rituals, meetings, processes, and, habits. A structured approach to distributing knowledge helps empower members of an organization to lead as advocates. It also ensures the conversation around empathy continues to happen in its most human form: from person to person.
John and Julie Gottman are world-renowned experts in relationships. Rather than hold their knowledge or distribute it through books or courses alone, they’ve trained around 100,000 other clinicians around the world on their methods. These clinicians work directly with couples and teach workshops that help thousands of people a year better understand or improve their relationships. From Moscow to Johannesburg this learning network builds on the knowledge of others to scale. Their work has transformed marriages and can transform how designers interact with, learn from, and co-create with our customers.
Inspired by this, we started running similar programs at Microsoft a few years ago, creating a “community of activators” with internal experts. We identified people with diverse areas of expertise to help build layers of communication, Q&A, teaching, and application within day-to-day processes as someone learns a new skill. These experts often had apprentices who accompany them for a period of time to gain intensive firsthand experience about implementing empathy in their daily work. By building a coalition and community of mentors and learners like this, empathy can thrive on larger scale.
2. Unlearn with an open mind
Opportunities for strengthening empathy can appear in unexpected places. For example, a red-tailed boa named Anahi lives at the Woodland Park Zoo. When a zookeeper brought out Anahi during a community program, a young girl ran to the back of the room filled with fear and negative preconceptions about this animal. Through storytelling and warm non-verbal interactions with Anahi from the trainers though, the child quickly moved to the front to learn about the animal with a renewed sense of wonder.
While we’re not always aware of our own biases, approaching new situations with an open mind and can lead us to more compassionate decisions. Unlearning can help us understand our own biases, assumptions, and beliefs.
OCAD University’s Inclusive Design program has an entire course about unlearning and questioning. This is a great example that shows critically examining our perspectives is key to avoiding exclusion in our processes, products, and environments. “Understanding the process of belief formation is critical to developing empathy, understanding why people believe what they believe,” said Dr. David E. Smith, an ethics professor at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Washington.
3. Tell diverse stories
Scaling empathy means actively seeking out underrepresented experiences to understand and amplify. Zaki Hamid, director of community engagement for Seattle’s KUOW public radio, runs a series called “Ask A…” These events bring together groups of people to learn more about each other in one-on-one conversations; for example, one of the show’s early projects events was “Ask a Muslim.” These experiences were specifically conceived to gather diverse experiences and question common assumptions in the public sphere.
“Our job is to lift up these (diverse) voices’ stories so that we can have a complete narrative of this place that we call home and not just stick to one specific narrative…to tell stories that are seldom told and lift voices that are seldom heard.”
Identifying and filling gaps in social narratives brings diversity to the center stage. Zaki also discussed the need to explore sources in journalism and move past white men as primary news contributors. We echo this at Microsoft as we push to listen and co-create with our diverse customer base.
How can you intentionally learn about and promote diverse stories?
4. Build learning networks
Create a community of learners through consistent knowledge sharing. Learning networks promote a culture grounded in reflection and growth. Part of community activation is promoting a shared vocabulary, ensuring empathy is embedded in employee onboarding, and, connecting dots to help employees identify naturally where in their workflow they can begin to leverage the tools in your empathy toolbox. It’s important here to recognize the role power dynamics play to create and sustain change — as a force you can either undermine or empower a learning environment.
Woodland Park Zoo, an award-winning zoological garden in Seattle, recently hosted an empathy symposium where organizations from around North America came together to learn, co-create, and act to build compassion for wildlife. Experts on topics like animal welfare and behavioral psychology shared ways to build and maintain public empathy toward wildlife, all in the spirit of sharing different kinds of knowledge across groups.
When I lead empathy workshops, I suggest everyone make a new friend and schedule time once monthly to talk about successes, failures, and, lessons. After three years of doing this, a colleague recently shared:
“These experiences changed my life. I’m able to see the world differently than I was before and check myself mentally daily in communications as I apply empathy in practice.”
Be scrappy and find creative, diverse perspectives to learn from daily. Create programmatic ways to enable discussions and reflection as an individual and among peers.
5. Create with instead of for
While people generally mean well when they express a desire to help, approaching empathy with a fix-it mindset can have harmful consequences. Dr. Smith cautions us against making assumptions about another person’s identity under the guise of empathy.
“Empathy is the ability to begin to see myself in another person and to begin to feel what they’re feeling. Common humanity is important,” he said , “ But if I haven’t experienced what you’re experiencing, I need to be careful not to pretend that I have.”
There is nuance and danger in unintentionally oppressing people by presuming knowledge and expertise or by not involving them as co-creators. Instead of designing for someone, co-create with them. Be mindful to avoid oversimplifying someone’s experience to a set of problems.
Check out our short film about this topic:
Special thanks to Ashley Walls and Danielle McClune for their partnership to bring this to life.
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