Wired to Care tells the story of how companies prosper when they stop worrying about their own problems and start caring about ordinary people. But the story doesn't end in the book. On this blog, we're sharing more tales of companies, political campaigns, sports teams, governments, and institutions of every kind that are Wired to Care - along with the occasional shameless plug for the book. Join the conversation.
Pete had the chance to connect with the Calgary chapter of the User Experience Book Club a few months back, and the group has now reviewed Wired to Care for their readers. They describe empathy as being at the absolute core of the work they do:
So how does the notion of empathy fit into user experience design? Well, it is actually one of the most important concepts when approaching a design problem and this is why “Wired to Care” continues to bubble up to the surface when I am thinking about design problems. If a company can’t understand what is happening when a customer interacts with their product or service—the challenges, the constraints, the “ah-ha” moments—then it is going to be a very tall order to gather requirements and create solutions that actually solve any sort of problem relating a customer and/or user.
S. Anthony Iannarino of The Sales Blog has published a terrific article discussing how the U.S. military’s Human Terrain System (a group of Army-employed anthropologists who talk with civilians in war zones to understand how to create more lasting peace) relates to the process of sales. The HTS is a powerful example of empathy trumping aggression time after time. In one celebrated case, the HTS managed to stop insurgent violence in a small city near Fallujah by rebuilding a volleyball court that had been destroyed in fighting. The town hadn’t provided cover for insurgents because they hated American troops. They provided cover because they were upset that their favorite recreation had been disrupted.
As Iannarino rightly notes, most companies too often fall into a mindset of fighting insurgents instead of understanding why they hold appeal. Rather than launching new solutions based on brand, competitors, or emerging technologies, it’s much more helpful to understand the lay of the land. You need to know the situation on the ground.
Mary Beth Coudal has a delightful meditation on how hard it can be to maintain confidence in the idea that we derive much of our strength from our so-called soft side. She’s a prolific blogger and writer, and she recently found herself feeling that the only way to get ahead was through ruthlessness. In some small way, Wired to Care helped her to stay focused on empathy:
I had to Google a management expert to be reminded that kindness and caring, these are not failings, these are assets. And companies like assets.
Our colleagues Isabel O’Meara and Sarah Rottenberg at Jump have had their quite wonderful article “The Art of Seeing” excerpted from Rotman Magazine in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record. The piece defines seven ways of looking at your business to find new sources of innovation, including a few different approaches to empathy. Our favorite, drawn from Jump work:
LOOK THROUGH SOMEONE ELSE’S EYES
While founders and employees can represent a segment of a company’s customer base, most businesses grow and succeed by reaching out to people who are different from their staff. Get out into the real world, and meet face-to-face with your customers. GE’s Plastics division was shocked to find its corporate customers less interested in driving the bottom line and more artisanal in sensibility, eager to see what new cool things they could make from plastic fibres.
For all of the neuroscience that we included in Wired to Care, one aspect of the brain’s empathy system we didn’t touch upon was oxytocin. It’s a hormone produced in the brain, essentially, by love. Mothers and their babies bond, in part, through a mutual release of oxytocin produced when they look at each other. Looking at your spouse can shoot your brain through with the stuff. And, unsurprisingly for something associated with love, it literally makes you feel warm and fuzzy. And generous. And happy.
Fast Company’s current issue has a great story about Dr. Paul J. Zak, a hybrid individual who is pioneering the field of neuroeconomics, which seeks to connect the decisions people make with the brain activity that generated the thinking. He’s been doing a lot of research in recent years on oxytocin and its influences on how we act under its influence. One of his most fascinating experiments follows what’s known as “the ultimatum game”, a classic psychology test that pairs two individuals and gives one of them $10. The one with the money then selects how much to offer her partner. If the partner accepts, they each receive their portion of the cash. If not, both leave with nothing. When primed with imagery that stimulates oxytocin (pretty much anything empathic, from cute puppies to stories of sick children), people offer their partners a higher dollar amount. At the same time, they take away the same to slightly more than average money themselves. Greater generosity yields greater returns.
Most interestingly, Zak has used magnetic resonance imagery technology to show that when people visit social networking sites, whether Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, their brains generate nearly as much oxytocin as they would when interacting with friends in person. All of which suggests a very interesting aspect to the rise of such websites over time. They’re playing on our natural desire to be around other people and interact with other folks like us. We’re social creatures, so we’re invariably social networking creatures, too. The article does leave unexamined a more critical question, to our minds. Even if the brain is fooled by social networking into seeing true human interaction, does the superficial image of others we get from a one-sentence update actually replace the impact of being around other people? We would venture: no.
And that’s a dangerous trend. Many large organizations have done a great job of becoming involved in social media, whether Comcast’s revolutionary Twitter-based tech support or the Obama campaign’s unprecedented success online in the 2008 election. Now, such interaction is superior to no interaction. There is no question of that. But if it is a substitute for real empathy, for deeper connections with the people that you serve, you risk developing a false sense of security based solely on the small portion of people’s lives that they talk about online. And that would be a mistake.
A very wise man once told me to “never write angry.” It’s for that reason, and that one alone, that this blog has been silent on the subject of the BP/Transocean oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico for the past several weeks. And silent, generally. Talking about a topic as seemingly soft as empathy at a time when millions of American fishers are unable to work because their targets are swimming in oil can seem flip (although BP CEO Tony Heyward’s “I’d like my life back” comment comes close to setting a record for low empathy by a leader.).
Tens of thousands of barrels of oil per day have spilled and now begun to reach the shores of Louisiana, with Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida next in the path of destruction. Multiple high-drama tactics have been attempted to stanch the flow, even though experts say the only possible solution will be when relief wells near the site of the former Deepwater Horizon platform are completed. This will take months more, and likely millions more barrels of oil along the third-longest coast of the United States.
And most of us can only sit back and ask why and how such a tragedy could occur.
A debate has raged for decades among geologists about when, if ever, we would reach Peak Oil for the world — when would the production of petroleum reach its maximum level before falling back as wells dry up and the price rockets up. Statistically, at least, we haven’t reached that point. But Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College, has potentially framed the issue in a new light: we have reached the era of tough oil. Though we might be centuries away from extracting every possible drop of oil contained beneath the earth’s surface, we have, without question, reached a point under which previously unthinkable tactics by oil companies (like, for example, drilling a well more than 5,000 feet underwater or processing oil sands into crude). Peak Oil is irrelevant. The costs of tough oil are more than adequate to make the need for new energy technologies a crisis.
It says a great deal about the current economics of the oil industry that in the time since the 1979 Ixtoc I oil platform explosion (a case that is eerily similar to Deepwater Horizon in every regard except that it was 1/25th as deep), R&D dollars have been focused on one thing — new ways to get oil out of the ground. Not on new ways to prevent disaster, not on new kinds of energy sources, but on new wells far beyond the brink of sanity.
This disaster is manmade and ultimately caused by a simple misapprehension about the purpose of corporations. They do not exist merely to reduce transactional costs and maximize shareholder value. Companies like BP exist to serve their customers. With an industry as massive as oil, those customers are pretty much everyone on earth. And still again, as it was in the wake of the financial industry’s late 2008 implosion,the executives of an industry that has wrought grievous harm on society, its employees, and its customers, seem confused as to why anyone is even angry at them.
For the last 35 years, it has been increasingly evident that oil would soon lose its status as the most economical source of energy. And yet the wealthiest companies in the history of the world have made only token gestures toward finding a safer replacement. We’re all paying for that now. We can only hope that this moment might mark a turning point, and that the energy industry will soon be able to see the world beyond its walls. It’s time to rewire the corporation.
A few weeks ago, Dev had the opportunity to speak at TEDxSoMa, a San Francisco version of the annual Long Beach gathering. For those who couldn’t make it out, the entire event is now available to watch on YouTube. We’ve embedded Dev’s talk in the post, and you can check out the rest here.
One of the more exciting developments in public speaking of the last several years has been the expansion of TED beyond the annual conference to hundreds of independently organized and hosted TEDx gatherings. Dev recently had the chance to share the food word about Empathy at TEDxSoMa, an event held in San Francisco’s famously tech-heavy neighborhood. Stitcher.com has posted audio of all the talks now, so be sure to check out the great thinking on display. Dev’s first, of course.
Dev recently sat down with Andy Kaufman of the People and Projects Podcast to discuss the essential role of empathy in leadership. The conversation is fascinating, particularly as it explores why people are so skeptical of empathy in the first place.
Thanks for everyone who voted in last week’s Empath-O-Meter poll about Ford. To our great surprise, this was the only unanimous vote we’ve ever had, with Ford earning a perfect 100 percent score in Striving ...[more]
