To Empathize, Allow Some Space

This post comes from my good friend Bill Pacheco, former design leader at Cybex and Keurig Dr Pepper, and currently Senior Innovation and Design Thinking Fellow at Trinity College. He’s also the Founder of Open Until 8, a boutique business consultancy. Bill invites you to connect here.

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I love the way Brené Brown defines empathy as “connecting to the emotions that underpin an experience.”

I often use this quote when I teach folks human-centered design. Emotions drive behavior, and if we can connect with the emotions of our customers, we will understand what they truly value, believe or get motivated by, and design better outcomes accordingly.  

The key in all this is how you connect with an experience someone else had. 

A few weeks back, I trained a group of executives on how to empathize with their customers. After a lecture and demo, I summarized by stating we want to drive to specific scenarios, seek emotional moments and dig deep by asking ‘why?’ and ‘how did that make you feel?’ often. They were curious and excited, so we headed out to the field to meet customers!

After a few interviews, some themes emerged. They were challenged with getting people into a specific area & going deep emotionally. I offered tips, and subsequent interviews improved. However, the team seemed to treat those interviews like they would a survey. They would launch a question and within a few seconds say, ‘how did that feel?’, often before a response even came out, and moved on. To me this felt jarring; I can’t imagine how the customer felt. The team didn’t allow the customer time to reflect, explore and share. So much opportunity was being lost. This happens often with new trainees and my overarching coaching message to this group was simply, allow some space.  

The reality is that when we empathize with customers, we are really asking them to be vulnerable and share painful moments in their life. I once had someone cry during an interview. We got into a story that went deep & ultimately got into a discussion about her mother and what a great role model she was. I’ll never forget it. Forever connected. 

When empathizing, we need to be comfortable with pregnant pauses, side trips and loops. If we are going to have people trust and share with us, we have to go alongside them.  They may need to purge a lot of confusing statements out. They likely never reflected deeply, if at all, on the particular experience in question. They likely cannot be objective on an experience so subjective. When empathizing, we need to allow some space.

A person I always admired is Fred Rodgers for his humility, kindness, and wisdom. He said, “Love and trust, in the space between what’s said and what’s heard in our life, can make all the difference in this world.”

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