Three-Way Empathy: Beyond Empathy For The User
December, 2017
When we talk about empathy in the problem solving context, we typically relate it to empathy for users. When we try to help organisations innovate and change, understanding user experience is important, but one-sided empathy alone is not enough. To drive and facilitate change, we need three-way empathy.
1. Empathy for the users
To design anything relevant to people, we need to understand their needs and pain points. We need to solve problems for them that are worth solving. Empathy for users starts from understanding that you are not the user, and neither are your colleagues. People are different, and so are their experiences. By embracing the versatility of differences in what drives people’s behaviours, we can learn how to design solutions that create value to users. Designing for everyone and looking at averages doesn’t help us to come up with sharp solutions. We need to look at different individuals and truly understand their life through empathy to get inspired to create something relevant, something that people love to talk about. Empathy is a skill fuelled by the mindset of curiosity.
2. Empathy for the CEO
Empathy for the user is a starting point for innovation that becomes meaningful for people and valuable for organisations. However, focusing only on users will lead to paths that are not relevant in relation to strategy of the organisation. The sweet spot of innovation is where user needs and a company’s intent and capabilities collide. To be relevant and efficient, human-centric designers should also develop their empathy for the CEO. We need to understand why an organisation needs to change and what may prevent that change. This helps us to better understand how the company is looking at its business and customers. You will have a clearer understanding of the brief and can communicate in the same language with the management. Only insights that get a buy-in and are relevant for business will eventually lead to change.
3. Empathy for the co-workers
Human-centric design is all about building solutions together. The old way of designing solutions in isolation leads to vast implementation and change management projects. When true problems are realised and discussed together and solutions are born from co-creation, there is less resistance to change. To build things together, we need empathy for our co-workers — the team we work with, and eventually for the whole body of the organisation that is involved in change. Instead of selling our own viewpoints, we need to learn to truly listen to different perspectives, even the ones that are driven by the fear to change, and learn to build on each others’ ideas. Innovation is not a competition of who is most creative. Listening is not easy when you disagree. But when we listen with a curious mind, we open the horizon of new opportunities and deeper understanding of the problem we are trying to solve. Without organisational empathy, we end up using lot of time and energy in internal struggles when that energy should be utilised for constructive solutioning. Also, in design, solutioning is not an intellectual debate - it’s about proving your point and assumptions by making it real and testing it out, then making it better based on what you have learned, both from users and the organisation. Everyone can contribute to make the solution better.
