The Open-Empathy Organization
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Dev Patnaik
Peter Mortensen
3. Make it Experiential
Finally, it’s important to make empathic information experiential. The emotional centers of our brains aren’t easily triggered by Excel spreadsheets. Open-Empathy Organizations work to create ways for employees to interact with customers and environments for themselves. Sometimes that means encouraging employees to get out into the world. Other times, it means bringing the outside world into the office.
Routinely visit real customers
Too many leaders only understand their customers in the form of market research about their purchasing habits. They don’t know them as people. Open-Empathy Organizations instead encourage employees to regularly meet the actual folks that they serve. When Lou Gerstner became IBM’s CEO in 1993, he launched ‘Operation Bear Hug’ to meet this goal. The program required each of his 50 top managers to meet with at least five of IBM’s biggest customers in the span of three months. Managers weren’t supposed to sell product in those meetings. Instead, they were to listen to customer concerns and think about how IBM might help. All of those executives’ 200 direct reports then had to do the same thing. Gerstner demanded short written reports on the outcomes of each Bear Hug meeting, and he personally read every single one. As a result of this process, Gerstner saw the opportunity to dramatically grow IBM’s business by moving into professional services, a shift that restored the once-beleaguered firm to profitability and growth. [Insert Picture 1]
Bring the outside in
Many companies are insulated from what life is like for their customers. Open-Empathy Organizations blur the line between their company and the rest of the world. One great way to do this is by finding ways to bring the outside in. Gardening tools company Smith & Hawken does a great job of this. Everyone in the company is required to take rotations working in the garden – to literally get down in the dirt. It’s the company’s way of helping its employees develop a better gut sense for how real gardeners view the world. The gardening program helped Smith & Hawken create an empathic connection that helped employees quadruple the company in size and expand from a mail-order business into one of the fastest-growing retail companies on the planet.
Communicate through high-bandwidth media
Though it’s easy to boil down information about customers’ lives to a single bullet on a PowerPoint slide, Open-Empathy Organizations recognize that too much gets lost in the process. Instead, they rely on storytelling, video, and even immersive spaces to communicate data about the people that they serve. No one does this better than Nike.
A major brand in the United States, Nike is also a big name in Japan, a notoriously difficult market for American companies to crack. Experiential empathy has made this possible. At the beginning of a project for Japan, Nike designers visit the country in person to gain inspiration by hanging out with teenagers. The designers see their homes, go to school with them and get a sense for what ‘cool’ means to them. Upon returning home to Beaverton, Oregon, designers recreate the environments they’ve visited overseas: they build rooms that look like the teenagers’ bedrooms they saw in Japan, right down to the posters on the walls and the color palette of the furniture. They even turn on the same Japanese TV shows that teenagers there like to watch. These rooms serve as an immersive space to help designers and marketers create offerings for Japan. They sketch, brainstorm, and debate a product’s look or positioning while immersed in the world of the people they want to connect with. This way, even someone who didn’t go to Japan can experience what they missed.
Use consumer-insight people as coaches, not experts
Consumer insight departments are often the keepers of information about the people a company serves. By contrast, in Open- Empathy Organizations these folks act as coaches and facilitators who create opportunities to learn about customers for everyone else in the organization.
Procter & Gamble exemplifies this principle. In 2001, it created the ‘Living It’ program, in which its consumer insight division arranges for managers and other employees to live for a few days in the homes of lower-income consumers. The same group also developed ‘Working It’, which allows employees to work behind the counters of small stores to see consumers up close and personal. On numerous occasions, P&G employees have come up with breakthrough ideas for products in response to needs that they discovered through time spent outside of the organization. While these experiences are set up by the insights department, the people who go through them work in every function and at every level of the company.
In closing
Creating an Open-Empathy Organization entails a long-term process of organizational change, but the first steps are simple: take the way that you already work today and add in easy, everyday, experiential activities that put you in the shoes of the people you serve. Companies can begin to change by filling just one wing of the building with fresh air. If even a single unit develops widespread empathy, that group’s enthusiasm for the people it serves can spread throughout the company.
Over time, any organization can learn to hear what people outside of its walls are talking about, feel what they are feeling, and see the world through their eyes. Open-Empathy Organizations see the world as it really is: rich with life and overflowing with unseen opportunities for growth.
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