Category: Empathy

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Commitment Compassion Empathy Foundational Values Humility Patience Vulnerability

A Room With A View

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcJAWBsLVZ8.

In The Invisible Propeller, I concluded with a quote from Lisa Hermsen (the Caroline Werner Gannett Professor of Humanities at RIT):

“The difference between an engineer who can communicate and one who cannot…is a room with a view.”

In other words, if your communication skills aren’t top-notch, your career opportunities — and resultant lifestyle — will be limited. It’s my opinion that this should be the first lesson in any aspiring engineer’s education, lest we set students on a miserable journey toward dashed career expectations.

This is not what you see from the window of your parents’ basement. (Pix4free)

Longtime readers of this blog know that my father taught me this lesson at just the right moment in my life, and I have devoted the second half of my career to paying his lesson — and my good fortune to absorb it — forward, tirelessly.

For those of you who are new to this blog, the core communication skills are embodied in six of The Progressive CIO’s eight foundational values: Vulnerability, Humility, Empathy, Patience, Compassion, and Commitment.

I once had a software engineering student at RIT who told me that he was skeptical about the value of his own major (which is distinguished by a balanced emphasis on human and computing skills.) He said something to the effect of “too many software engineers can get away without knowing anything about computers. Only computer science majors truly understand computers, and I would hire them to program before I would hire a software engineer.”

And there I had it: an otherwise progressive young man within my own field, denigrating the value of what many condescendingly call “soft skills” that are essential to success.

I asked the young man to consider doctors for a minute.

There are MDs who supervise medical research in laboratories for companies. MDs who consult for the government. MDs who work for insurance companies. MDs who perform pathology or radiology. Then, there are the MDs who “lack bedside manner” (many fine surgeons). These doctors are at their best when they are handed an established problem to solve. In software engineering, we might call these people coding monkeys.

But these are not the doctors who elicit problems from patients.

The doctors we tend to value most are those who interact well with us when we don’t feel well, and help us figure out what might be going on. Through keen listening and empathy skills, they are able to turn vague symptoms into accurate diagnoses. These are the doctors most of us seek as a first resort, always ready to lend a listening ear, a thoughtful mind, and a sympathetic eye.

“You,” I shared with my student, “are like one of those doctors.” Computer scientists may be better-trained for the laboratories of our field, away from the patients the software engineers are better-trained to serve, but it’s one thing to understand computers; it is an entirely other thing to understand people.

I’d like to revisit the condescension of soft skills.

What are “hard” skills? Math, science, logic, and other formal methods that bachelors of science work to master. These skills do not come naturally, and are learned through reading, formal exercises, and other pedagogy. Hard skills can be tested objectively.

What scientists refer to as “soft skills” can only be tested subjectively, making them easy for scientists to dismiss. Whenever the term is uttered, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in the same way that they did when I — as a computer-programming, clarinet-playing, poetry-writing youngster — was called “wuss,” “fool,” “sissy” or many other hurtful things. “Soft skills” is condescending because it is a dismissive epithet, deliberately crafted to distinguish these skills as something “fuzzier” and less legitimate than scientific methods.

Fact is — and I didn’t invent this phrase inasmuch as I arrived at it on my own at some point — the soft skills are indeed the hard skills to find in quantity and quality in the workforce. Most people seem to agree that the Venn diagram of great scientists and great communicators does not have a huge union. (Indicators of the presence of this notion tend to be hidden in comments to articles like this one.) Despite what scientists might like to believe, however, development and testing of subjective skills can be done effectively. Just ask a liberal arts professor.

How would a scientist feel if I were to condescend or dismiss their hard skills by calling them “soft,” given my own capabilities for communication, audience analysis, listening, empathy, vulnerability, trust, and so forth? (I admittedly do this from time to time, just to make a point.) Is it possible for us to move on to a world where we use less judgmental terminology?

We could go with: Objectively-Testable Skills and Subjectively-Testable Skills? OTS and STS.

Let’s posit that engineers who are asked to work with other humans on a regular basis should possess something approaching a 50:50 ratio of OTS and STS. Computer Scientists can be successful with a higher OTS:STS ratio; Software Engineers and IT professionals will be most successful with a higher STS:OTS ratio. I don’t care what the scientists say; that’s a maxim.

If STS and OTS sound novel to you, then I’d ask you to appreciate the fact that I’ve deliberately snowed you. What this is really about is nothing new; it’s simply arts and sciences, in balance with one another.

Great scientists benefit from experience and practice in the arts of life. Scientists don’t serve science; they serve humans. Those who learn this lesson will always have a room with a view.

Isn’t that what we all want?

“The difference between an engineer who can communicate and one who cannot...is a room with a view.” —Lisa Hermsen, RIT

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Antipatterns Empathy

A Vacation and a Cell Phone Walk Into a Theme Park…

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq3BylHjiuk.

“I suppose,” I said to my family, “that this is a sure sign that I am getting old, having a hard time relating to the younger generation.”

“No,” replied my 20-year old niece. “All my friends say the same thing. They hate it, too.”

This particular exchange occurred while I was vacationing with my family this past Thanksgiving week. We had just discovered that — despite a distressing amount of preparatory work that should never be required for something called a vacation — there was no place where we could sit down to a simple lunch without a reservation. We were informed that we had to find a place willing to feed us; enter a lunch order on one of our mobile phones; and wait for a time to pick our food up, sit down, and eat.

Imagine our family of seven, all perusing menus on our phones, finally passing around a single phone (I don’t recall how we chose the winner) to enter our orders in the midday sun, taking time to review everything one more time before pressing “submit order.” Then began the indeterminate countdown to lunchtime. How does it feel to spend 30 minutes out of an expensive 8 hour day doing something so “non-value-added?”

Then I looked around more closely, and saw that everybody else was doing the Same. Darn. Thing. Thus began a weeklong journey in lessons of customer experience.

I don’t know that I ever imagined a day when Walt Disney World would find so many ways to alienate its visitors.

I once had rule that I would not touch a computer when I was on vacation. Then airlines began using phones as a primary means of alerting us all to delays, and that rule began to erode. Leading into this particular vacation, it became clear that web sites and phones were going to be part of the daily experience. We needed Magic Bands. We needed the My Disney Experience app. All of this, as it turns out, is part of a concept Disney calls MyMagic+. Part of this is the Disney Genie+ Service. Please read those last two links. They are lessons in missing the point.

As our first day wore on, and my family worked hard (!) to achieve the experiences we desired, I could not unsee the vast amount of time people were spending on their cell phones rather than enjoying real-life experiences.

The afternoon of November 21, 2022 at Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida

These photos were taken on Sunday, November 21, 2022…just hours before Disney’s Board of Directors brought Bob Iger back as CEO. That day led to a week of me pondering: Should a vacation require that you so regularly employ personal technology? How did Disney get here? This is not The Disney Way.

As that evening wore on, shortly after the Iger announcement, I began to recall a passage from the book User Tested: How the World’s Top Companies Use Human Insight to Create Great Experiences:

In the 1950s, smooth-tasting Arabica coffee beans began to rise in price, in part because they were delicate and prone to dying under cold or inclement weather conditions. So, in 1954, Maxwell House, a popular brand of grocery store coffee, began blending Robusta beans into their mix to lower costs.

Not only are Robusta beans cheaper and more plentifully grown—they’re pest and weather resistant.(1). Unfortunately, they taste bitter and harsh. To mitigate this issue, Maxwell House introduced Robusta slowly and gradually so customers could acclimate to the flavor. They performed user tests along the way, asking longtime drinkers of Maxwell House to weigh in, and virtually none of them noticed a difference between all-Arabica and Arabica cut with a hint of Robusta. So they continued to add more Robusta, test among loyal customers, and roll out blends with less and less Arabica.

For many years sales boomed and profits were healthy, but over the decades, sales began to decline. Maxwell House’s U.S. market share in fresh and instant coffee sales fell from 8 percent in 2013 to 6.7 percent in 2019, and in April of 2019 parent company Kraft Heinz was attempting to sell off the once-iconic brand.(2) So what went wrong?

Maxwell House consistently found that longtime customers were happy with their product. Weren’t they doing everything right?

Not quite.

The company was only asking current customers for input, the people who had been slowly acclimating their palates to a Robusta-dominant blend. New customers who tried Maxwell House for the first time frequently hated it, so the company was failing to attract new buyers.

Had they run user tests with both current and prospective customers, they may have avoided this mistake and saved their brand.(3)

When you’re planning a round of user testing, you can’t invite just anyone to the party. And, surprisingly, you can’t always just invite your current customers to weigh in either. Deciding who to consult to get the perspectives that matter to your company requires a thoughtful approach.

Substitute “Disney cast member” for “customer” above, and I think you will get a sense for what I was thinking. This experience was the result of insidiously-introduced Robusta without enough new taste testers to spit it all out. But here we were, Arabica drinkers all…

If it weren’t for my niece’s comment, I would have been surprised to find this set of Google results as I was reading about Bob Iger’s return that Sunday night.

Google search results: “disney world too much tech not enough fun”

Since so much has already been written about Disney’s current state of affairs — prior to Iger’s return, and since — it has taken me three months to decide if I have anything meaningful to add to the canon. The piece you are reading has been in flux during those months; I finally decided here in early February what it was that I wanted to share.

In the teaching side of my career, we spend considerable energy encouraging software engineers to define metrics that can be used to help articulate success or failures in their products and processes. Rarely have I ever seen a team define “reduced user engagement time” as one of those metrics. One smart blogger I found seems to get it, but this particular search will help you appreciate just how upside-down the world can be.

A key goal of every piece of technology (with the exception of games and related experiences) should be: get all users done with it as quickly as possible so they can get back to other things. How many of your own projects actively strive for reduced user engagement?

I’m fairly certain that Bob Iger wasn’t forced to use his phone for anything during his recent visit to the park.. What does “going back to the office” mean for him? I suggest that it means that every employee responsible for UX at Walt Disney World strap on a Magic Band, plan a week at the park, and let their bosses know at the end if working at home was actually more relaxing. I know what my answer would be.

My family has long loved the Disney experience. But this trip left all of us with the same feeling: there is no need to go back as long as this is the way things are. Several post-vacation discussions have revealed that my family is not alone in feeling this way—and let’s not forget my niece’s friends, either. While I have some good memories from my recent trip — it wasn’t all bad — one stands out above all others: a renewed interest in doing everything in my power to ensure that reduced user engagement is a part of every technology initiative I undertake. On top of it all, I will seek vacation experiences that underscore these values.

The notion of vacation involves leaving something; one of those things should be the trappings of technology that we have every non-vacationing day of the year. Walt Disney Land and Walt Disney World both existed for decades before cell phones did. There is no reason other than shareholder return that it can’t operate the way it once did. Disney shareholders would do well to understand the correlation between reduced user engagement and long term shareholder return, lest they find themselves delighting in Robusta while missing out on investments in companies who care more deeply about the human experience.

The best software is the kind you can finish using as soon as possible.

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Empathy Foundational Values

Imagination With Relation

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhVqt2As8Hg.

This fine spring morning, I went for a run between Lancaster and Witmer Pennsylvania, in what is colloquially known as Pennsylvania Dutch Country. If you haven’t walked or run these roads, I recommend you add this to your list of things to try. There is a magical humanity in the exchange of a wave from a sunlit hand peeking forward from the shadows of a horse-drawn buggy to warmly greet you as you pass from the opposing direction on the shoulder of a road. The sound of horseshoes on worn pavement ruts enhances the atmosphere, which is quite unlike anything else in the modern world.

While running west on Horseshoe Road under cloudless skies, I saw an Amish boy of nine or ten topped with a straw hat, transporting a reel mower from a neighbor’s property on the opposing shoulder. As I got closer, I saw him look over at me. We exchanged waves, as the people of Pennsylvania Dutch Country are pleasantly prone to do. He mostly focused on his errand, but he continued to occasionally glimpse over his shoulder and behold me as I slowly chugged past him. I wondered what he was thinking. Would he prefer to be free of chores and playing as I was? Did he simply think what I was doing was inane? Or was he simply wondering what I might be thinking of him and his activities?

As I passed from view, I thought: we will never see each other again, and he should live for decades beyond me. Might he recall today’s vignette as a random memory long after my time here, as I have for so many similar scenes from my youth?

About ten minutes later, I witnessed a similar scene of an Amish girl of like age, busy mowing her front lawn with a nearly-identical mower. As I ran past, she dropped her mower onto the green grass beneath, and ran toward her front door in a way a child who wanted to do anything but chores might. En route, she, too, took a moment to look over at me and wave in a similarly kind manner as the boy had. She quickly disappeared inside.

If I share that these bucolic scenes are elemental episodes of empathy, how do you feel? We are conditioned to believe that empathy involves identifying something amiss in another individual’s exigency so that we can find appropriate actions or words in response. We typically miss, however, that empathy is an emotion-agnostic notion that can be employed in myriad ways that enhance our appreciation of our world.

Because of this, I like to share that empathy is imagination with relation. In other words, empathy is the use of our imagination to gain an appreciation or understanding of another’s feelings or situation. This is done without regard to the emotions at hand. We can employ empathy when we behold the work of others, present or past, such as artists or architects; or artifacts as simple as laid pavement or the lines painted thereon. We can empathize with a willow swaying in a cold winter wind…an ant enjoying the honeydew of an aphid…a bumblebee hitching pollen in its fuzz…a dog gazing at us while munching a treat…or a turkey vulture tearing meat from a carcass.

The aim of empathy is not to agree and it is not to sympathize; it is merely to understand, or at least attempt to understand. To paraphrase Alfred, Lord Tennyson: It is better to have empathized and misunderstood than to have never empathized at all. An expression of deeply-attempted understanding between two people is more likely to be well-received than blunt ignorance. This is because humans recognize that it can be difficult for us to understood one another.

As has been quoted many times, Martin Buber once wrote:

In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.

—Between Man and Man (1948)

When we demonstrate presence and responsibility, others tend to appreciate it, even if we wind up wrong. That mere appreciation opens the possibility of a response that ultimately helps us gain understanding.

Joe: Good morning! I see that big smile on your face, Mark. You must be looking forward to your fishing trip later today!

Mark: I sure am happy, Joe, but the real thing I’m looking forward to is seeing my grandson get his first bicycle for his birthday this morning!

When you hear “Happy Birthday” sung at a neighboring restaurant table, what do you do? You might survey the table to identify whose special day it is. You might look to see if a treat is being presented, along with the embellishments employed. You might look for smiles to make sure everything is as planned. You might even sing along and applaud.

But how often do you afford yourself to imagine, in any depth: What might it be like to be at that table right now?

I’m fairly sure that most of us don’t employ empathy at times like this. Why is that? I suspect it’s because it requires energy, and since we don’t have a clear idea of immediate gain, we choose instead to apply our energy to other things.

That would be a mistake.

Suppose you are fifty years old, and the birthday girl at your neighboring table is joyously celebrating her ninetieth year of life. Would you take a moment to think: I wonder what makes her particularly happy today? How does chocolate cake make her feel? Does she like icing? Dark coffee? What did she have for dinner? Or for lunch? How late did she sleep in? Did she listen to music or watch a favorite movie with her grandchildren? Did she feel a particular connection in her prayers this morning? Does she know how well those glasses complement her face? Did she put a lot of work into choosing them? What profound lessons did she learn from her struggles that enable her to feel at ease this evening?

You may tell me: I did that for a bit, but someone at my own table told me to stop daydreaming. Well, good for you.

Runners like to say:

The only way to run faster is to run faster.

The same is true for empathy. The more you do it, the better your conditioning will be. Taking every opportunity for “imagination with relation” will make you a stronger empathizer.

Postscript: Prior to today, I’ve penned ten posts touching upon empathy. I’d have written more if it weren’t such a tired topic. Despite that, empathy is, of course, one of the most useful skills that any of us could hone, so when I do write about it, I try to reward readers with something that I believe is novel. My introductory post on empathy in 2020 offered a brief but profound exercise that I hope you have an opportunity to try sometime.

A month or so later, I introduced the concept of invisibleism, a form of discrimination against people due to things we cannot see and, therefore, neglect to consider when dealing with others.

If there is something that ties these two notions together, it is an acknowledgement that empathy requires much more work than many people appreciate. I hope that this post, like the others, helps you with this, adding something new to the way you approach your empathy-building skills.

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