The Impact of Deep Understanding

Editor's Notes

• #3: Of course I have to start a talk to an audience of librarians with a picture of my bookshelf. Or rather, a special part of the bookshelf holding some of my grandmother’s books. Plus the first book I ever bought. (The dictionary.) The blue book in the middle is a really special one. It’s a collection of letters a 13 year old niece of my grandmother’s wrote every day during her trip through Europe with her parents in 1937. That was the year of the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth … the year of the World’s Fair in Paris. Her father was a product-buyer for a U.S. department store, so this was a six-month sourcing trip. The question is: Why did she do this? Why write a three-page letter every day describing the details of her day and her reactions? She’d promised her grandparents, as a way of carrying them along to see the coronation and to experience Europe. They used her letters to see through her eyes and feel through her heart. She used her writing to shine in their eyes, and to guarantee correspondence.
• #4: I use her letters to re-trace her steps when I’m in the places she described. This is the Chateau de Chillon in Switzerland. She describes these images in her letters. I like to dwell on the common human threads undisturbed by time. There is something quintessentially human about her train of thought. It is as valid today as it was in her time. Sure, there are things that are different today: faster communication, more widespread access to knowledge, but human thinking is still human thinking. Of course, Betty May did refer to the technology of the time. We have that phrase “Digital Natives” now—people who were born after the advent of the internet. She was a “Kodak Native.”
• #5: Amateur motion picture filming was introduced when Betty May was born. When she was 13, in Paris, so it was natural that she would drive around the city taking movies. Saturday, May 29, 1937 “We grabbed an open top cab and drove around the city taking movies!”
• #6: She was also a photography enthusiast. She took her camera everywhere, just like we do with our mobile phones today. Even if it might put the device in peril … here she’s up in the mountains of Switzerland. Thursday, June 3, 1937 “We saw some huskies for hire. Jan and I piled in camera and all. Out we sprawled on a turn. Snow down our backs and our hair … I’m afraid my camera was ruined.”
• #7: Whenever a film-printing service was available in a city she arrived in, she would drop off her work and return the next day in hopes the photographs were ready. Sometimes she was disappointed. Friday, July 16, 1937 “…but my films were not ready at Kodak.”
• #8: But when her films were ready, she was ecstatic. Tuesday, May 4, 1937: “Oh! Yes! I got my films today! I am sending them home. I hope May May or Ruby will get an album for me. I labeled all of them on the back.” She was documenting her trip beyond just the daily letters to her grandparents. She anticipated also looking at her photographs in the future, and sharing the album with people who were interested. Perhaps she was also recording what happened so she could remember how it felt, later, when the emotions had faded. But, did she know this at 13? Or was she just doing what everyone did: making an album?
• #9: My own grandmother made albums. I’m a grandkid of a Kodak native. I don’t happen across the physical albums very often. I see them when I’m helping my parents move house, or for their 50th wedding anniversary, or when someone in the family has died. That’s when I spend time immersed in them. I try to learn my grandmother’s stories.
• #10: She had a lucky upbringing. She got to travel. She went to Hawaii by boat with her family.
• #11: Her brother.
• #12: She posed for the iconic surfboard photo. That’s Diamond Head in the background. When I look at these photos, I’m amazed they were able to have such adventures in places we still think of as distant …
• #13: … that took days to get to …
• #14: … wild …
• #15: … inhospitable. (Like, how did they get there in the winter in 1910’s before interstate 80 was built? It would have probably been by train.)
• #16: And yet, here were all these people, enjoying the locations, enjoying each other, striking frolicsome poses for the camera. I wonder what these people were like and what was their intent as they took these photos. There's something about this wondering, this trying to connect with people from the past … bonding, understanding, reminiscing, wondering. I want to re-invoke their lives.
• #17: What was it was involved in the decision to go fly in a biplane and take photos of San Francisco, when that was the high-tech of the decade?
• #18: It appears that this biplane ride was the work of a gentleman trying to impress a date. WOW!
• #19: But then, who is this gentleman? What was on my grandmother’s mind as she posed for this photo for him?
• #20: How did her personality form from this adventuresome girl with her little brother?
• #21: Unafraid of the cold Monterey Bay water. (This is McAbee Beach.)
• #22: … to the carefully poised, reserved woman that I knew? (That’s her on the side.)
• #23: I have her albums. Every few years I come across them and wonder about her thinking and the moments that were captured in those photos.
• #24: Here’s another question. This is a Digital Native. (My nephew.) What will his grandkids do? They won't lack this curiosity about their ancestors, surely. How can we support them?
• #25: Right now, this is kind of all we’ve got, digitally. It superficially ties memories to dates … and mostly only your own memories or memories you were tagged in. This feature supports none of the various thoughts I’ve wondered so far.
• #26: Sometimes the feature actually makes me feel upset. So how do you figure out better ways to support people? To pave the way for the Digital Natives’ grandkids? Deep understanding! Developing empathy. We have to understand what their purposes are. What they’re thinking.
• #27: You do that through research. Research is in fact the tool that most of you reach for first when faced with a challenge like this. There are lots of kinds of research.
• #28: We can understand how well the services we create work for people. Or whether one solution works better than another.
• #29: We can use generative research to gain inspiration. Successful organizations try to do research in all of these boxes.
• #31: There is a whole layer that hasn’t been explored much. It’s called the problem space. That’s the layer that understands the intents and purposes that people have, whether or not these are explicit or layered deep in their minds. Forge a deep understanding of people … via cognitive empathy.
• #32: Successful organizations are also branching out to include research in this new layer.
• #33: Quality is measured in two ways: how well does the solution do what you intended? How well does your org support the person in their pursuit of their purpose?
• #35: What I talk about is support, not manipulation.
• #36: When I did research for my book Practical Empathy, I found lots of articles about persuading people, especially politically, but very few about supporting people.
• #37: Persuasion, manipulation, these are often referred to as dark patterns
• #38: What he means is “dark patterns.”
• #39: Support is different than manipulation; it’s not what Daniel Goleman was thinking of
• #41: Tasks and goals relate to the solution space. I want to be able to support the intents and purposes people have. Support how they think their way through to these larger things. Not the details of how they use tools, not the explanations of what they’re doing. What are they trying to do, and what workarounds are they thinking up to achieve these larger purposes?
• #42: A purpose is larger. My mom is getting older and has never seen the Grand Canyon, and I want her to have that amazing moment when she first lays eyes on it. But we live in different cities. And since she’s getting older, she doesn’t like to fly. Last time she flew anywhere, a few years ago, she had a connection. She got a bit lost and was late and it was a lot of stress on her. So I was wondering if I should fly to her city and drive to the Grand Canyon together. Or if there’s a direct flight for her.
• #43: But all I’m faced with is a representation of the airline’s system. They have planes that fly between airports on certain dates at certain times. That’s all they will help me with.
• #44: I happened to do a year’s worth of problem-space research with an airline. 100 participants. And a huge part of taking a trip was exploring what it takes to get there, making decisions around difficulty, complexity, timing, time of year, possible thunderstorm delays, extreme locations requiring days to get there, islands with no airports, etc. The airline thinks I’m only concerned about the price of their flights between airports.
• #45: So I tried a bunch of options, taking an hour to see what might work. I had to pretend I was booking the flight. And when I figured out the route, I wanted to book two seats for me and my partner and a separate flight for my Mom. There was no way to do this.
• #46: The airlines tools did not support my intent.
• #47: Clients come to me wanting to do research and can’t get outside of their own frame of reference. I help them re-frame their thinking in the problem space, so they can broaden their perspective, and choose which audience merits a narrow focus.
• #48: And the research can be structured as a diagram …
• #49: … which can be used to pinpoint gaps in your support and catalyze new ideas.
• #51: Empathy is defined in a lot of ways.
• #52: Walking in someone’s shoes is a valid interpretation of empathy, yet some people twist the meaning.
• #53: … which of course is not what empathy is about. Empathy is being an actor, trying on their character, acting them out.
• #55: Affective means “emotional,” so you can also call it emotional empathy.
• #56: Sadness “fixes” Bing Bong with emotional empathy, where Joy failed with her tickling and energy to fix things.
• #57: It’s like a bolt of lightning that zaps you with the person’s feeling. It’s being infected with another person’s emotion. (Which is where you get “sensitivity.”) It’s also how actors and authors convey a character to you. If you don’t feel what the character is feeling, you lose half the story.
• #58: And like a bolt of lightning, it’s incredibly powerful and illuminating. But it’s hard to force it to happen.
• #60: So that leaves cognitive empathy.
• #62: It's more than being sensitive to others' emotions. It's about supporting different people in different ways according to their purpose. Not their needs or goals. Their purpose.
• #63: That don’t have to do with the services or things a person has, but the human things that your great-grandparents thought about and planned for.
• #66: Remember walking in someone’s shoes?
• #67: It’s how you apply empathy.
• #68: But the majority of organizations skip the part about developing empathy. Instead, the make up their understanding of others. The guess or use assumptions. Developing empathy requires listening to many different people’s stories to understand how their thinking goes. There is a practical way to do this, and to draw reliable patterns from the words which guide you.
• #69: Not interviews
• #71: We had our own little rainy tour in Monterey yesterday, led by Jen Waterson of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies here in Monterey.
• #72: When you’re on a tour, you follow what the tour guide wants to show you. If you have an abiding interest in church architecture, but that’s not on the tour, you don’t interrupt the guide to ask about it.
• #73: When listening, you need to go deep. You can’t develop empathy from statements of fact, explanations, opinions, or preferences. Those are the shell (or bubble) that we build around ourselves to show to the rest of the world. Empathy goes into the deeper currents.
• #74: To listen well, you need to channel your inner toddler. Toddlers are not embarrassed that they don’t know
• #79: Empathy does not judge; it does not have contempt for another person.
• #81: Just deep pursuit of topics
• #83: Why report numbers by gender? Why not age? Destination? Vacation vs. business trip?
• #84: As much as this sweet little picture is something we we’d like to be true. Usually the two things we correlate at work are more related. Insidious. Our minds like to simplify things.
• #85: So, why not report by number of alcoholic drinks consumed on board? It has about as much correlation as gender.
• #86: At the airline we actually captured the way people think about carrying on bags or not. Age, gender, economic means—these do not matter here.
• #87: This is a more helpful way to report the information for the product managers and designers.
• #88: … whether it’s internal or external …
• #89: Vocabulary is important. Cultivate an awareness of your vocabulary. Every time you say user, or any of the other words that also mean user (member, passenger, customer, student, etc.), you are speaking about the solution space, not the human in the problem space.
• #90: Marketing segments have poisoned our minds. Marketing segments use demographics to represent the way people think. This is false.
• #91: Demographics, statements-of-fact & preferences can be distracting and cause assumptions. Descriptions represent what is important to your organization. Your ideas will derive from this frame of thinking, which will limit your creativity.
• #93: Here’s an example. Healthwise did the research, found three different thinking styles, and supported them with three different packages. Each package has different components and different tone of voice.
• #97: Here is a second example. Rebecca wanted to understand the thinking styles of all the people who have a non-student, non-faculty, non-administration relationship to the university.
• #98: She found these four patterns of thinking. She then re-architected the web presence to support each of these differently.
• #99: In another example, Kendra works at a libaray system, with no budget. She used her lunch hours to conduct listening sessions over the course of several months, then pulled together the data. In the end, she discovered several surprising things the libraries had not considered before.
• #102: Fourth example: As opposed to thinking of their audience as the “resistors” and the “change-makers,” they saw more nuance. Empathetic problem-solvers, Organizational implementer
• #103: Okay, now let’s face reality.
• #104: It’s kind of like an Easter Egg hunt.
• #106: We can get research done for a tiny percentage of these larger budgets.
• #107: It’s typical for people to want to insert this research into a cycle—a solution cycle. Spread the word that this does not work. People short cut the phase when it’s done as a part of a recurring cycle, plus it does not always need to be done with each cycle.
• #108: You don’t explore the problem space all the time—only when needed. Build up your understanding of people over time. The data will never go stale. You can keep adding to it over time. Practitioners tend to do this every year or so, more or less.
• #109: Make better business decisions: Community engagement Promoting the library
• #114: And it can be structured as a diagram which can be used to pinpoint gaps in your support and catalyze new ideas.
• #115: If you want to create a forma artifact, then you need to capture and preserve the concepts—the quotes from the transcripts.
• #117: Starting on the right are the concepts—quotes cut and pasted from the transcripts. Then there’s the ID of the participant, to preserve privacy. Then there’s a summary in first-person, present tense with the verb and the important concept from the quote right at the front. It forms a complete sentence. (Minus the “I”) It allows you to find affinities between these summaries and those from another participant more easily. It allows you to step into their shoes more easily. It also helps you save time that you’d otherwise take to re-understand each concept over and over as you create and use the artifact.
• #119: If you want to do this at scale, if you are using empathy to look into how the people you support in your work are thinking, you can summarize that clarity of meaning in a standard format, from many voices.
• #120: And you can inductively organize the summaries into patterns, bottom up.
• #121: As you add more voices from the people you support, the patterns stabilize.
• #122: For every hour of listening session, expect to take around 8, 9, or 10 hours to pull all the data together.
• #123: And it can be structured as a diagram which can be used to pinpoint gaps in your support and catalyze new ideas. It can be “decorated” with various information, thinking-styles, locations, demographic data, even survey results.
• #124: The lower half of the diagram can be used in many ways, such as aligning the support and capabilities you already have in place, planning where to go next, forming arguments as to strategy, etc.
• #126: So if you’re trying to support the grandkids of Digital Natives in understanding their grandparents … you will think up better features than this type of thing.
• #127: These are Digital Natives. (My nieces, posing for the iconic surfboard photo.) What will their grandkids do? They won't lack this curiosity about their ancestors, surely. We can support it by … developing deep understanding instead of tracking what is happening currently with respect to the solution.
• #128: Measure your new knowledge