What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to share and understand another’s feelings and perspectives.

Empathic organizations will anticipate new opportunities more quickly than their competitors, adapt and innovate to capitalize on them and create workplaces that are infused with a sense of mission.

Proper empathetic engagement can help us understand and anticipate the behavior of others. One of the major flaws in contemporary business practice is the lack of empathy inside large corporations, not only for their obvious constituents, employees and customers; but for everyone involved in the production, distribution, purchase, consumption, and perhaps of equal importance, the collateral experiences with their products.

Without an intentional structured process of preparing for empathic engagement and a rigorous approach to the collection and dissemination of that data throughout the organization, employees often struggle to make objective, intuitive decisions; believing they understand their consumer or customer or other constituents related to their business when actually they are distant, disconnected, or even misinformed. This can be caused in part because many organizations often rely exclusively on un-rigorous empirical experiences, quantitative research or sales data, or in some cases mixtures of these and outmoded or miss-used qualitative research tactics.

In this upcoming series of blogs, we will explore some of the opportunities and roadblocks many organizations face in their quest for empathic understanding. We will examine how to understand and mitigate the latter and recognize and implement the former. We will explore how to use Anthropological and Sociological techniques such as Ethnography both internally and externally, individually and collectively to produce empathy.