Develop conversations, not interviews
Most of the books I read have been aging at my Kindle Library for a while before I start reading them. I don't remember who recommended Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work to me. Still, my expectations were slightly different when I started reading it a couple of weeks ago. I was looking for a read about improving building empathy with peers, but after a slow start that almost made me drop it, I found a great user research book. Later on, the book develops into the topic I was expecting initially, but the trip there is even better.
If you have worked with me, you probably know how intense I'm about granting access to the research materials as raw as possible. "Take notes as quotes." "Have you take notes as quotes?" "Can I listen to the recording?". Quotes, quotes, quotes, ...
At CARTO, we built this crazy Airtable with hundreds of classified quotes that Aroa managed. Anyone from the company could search or even add new ones. Are you a Sales Representative that was in a meeting and caught an interesting comment by the prospect? Please send it to Airtable.
It was a monster to maintain, but I guess it summarizes how far I think we should go to avoid interpretation jumps early in the process. Cultural load, biases, etc., are always there even if we are aware of this.
Indi Young goes in Practical Empathy way further than I do on building a generative process without personal interferences.
When you listen to someone telling a story, you fill in a lot of details that go unsaid. These “fillers” are based on your cultural and personal history—and probably half the time they're wrong.
You drop into a neutral frame of mind, try to discover the deeper reasons behind what she is saying, and shut down your own thinking and emotions.
The funnel process explained in the book is nothing new for anyone with research experience, but some hints blew my mind.
As a former Journalist, I always congratulate myself on writing good interview scripts and driving the conversation naturally to unexplored and exciting new places. Young says that if we try to build empathy, we should avoid scripts altogether. Even avoid asking if possible. Allow the person on the other side to talk and talk; you should just listen. Don't even write notes. Listen.
Empathy is built through the willingness to take time to discover the deep-down thoughts and reactions that make another person tick. It is purposely setting out to comprehend another person's cognitive and emotional states. Empathy then gives you the ability to try on that person's perspective—to think and react as she might in a given scenario.
If you do conduct additional listening sessions to see if there is corroboration out there for a concept only one person mentioned, be careful not to bring up that concept. You are never supposed to introduce topics to listening sessions because it might skew the results. If you do that, people will talk about your topic, even if they would have never brought it up on their own.
We try to ignore opinions ... even in the qualitative sessions. Because opinions are essentially worthless. They don't repeat. Opinions require a huge sample size to find trends. But cognitive behavior repeats over a very small sample size.
As someone who has worked building services that use vast amounts of demographic data to build business insights, her take on demographics also caught my eye.
An even more important guideline for this activity is to avoid demographics entirely. Demographics are descriptors such as gender, age, income-level, health, religion, eye color, nationality, political-affiliation, and so on. To stay within an emphatic mindset, you need to concentrate on the reasoning patters you found.
As another example, saying that a person belongs to a certain political group does not explain her reasoning and guiding principles. Indeed, a political label invites the assumption that this individual -and all individuals of the same demographic- align with your interpretation of some of the viewpoints of that party. Rarely do all individuals interpret a viewpoint in exactly the same way.
It's not only that technics like Personas are most of the time a Design/Marketing gimmick to prove our ideas right and are a worthless tool for your product definition workflow.
Demographics are wrong as the driving pattern to simplify and group our decision-making, and most of the time, they have a terrible impact on our society.
The book closes by talking about using all that empathy built during the previous chapters and applying it at work. I enjoyed this paragraph. It's something I always need to remember from time to time.
The halts in progress at work happen because, among other reasons, people at all levels of the hierarchy have not invested time in understanding one another. For example, if a coworker is having a fit, the reason is often rooted in others not understanding or appreciating his ideas or because another person encroached on his area of decision/making.
Nevertheless, monthly productivity reports focus on the things you get done, not on how well you relate to others. Yearly performance reviews include perhaps a small piece that evaluates your ability to collaborate. But earning the trust of people at work, understanding what drives people, deciding what to say and what to request -all these require empathy. Learning how your coworkers reason and acting on this knowledge is paramount to your productivity. It won't bring it up to superhuman levels, but it will reduce the frequency and duration of the halts.