Yesterday evening, I attended an interactive session focused on the first step in Design Thinking- Empathy, Hosted by Make Studios at their office in Wan Chai.

It was a well attended event and great to see such an engaged audience.  The hosts had us on our feet, walking around the room in a sort of adult musical chairs, without the chairs, and orchestrating interactions between people who hadn’t met already.  The last exercise had us interviewing each other in pairs about what we did on our weekday lunch breaks.  It was a simple exercise but reminded us of the importance to listen carefully, observe our interviewee and prompt the discussion along.  

I valued the session for the reminder on the importance for empathy in business and the opportunity to meet like minded people in Hong Kong.  

It got me thinking about empathy in the context of problem solving.  Without problems, where do the challenges come from?  All of us are problem solvers and empathy enables us to get more out of the process and focus on solving through understanding, collaboration, inspection and adapting.  It’s also less stressful personally to take yourself and your judgements out of the process so that you empathise, focus on your client and work with them towards the outcome.

I write the following based on my own experience in driving change over the years.  Personally, I’ve found leaving my personal opinion out of the process very healthy.  It’s good to be invested in the outcome but to enjoy the process of engaging and doing something without any assumptions upfront and enjoy seeing how your client (and maybe even yourself) is transformed in the journey.

For example, our client has an issue with staff turnover.  They come to us for help.  We know this client has a bad industry reputation so we inject our personal opinions into the situation, grit our teeth and grumble internally about how lousy their management is, the below market compensation they offer, and so on, however how about we leave our ego at the door and get into the real business of understanding their situation and work with them on solving the problem?

Empathy: The client acknowledges they have a problem.  Great.  Now let’s seek to understand the problem.  Work with them to draw up a stakeholder map, conduct interviews, understand how their business works, seek to understand the impact staff turnover has on the business.  Give a project outline to the client to help them understand the potential work involved in solving the problem.

At this point, the client may back off and that’s OK.

Define: Working with the client, use the data to define the challenges, the pain points and the personas affected by the current challenges.  Are there new personas they want to impact?  Keep a future focus as well as being mindful of the current issue.  Define the objectives of this transformation.

Ideate: Generate ideas to move forward.  

Assuming there is a high level of psychological safety, conduct workshops, respect ideas from everyone.  Psychological safety lacking?  Anonymous surveys, in person interviews, small groups to begin with.  Start with the naysayers and the cynical people.  The path of least resistance is to engage the enthusiasts and leave the uncomfortable conversations for later.  Leave them out now and you’ll get a lot more pain later. Main thing here is to time box effectively, set the intent, reinforce and remind stakeholders of that intent, keep the momentum up and constantly communicate to all stakeholders.  Inspect and adapt. Understand dependencies.  Generate a sense of pace and action.  

At this stage, avoid endless talking shops where nothing gets done.  People are busy so respect their time, set clear agendas and deliver.

Use the time to prioritise next steps.  To get a sense of achievement, quick wins and credibility, go for small impactful changes with the caveat that you get buy-in from your client.  Make progress collaborative- if your client has skin in the game, you’ll get far more buy in for the bigger achievements down the line.  Identify ‘friendly’ individuals and groups you can try the prototypes with.  Identify what methodology you’re going to use to take the process forward i.e. Kanban, Scrum.

Prototype: Get your Kanban boards ready!  Time to create some wireframes, some story boarding and engaging the friendlies to critique the prototypes.  Gather data, fail fast and keep communicating.  Learn from the mistakes, inspect and adapt.  Remember, perfection is the enemy of progress.  Prioritise what MUST get done and identify the nice-to-haves.  Continue checking with your stakeholders that you have understood but be firm on scope creep!

Test: Obvious as it sounds, it’s important to test the prototypes out.  Perhaps A/B testing to compare a couple of options.  A friendly team might test the hypothesis which you can observe.  Again, check dependencies- there could be system dependencies, role dependencies and other business dependencies that you must be aware of.

The above assumes the driving force(s) behind this change have these qualities:

• Curiosity- a desire to learn and challenge current thinking.
• Engagement- An engaging, inclusive and respectful manner.  Saying Please and Thank you is hugely important in building trust.
• Reliability- Another key to building trust is following up and doing the thing you said you would do.
• Communication- the courage to have difficult conversations, the skill of creating pithy, salient updates that people actually want to read.
• Determination- driven to get something done.
• Astute- politically and commercially aware.
• Adaptability- Things change.  Conditions at the start of the project may not be same part-way through- changes in sponsorship, key stakeholders, budgets etc.