S2 E1 | Practicing an Empathetic Perspective

But I think the reality is the empathetic perspective is that aspect of being able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes, see what they see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel, and then take that information into account as you look at the whole. And that's really kind of the important part of it is as you develop product, whether, you know, I would say we're doing that obviously in jobs to be done, but we do it also in teams. We also do it in project charters. We also do it in investments that we make. All those different things. We're looking at it from. Think about the. We just had the lock break and we had to think through all the different perspectives of could Alan open the door if we got a new lock? Right. And so we have all these different things going on. And so it's that aspect of being able to think through things more comprehensively that then actually turns out to be a better solution.

Welcome to the Circuit Breaker podcast, where we challenge the status quo of innovation and new product development. We'll talk about tools and skills and methods, methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer. I'm Bob Mesta and I'm the co founder of the Rewired Group and I'm one of your co hosts. And we're joined by Greg Engel, who is my co founder and chief, Bob interpreter. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset, reorganize, and recharge your brain to build better products.

Hey, Bob.

Hey, Greg.

I give you enough pause?

You did?

Okay, perfect. He yelled at me last time about not giving us enough pause. So, you know, I have to make sure I. I give enough pregnant pause that he can get in there.

No, that was bored. The fact that you were on a roll last time and you just went straight through and I was like, wait a second. Am I not supposed to say hey, Bob? I don't know.

Well, you don't say hey, Bobby. Say, hey, Greg.

Hey, Greg. That's true.

That's a different thing.

That's a different thing. You're right.

So we, we realize we're slap happy today. So hopefully, hopefully you enjoy this.

This podcast, this version.

Yeah. So what I want to really talk about is something that's in your newest book, which is Learn to Build. And we want to talk about empathetic perspective. So can you give me a brief. No, it's a hard thing. A brief description of what empathetic perspective is to you.

Yeah, so what. What I would say is it's the ability to. To see things from different people's perspectives or different lenses, like, you know, molecular, like scientific lens or a person's lens. And it's being able to see things in multiple perspectives around a specific topic or item or issue or struggle or whatever. And it's the ability to kind of surround something from 360 degrees or 720 degree, like, just all the way around it. And so to me, really good innovators and entrepreneurs have this ability to, you know, to. To see things and connect dots between different views. And it's empathetic because they're not judging what it is. It's more like, what is it and what do we do with it? And it's very, very. It's trying to be objective around it to be able to understand how do they feel, what do they see, what do they hear?

And so that would be something like, if a company uses segmentation or Personas, you want to be able to walk through each segmentation or Persona with. With that empathetic lens.

I want to be able to see it from, like, this is why I usually with Personas is because they're. They're aggregated from a bunch of attributes. And when I try to go like, okay, what does this person see? Like, I can't. They're not a person. They're. They're. They're a Persona of something. They're not, they're not, they're not real. Sorry again. When I talk about empathetic perspective, I use my hands and I just knock the mic over. So sorry about that.

But I think the important thing, whether you want to dog Personas or not is, is you need to. As you need to understand what that Persona or that segmentation is, and you need to look through their eyes and you try to get it as authentic as possible, knowing you still have biases.

Yeah, you're always going to have some biases. But I don't want to dog Personas. But what I'm saying is Personas are just really hard to develop from. And we need Personas to help us buy media. It's how almost all the channels are now specified. It's by Persona or by some set of attributes. So a lot of this comes from basically how we buy media. But it doesn't necessarily help me develop the product if I don't understand how somebody thinks about something and how they approach it and where they are. And so it's more about kind of playing the role I always talk about. This is actually more art than science in this case. Because it's about you learn, like, playing the role of the other person. So when we're doing interviews, my whole thing is our job is to get their empathetic perspective and bring their view to the table. Not with our bias or as little of our bias as possible and our understanding of what are they thinking, where are they coming from, what are they trying to do.

Yep. And we're going to get into a podcast later in the season about decision making and how decisions get made from a customer perspective of what's the first framework we think you should use, Then how do the other ones fit in? So we'll get into that a little bit later. So that's a little bit of a tease for later. But I think with empathetic perspective, I think what we want to make sure we're talking about is it's really important not to ignore different perspectives.

No, this is where I think you need diverse perspectives. You need. Is why you need diversity on the team. Right. I think the thing is you got to be able to see this from, you know, like, I'll say, when I was at Ford, it was like, I got to understand what the, like, the assembly line people need to do, and I got to understand the service people, and I got to understand, you know, kind of the. The end. You know, end buyer of the car, like, all those kinds of things you had to actually take into account as you went through this. And so the same thing, though, is as we might have different people's perspective, we can also have different kind of scientific perspectives. We can have a molecular level. We could have a, you know, a macro level. We can have a micro level. We can have. We can see things through space, through time, look backwards, look forwards. And so part of this is to realize that it needs to. It needs to extend beyond just people, but to think about how the different perspectives of the world kind of connect and ultimately, where are the gaps and where are the. Where are the conflicts? Because really good innovators and entrepreneurs and writing that book, it was like, I studied a lot of them, and you start to realize they can see problems before they happen because they have this ability to actually play the role of somebody else.

But why is it important to do it? In your opinion? And it's an opinion. Right. Why is it important to have that? Because if I'm just a really good visionary, I can just pick something out of the sky and go do it.

I think there's three main reasons. One is the fact is that at some point, ultimately, we're not all Going to agree on everything. And so part of it is being able to understand where the conflicts are or where the trade offs are we have to make. The other part is to realize at some point in time there are things that are more important. Some perspectives might be more important than others. And so being able to understand like where do we need to prioritize? And so it gets back to your point, which we'll talk about later is decision making. Right. And the last one is when you forget about. Right. One of those perspectives, you actually have a very big problem. Right. Like I love the, I saw a video, I think the other day of them changing the oil on like the new Suburban where it like it just pours all over the transmission. Right. And it's like nobody thought about how we had to actually change the oil. And so it's that kind of role where like you've got to basically, you know that's going to be a problem long term. Yeah.

And I think when you actually do an exercise with empathetic perspective and you have people and I'm going to stay with the human aspect, act aspects. Aspects of it, which is different segmentations. You actually see people have aha. Moments. You actually see people realize that what they're. That there's other ways to solve this problem.

Yep, yep. And this is one of the reasons why I call it a skill is because I think everybody has some form of empathetic perspective. Like, like when you plan a meal or you're going to think about a vacation or you're going to go visit somebody, like you're thinking about what it's going to be like and who else is going to be and what's the dinner table and what else is going on. And so, you know, part of this is, is that this is, this is, this is like a very fundamental skill. But, but what you have to do is realize like the more and more you can bring other perspectives into it and start to see how things connect. That's when you start to see the whole. That's the magic. That's when the AHA's come. Right.

And it's one of those things where we have. You have to get out of your own comfort zone to do this. And that's, that's probably the hard part for most people is understanding. Everybody knows they have biases, but understanding when they're coming out I think is the skill or the practice people have to have to do this.

So can you tell one of the story? Like when you worked at the independent living facility, you had Some really interesting ways in which to think about kind of different perspectives of people who walked in the door and how they actually did it.

No idea what you're talking about.

So when you worked at the independent living place, you would think about the person that was coming in, you'd think about the caretaker that was bringing them in, you'd think about all the different people that were involved. And as you're starting to sell to help them make the progress. And it wasn't about selling to them, it was about literally understanding where they were coming from. And to realize, here are the trade offs they had to make. To me, you had some really good ways in which to look at it in terms of being able to help make those decisions. Sorry, I just probably said the whole story.

Well, I guess I do it empathically, so it's hard for me to break up the story. But in that situation, what you're talking about is if you think about an independent living facility or you think about picking out a place for your parents to go, whether it be independent or assisted living or nursing care, there's multiple different things you have to take into account as that person.

Making that decision for your parents, but then also as a salesperson.

Yes, but also for the parent. Right.

And what that means is if you can, if you can picture the self, hopefully you haven't gone through this, but if you can picture yourself in this is as a child of someone that you're putting into a facility, you feel you. You can feel like you are pushing your parents into a decision. You can feel like the bad guy, you can feel, at the same time, you could feel like the good guy. And there's all these different things. So as a salesperson, you have to understand how to talk to the resident that's coming in. You have to understand how to talk to the child, the caregiver. You have to also talk. You also have to know if there's problems between different stakeholders in the family. Because a lot of times, unfortunately, siblings don't see eye to eye or you might have a another relative that thinks they know a better way to do it. So you have to, as a salesperson, you have to walk people through that. So it is empathetic thinking about it because you have to think about the tour, especially in a system or especially in an independent living situation, because you're actually answering three different questions or three different problems at the same time. You're trying to understand the needs of the resident or of the person coming in. You also have to understand the needs of the caregiver givers, the anxieties of all. All those people involved, all in a singular event.

That's right. That's why it's. That's why it's so hard. And at the same time, the fact is, if you have empathetic perspective, it's not hard. It's actually just. It's actually about slowing it down and making sure you're hitting all the right points for all the different parties involved. And so this is one of those things where, again, we all have this ability, but you can use this. Whether you're developing product, whether you're selling, whether you're buying or you're planning something for somebody or an event, all of these skills come together. And so this is where I don't want to play out. Like an empathetic perspective is like a unique skill. I believe we all have it, but I think there's some people who actually are really, really good at it and they explicitly try to get better at it.

I think everybody can do it. And I think. But I think it's also easier to do in a group than it is by yourself.

That's for sure.

And the reason why I say that is because if you do it in a group, people can call out biases. When you do it by yourself, you don't know. You tend to fall into biases when you don't know you're falling into biases. So that's why we do it.

We do it together. We do just about everything together.

Well, and I think we tell teams, and that's why I think development is a team activity, is because different people have perspective. And that's also to mean it's often not a exercise either. It's just good listening.

That's right.

And when you're working in a team environment and you have a junior engineer and you have a senior engineer.

Being able to listen to both and being able to understand the problem from each because they have different experiences, they have different ways to tackle it. One might be.

More rigid in their thinking and one might be less rigid. And that doesn't mean. I'm not saying that the less rigid person is the person out of school. Sometimes they are the most rigid people. So you have to understand where they're coming from. And you have to understand what are those things that we're doing and listen to both and call each other's biases out in order to solve a problem.

And that's one of the things I would say, is that our unique ability in having doing this for so long is that I can actually play you and say, here's what. What Greg's gonna say. I'm not right all the time, but I'm pretty good at it. And you can do the same. You do the same thing. To me, you literally are like, you know, I think the word around the office. You're the Bob whisper. You just literally tell me these little things to go do. And next thing I'm like, I think we should go do this.

So, yeah, you're guilty of that. Don't deny that.

For sure.

But I think. But I think the reality is the empathetic perspective is that aspect of being able to put yourself in something, Somebody else's shoes, see what they see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel, and then take that information into account as you look at the whole. And that's really kind of the important part of it as you develop product. Whether, you know, I would say we're doing that obviously in jobs to be done, but we do it also in teams. We also do it in project charters. We also do it in investments that we make. Like, all those different things. We're looking at it from. Think about the. We just had the lock break, and we had to think through all the different perspectives of could Alan open the door if we got a new lock? Right. And so we have all these different things going on. And so it's that aspect of being able to think through things more comprehensively that then actually turns out to be a better solution.

So I'm going to throw you for a loop now.

Oh, go ahead. I threw you for a loop.

And maybe it's not. And maybe it's not, but is there steps in empathetic perspective, is there steps that you go through? Like, is there steps you go through? And it's not saying everybody should go through them, but are there steps you go through?

Yeah. So at least for me, like, to get an other person's perspective, like, I need to know a little bit about them. I need to know kind of like almost like a little backdrop. And then ultimately, I want to ask questions that are not traditional questions to kind of see how they react to things. Because ultimately it's how people react is kind of helps me understand where they're coming from. And so a lot of times you always think I ask weird questions, but the weird questions help me get to kind of who they are and where they want to go and what they're trying to do. And so, like, for me, it's, you know, I always got to have a Name a place and the time. And from there I can actually kind of play with everything around that.

And if I listen and watch, you're trying to a get into the. And this is an acting thing, into the method, into the person, into the thing. But then also work through. Okay, if I'm in this now perspective and I'm trying to solve these problems, and you have to be pretty specific on what you're trying to solve, right? Because if you're too out there, then it doesn't. It's not meaningful.

If it's fast, easy, and fun, I don't know what. What you're really trying to do.

Right. So then you have to set up the context of this situation.

Exactly.

Then you have to set up once you get to the context of the situation. So now you have the. The person, the context, and now what is the solution? And it's not one solution you should be testing.

No, no, that. That's why I always go like, well, why didn't you do this? Like, did you think that? Or like, like people think I'm leading people and I'm really more trying to understand. Like is like, did they go in this with a. With a. Like a, you know, a pinpoint view on what this is, or do they go in with a very broad view and narrowed it down and you start to realize, like. And most people will jump to the conclusion like, oh, and then I did this. It's like, yeah, but wait a second. What happened in between here? And that's where you're trying to get their understanding of how they looked at it and how do they. Like, how, like, again, the pert bottle. Like, okay, it's not here. What am I good at? Like, it's what the. Like the first 20 minutes of looking was like, where the hell is the pert bottle?

Okay, so if you don't know what he's talking about, go back to the last episode and relive that. Because we're doing this kind of in a row. It's one big conversation.

It is one big conversation. Sorry about that.

So if you don't know what he's talking about with Per bottle, go back and listen to shopping versus restocking, and it'll all come muddily clear.

We're going to have way more fun this season than last season.

So I think what we're saying here is, look, you have to first get into character. You have to understand who you're playing or who you are when you're looking at a problem. Then you have to look at the context. Then you have to look at. Then you have to look at multiple different ways to solve the struggling moments they have in that context.

That's right. What did they know, what didn't they know, at what point in time?

And it won't give you the answer. It's going to give you set of answers. And we're big on set of answers. And then that set of answers, when I put it with other empathetic, other people's empathetic perspective, other context perspective, I'll come out with a better solution that meets multiple different things.

That's right. And so most of the time we're trying to get to what did people do? It might be what they said, but what did they mean by what they said, and ultimately what did they do or not do as the main guide for us to actually understand how to play their role. So, like, when we're adding a feature, we're doing something else. It's like, okay, let's put ourselves in the role. Can they actually see what we're going to add? And you start to realize, like, we've given them a thousand things they need two more things is not going to make a difference. That's where most people don't realize they're overloading people all the time.

Yes. And I think one of the things.

We want to, as we are right.

Now, it kind of, you know, it's an experience. What can I tell you?

So I think an empathetic perspective, and this is going to be another way we look at the world difference. Right. Is you say that everybody has the ability or everybody does it. And I agree with that to some extent. Right. And I agree with that. But it's. I also think you have to practice this a lot because there's a lot of different skills that go into empathetic perspective. There's the ability to see the world different ways. There's the ability to listen. There's the ability to play things out. There's a lot of things in empathetic perspective there.

The other thing is, the other thing is, is to, is to, you know, kind of like, remove your judgment because you're trying to say, how do they judge this? Not how do I judge this? And so a lot of times people will do things. I'm like, oh, my God, I would never do that. But, like, you got to shut that off. Like, whether I do it or not is not relevant. It's like, why did they do what they did?

And that's a piece of listening skills that I think we'll end up getting into, maybe not this season, but in future seasons for sure. Which is, what are those things that cause us not to listen? I think that's one of the things that cause us not to listen is our judgments, our perspective, our things. Right. So empathetic perspective is a practice to get to that better listening skill.

I think the interesting part is, I mean, if you think about the last couple of weeks, the people who, like, when we do interviews, they can't even hear what we hear. We're trying to actually help them, but they're seeing the product, they're seeing the interview or the person we're talking to, or the customer. Only from the view of the product. We'll try and go like, all right, now I need to just don't worry about the product. Let's talk about why they did what they did and what they were hoping for. They just magically go back to like, so what they think of the product, like, what do we do about this? And you're like, okay, we don't care about the product. What we want to know is, like, if they like something about the product, what did it help them do that they couldn't do before? And so they're almost talking to the customer to get their ego stroked from the product perspective, as opposed to trying to understand the problem that they had and the progress they were trying to make.

So, and again, I don't want to throw you for a loop. If we throw you for a loop here.

Which is just listen to it again.

What are the things that stop us from using empathetic perspective in your view?

I think part of it is we just don't understand where that person's coming from, and we don't take the time to actually unpack it or appreciate that point of view. And so a lot of times we end up kind of either ignoring it or assume we know it. And we both know when we assume, you and I get in a lot of trouble.

Yeah. And I would say. I would say, look, it's. The pitfalls is you have to know your biases. You have to know your. Like, there are. Everybody has.

Everybody has biases. Everybody.

And I want to. I'm going to use a bad word. Everybody has trigger points. Everybody has things that they hear that throw them into a certain mindset. And when you're trying to practice empathetic perspective, you try to minimize those as much as possible.

So just to give an. Just give an example. What are three of my trigger words?

I don't know.

You don't Know any trigger words where.

Like, I know there's words out in this context.

There's very, very specific words you choose not to use because, you know, I go off on a rant. Right. And that's just part of empathetic perspective. Right? Never mind.

Yes, never mind. This is an example of. Of riffing in a bad way. There. There are many. There are.

Why are you judging the way we're riffing?

The one thing that this is, the problem with empathetic perspective at some level is we all have different ways we want things to happen. So we have to think of those ways that we're making people uncomfortable or not uncomfortable. So this is an example.

I'm making them uncomfortable by calling you out on the spot.

And there's actually not three trigger words. You have. There's hundreds.

I know I was just.

Thousands.

I know there are. And I was just wondering.

And if I pick the wrong.

It was a trap.

It will go into a hundred different things that. Why, if that's not a trigger word for you? So I don't. So I don't want to get into that.

It's so wonderful.

That's one of those. So this is. This is empathetic perspective, right? In a nutshell of. Of. I'm very uncomfortable with. With podcasting, and I'm trying to make it as. As rigid as possible, knowing that you want no. Rigid. Rigid rigidity or whatever the word would be. And this is the problem of knowing when to push someone or not to push somebody. And sometimes we make mistakes, even though we're supposed experts in this. Right.

My favorite is that you knew it was a trap because whatever the word you're going to say, we're like, that's exactly right. That's a trigger word. And then just go into it. And you literally didn't even take the bait. That's the beautiful part. So that's again, you practicing empathetic perspective, because it's like, it's not three, it's 100, if not a thousand. And anyone, you would say, I would go like, oh, let me tell you about that word.

And it's. It's context driven. Right? Because. Because if you've just went through a project where vision was being thrown around, that could be a trigger word, but three months from now, it might not be a trigger word. Right. So it's one of those things of knowing the person and all that stuff. But I think the big thing that we. That we want people to take away is. Is empathetic perspective is something that everybody practices at different times, we're actually probably better at it in our personal lives than we are in our professional lives. Right? So that's, that's one thing that we. So we, we all, we. We agree that it's a skill set that everybody has at some level. It's, when are you good at it? When aren't you good at it? And you have to know yourself to know that some people are better at personal than professional, some are better professional than personal. Just kind of depends on the person. But then also, knowing your biases, knowing what's going to get in your way of seeing things a different way, whether that be a personal bias, whether it be a product bias, whether that be whatever it is, knowing what that is going in is always helpful. So we will often.

Get those biases on the table before we start doing exercises with people.

We try to. And sometimes we don't get them until the friction happens.

But, yeah, I think if you're in a team setting, the worry of upsetting other people or the argument is also an impediment of empathetic perspective. And then I think just being comfortable, and you heard it here. I mean.

We'Re trying to be as authentic as possible, right? So when Bob throws out something that I'm not comfortable going down, you can feel it, you can hear it, right? Or when I do it to Bob, you can feel it, you can hear it. But we know we're comfortable with each other. We know it's not going to cause a problem. We know it's not going to be a big deal. We know we're probably going to laugh about it in five minutes.

And we might call each other names, but it's all part of it, right? It's part of our bond, our thing, right? So know that and know that in a team, that happens as well. And you have to get some of those things on the table. And when it happens, just like it happened here, I gave Bob the eye. He knew. He filled the air. And then I figured out what he wanted me to say. Right?

So.

So that's kind of how you have to play that. That's. That's part of empathetic perspective. That's part of knowing each other.

That's right. And I think the real point here is that it's. It's whether you're, you know, this is a useful skill, whether you're developing products, whether you're selling, whether you're just, you know, part of a team. Like all of this thing of knowing where people are coming from is a Necessity is a really, really good skill. And the more you can double down on it, the more you can understand other people's perspective. You can actually figure out how to reduce friction and how to actually get alignment better and know how to move forward. And so to me, empathetic perspective is just essential to making progress.

So I think the. This is a little harder one to give an assignment to.

No, I would say, can I come up with an assignment or is it going to be too hard?

Sure, if you think you can.

There you go. He just gave me the look again. I think the assignment is to think about somebody either in your office or in your house where you've actually been disagreeing for a while and see if you can actually figure out kind of their perspective on it and take a moment to basically listen and understand where they're coming from and what perspective they have and not judge whether it's right or wrong, but ultimately be able to kind of then come to terms with what is really going on from their side versus your side. And I think those that just being able to empathize and understand their perspective on it, you start to realize like there's some things you didn't really understand. Well, I think that's the best way to. That's the assignment I would give them, but you always give better ones, so maybe you should do it.

Oh, absolutely not. This is a. This is a try to practice.

I think it's a great assignment. I think you have to think that the only thing I would add is, is once you do that and you do that, just what are your biases? Why couldn't you.

Oh yeah, right. That would take a minute to figure out your own biases to it.

Yep, that would be my only.

Yep. Cool. Enjoy.

Awesome.

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