(More info: www.paulekman.com)
Eavesdrop
Several years ago, writer and former literary escort Naomi Epel published a small paperback book and companion card set called The Observation Deck. Epel’s package is a wonderful trove of writing tips assembled from authors she shepherded on book tours. One of those tips is also a fine way to develop greater powers of Empathy: Eavesdrop.
Listening to the conversations of those nearby has a bad reputation. But we all do it, so we might as well make it worthwhile. Next time you’re in a position to eavesdrop, listen carefully to what your targets are saying. Then imagine yourself as one of those people in that situation. What are you (that is, him or her) thinking and feeling at that moment? What emotions, if any, are coursing through your body? How did you end up in this particular place at this particular time?
“Many writers are notorious eavesdroppers,” Epel writes, citing, among others, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who kept a notebook in which he recorded “overheard conversations.” But the practice is valuable—if done in moderation and within the boundaries of the law, of course—to a range of professions. It’s an excellent way to put yourself in another’s shoes and see the world through that person’s eyes—if only for a few moments. One variation: Listen to a conversation without looking at the people who are talking. Then guess who the people are—their ages, their ethnicities, their clothing style. Turn around to see how accurate you are. You might be surprised.
Play “Whose Life?”
IDEO is one of the world’s most respected design firms—the creator of everything from those fat-handled toothbrushes for kids to Apple Computer’s first mouse to the Palm V. How do they do it? The secret would make an MBA squirm: Empathy. In the IDEO universe, great design doesn’t begin with a cool drawing or a nifty gadget. It begins with a deep and empathic understanding of people. Here’s an exercise in Empathy that I learned when I visited IDEO’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters:
Ask someone in your organization to lend you her purse, briefcase, or backpack. Also ask that person to remove the things inside that bear her name. Then gather a group of five or six other people and review the contents, without knowing who the person is, to try to determine what sort of life—personal, professional, emotional—the person lives. For instance, is the bag crammed with things or is it spare and neat? Is everything inside related to work? Or are there items that indicate a family life or other interests? How much money is in the wallet? Does this person carry any photographs? Pick through the artifacts like a purse-snatching archaeologist—and you can really begin to imagine what it’s like to be that person. Added bonus: “Whose Life?” is a lot of fun.
Also, IDEO has collected some of its other techniques and stamped them onto fifty-one funky oversized cards that are available online and in a few American stores for $49. These IDEO Method Cards detail an array of strategies—borrowed from anthropology, psychology, biomechanics, and other disciplines—for putting Empathy at the center of the design process. Like conventional playing cards, the Method Cards are organized into four “suits” that represent four methods of empathizing with people: Learn, Look, Ask, and Try. Each individual card explains a particular technique—say, “Camera Journal” or “Bodystorming”—with a photo on one side and on the other an account of how IDEO has used the technique with a client. These cards are almost as fun as rifling through someone’s purse.
(More info: www.ideo.com)
Empathize on the Job.
Even though we all say we believe in empathy, we often fail to demonstrate it with the very people who surround us for most of our daylight hours: our coworkers. Here are two techniques for increasing empathy within your organization and team.
1. A Day in the Life
Do you know what work is really like for your colleagues? This activity will help you find out. It’s easy to do and great for staff meetings or retreats.
Have each participant write her name on a piece of flipchart paper and then list four categories: my highs, my lows, my frustrations, my rewards. Post all these sheets on the walls. Then ask everyone to walk around the room and write what they think the answers are for their colleagues. What’s the biggest frustration of the senior vice president? What’s the greatest reward for the fellow in the mailroom? Once people write what they think, each person reclaims his own sheet. Then everyone takes a turn responding to his colleagues’ guesses and explaining what a workday is really like. A variation: Organize people by departments and have each group try to describe a day in the life of the other departments.
2. How Did I Get Here?
Sometimes you work near people for years but have little idea about the path that brought them alongside of you. Understanding these personal histories is the goal of an activity that Kevin Buck, a senior consultant with Leading Initiatives Worldwide Inc., uses with groups of physicians. He invites doctors to pair up and tell the story of why they chose the arduous path of medicine. Each doctor relates her own story, listens to her partner’s story, and then retells the partner’s story to the rest of the group—a process that Buck says is “always very powerful and renewing.” After the storytelling, he elicits the common themes from the community of physicians, the result of which is a new narrative that runs counter to “the dominant story of disdain and negativity that most felt in the health care community.” Buck has used this technique with other groups of professionals with similar success.
Take An Acting Class.
Americans of a certain age will remember the television commercial that began, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” These days that piece of Americana is being turned upside down. Doctors are pretending to be actors. Increasing numbers of physicians are working to understand and deepen their Empathy by taking acting classes. It sounds either dubious or duplicitous, I know. But think about what actors do. They try to inhabit the mind and the heart of another person—and that makes acting a great way to understand emotion and emotional expression. Most local colleges and community centers offer evening classes. And while the instructors aren’t exactly Lee Strasberg, you’re not exactly Al Pacino. So if you’re game, give it a try. You might learn something.
Get Mind Reading.
If taking an acting class is too much—or if you find this Empathy stuff really perplexing—consider the CD-ROM Mind Reading. Designed by a team of scientists at Cambridge University, the CD-ROM shows real people demonstrating with sound, expression, and gesture more than four hundred different emotions. It’s designed partly for people (those on the “autism spectrum,” for instance) who have difficulty reading emotions and want to learn how. But it has also become popular among actors, illustrators, and others who need a keener insight into facial expression, intonation, and emotion more generally. It’s not cheap—about $125—but it is encyclopedic. (More info: www.jkp.com/mindreading)
Don’t Outsource Your Empathy.
Are you still buying greeting cards that broadcast someone else’s sentiments about life’s most important moments? Show others how much they really mean to you (and demonstrate your empathy) by creating your own cards for various occasions: birthdays, graduations, illnesses or deaths, anniversaries. Kids know how to do this. And so do you. Just fire up your computer’s word processing program and get started. Even better, do it by hand with some blank cards and colored pencils.
Anybody can grab a mass-produced card along with the week’s groceries. It takes a special person to spend the time really thinking about what message to send and how best to convey it. Put the power of the personal to work.
Volunteer.
Another great way to sharpen your empathic powers is to volunteer somewhere in your community that serves people whose experiences are far different from your own. If you volunteer at a homeless shelter, for instance, it would be hard not to imagine yourself in the situation of someone there.
Another approach is to combine volunteer work with a vacation. Immersing yourself into someone else’s world an
d working beside that person is a great way to connect with others and gain insight into their lives. Several organizations provide information about these types of experiences: Global Volunteers (www.globalvolunteers.org), Cross Cultural Solutions (www.crossculturalsolutions.org), and Transitions Abroad. Volunteering vacations have long been popular with college students, many of whom participate in programs offered by their campus chapter of Break Away, an alternative spring break organization (www.alternativebreaks.org).
Seeing another human in distress—and thinking, “There but for the grace of God go I”—will hone your powers of empathy. But that’s not the reason to do this, of course. It’s an ancillary benefit of something more valuable: helping another human being.
Eight
PLAY
Why is this man laughing?
The explanation is more complicated than you might expect. This is Madan Kataria, a physician in Mumbai, India. Dr. Kataria likes to laugh. A lot. In fact, he believes that laughter can function like a benevolent virus—that it can infect individuals, communities, even nations. So a few years ago he scaled back his medical practice and refashioned himself as the Typhoid Mary of laughter. His mission: to trigger an international laughter epidemic that he says can improve our health, increase our profits, and maybe even bring world peace. His means of transmission: laughter clubs—small groups of people who come together early each morning at parks, village greens, and shopping centers to spend a half hour laughing.
Kataria’s plan to change the world by making it laugh can seem, well, laughable. But if you visit a laughter club, as I did one damp morning in Mumbai, you can see there’s a method to his mirth. Today about 2,500 laughter clubs convene regularly around the world. Many of them are in India, including nearly one hundred clubs in Mumbai and even more in the high-tech haven of Bangalore. But others have sprung up in the West—in the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Canada, and several hundred clubs in the United States. The fastest-growing venue for these clubs is the workplace.
I’ll come back to this self-anointed guru of giggles later in this chapter. But his popularity around the world, and especially the gradual acceptance of laughter clubs in offices and boardrooms, reveals another important dimension of the Conceptual Age—a move away from sober seriousness as a measure of ability and the elevation of the next essential high-concept, high-touch aptitude: Play. “The whole purpose of the laughter club is to be more playful,” Kataria told me. “When you are playful, you are activating the right side of your brain. The logical brain is a limited brain. The right side is unlimited. You can be anything you want.”
Contrast Kataria’s movement, and the workplace laughter clubs it has spawned, with the Ford Motor Company of the 1930s and 1940s. At Ford’s River Rouge plant, laughter was a disciplinary offense—and humming, whistling, and smiling were evidence of insubordination. As British management scholar David Collinson recounts:
In 1940 John Gallo was sacked because he was “caught in the act of smiling,” after having committed an earlier breach of “laughing with the other fellows,” and “slowing down the line maybe half a minute.” This tight managerial discipline reflected the overall philosophy of Henry Ford, who stated that “When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two.”1
Work and play, Ford feared, was a toxic combination. If they weren’t quarantined, each would poison the other. But in the Conceptual Age, as abundance releases organizations from the post-Depression grimness that gripped the River Rouge plant, commingling work and play has become both more common and more necessary. At times, it is even an explicit corporate strategy. Take the airline business. Southwest Airlines is one of today’s most successful carriers, earning a regular profit while many of its competitors wobble on the edge of insolvency. The company’s mission statement offers clues to its stellar performance. It says, “People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it”—a 180-degree turn from Ford’s mandated joylessness. And it’s not just one zany American corporation that is supplementing the work ethic with a Play ethic.2 According to the Wall Street Journal, more than fifty European companies—including less-than-zany firms such as Nokia, Daimler-Chrysler, and Alcatel—have brought in consultants in “Serious Play,” a technique that uses Lego building blocks to train corporate executives.3 British Airways has even hired its own “corporate jester” to imbue the airline with a greater sense of fun.4
“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and committed as if one is assured of one’s prospects.”
—BRIAN SUTTON-SMITH,
professor of education
(emeritus), University of
Pennsylvania
Like its five sibling senses, Play is emerging from the shadows of frivolousness and assuming a place in the spotlight. Homo ludens (Man the Player) is proving to be as effective as Homo sapiens (Man the Knower) in getting the job done. Play is becoming an important part of work, business, and personal well-being, its importance manifesting itself in three ways: games, humor, and joyfulness. Games, particularly computer and video games, have become a large and influential industry that is teaching whole-minded lessons to its customers and recruiting a new breed of whole-minded worker. Humor is showing itself to be an accurate marker for managerial effectiveness, emotional intelligence, and the thinking style characteristic of the brain’s right hemisphere. And joyfulness, as exemplified by unconditional laughter, is demonstrating its power to make us more productive and fulfilled. In the Conceptual Age, as we’ll see, fun and games are not just fun and games—and laughter is no laughing matter.
Games
Here’s a screen shot from a popular video game called America’s Army:
When you play this game, you navigate a treacherous environment, trying to knock off bad guys while avoiding getting whacked yourself. You earn points for nailing opposing soldiers and for helping your side elude harm, a format and structure similar to most games in this genre. So here’s a question: Which company makes the game? Nintendo? Sega? Electronic Arts? Nope. The organization that created, manufactured, and distributed America’s Army is . . . America’s Army, the United States military.
A few years ago Colonel Casey Wardynski, a West Point professor who specializes in military manpower, was working on ways to boost recruiting for the armed forces, which had fallen to dismal levels. Because the draft had ended in the 1970s and the size of the military had shrunk after the end of the Cold War, potential recruits knew much less than previous generations about what it was like to serve in the armed forces. While chewing on this problem, Wardynski noticed that the cadets he was teaching at West Point were obsessed with video games. And in a flash of right-brain inspiration, he glimpsed a possible solution.
What if, Wardynski wondered, the military tried reaching young people where they live—on Sony PlayStations, Microsoft Xboxes, and personal computers? Since gauzy television ads and person-to-person persuasion couldn’t give recruits a feel for the reality of military service, perhaps the Army could, as Wardynski put it, substitute “virtual experiences for vicarious insights” by creating a video game. He presented his plan to the Pentagon brass, which, concerned about a shortfall in personnel, was willing to try anything. They gave Wardynski a healthy budget, and he began formulating a game that he thought would convey the substance of Army life while also being engaging and challenging to play. Over the next year, he and a team from the Naval Postgraduate School, with the help of several programmers and artists, built America’s Army and released it for free on the GoArmy.com Web site on July 4, 2002. That first weekend, demand was so great that it crashed the Army’s servers. Today the game, which is also distributed on disk at recruiting offices and in gaming magazines, has more than two million registered users. On a typical weekend nearly a half-million people sit in front of computer screens, maneuvering through simulated military m
issions.5
America’s Army says it’s different from many other martial games because of its emphasis on “teamwork, values, and responsibility as a means of achieving the goals.” Players go through basic training, advance to multiplayer games where they work in small units, and, if they’re successful, move on to become Green Berets. Most of the missions are team endeavors—rescuing a prisoner of war, protecting a pipeline, thwarting a weapons sale to terrorists. Players earn points not only for killing enemies but also for protecting other soldiers and for completing a mission with everyone in the unit still alive. If you try something stupid—for instance, gunning down civilians or ignoring orders—you can end up in a virtual Leavenworth prison or find yourself banished from the game altogether. And like any producer with a hit on its hands, the Army has produced a sequel—a new edition of the game called America’s Army: Special Forces.