Rigorous Empathy?
Empathy is a popular concept these days, for many valid reasons. However, it is often conveyed as a sense of acceptance and sometimes even passiveness. What I mean is that empathy often means that you CAN’T understand someone’s perspective because it is different from yours and so therefore accept the difference. This approach, which perhaps reduces frustration and other negative outcomes, can also curtail progress that comes from understanding.
There is a different approach: Rigorous Empathy.
Rigorous Empathy is about engaging with empathy to truly understand someone’s path, experience, context. There are many vital applications for this. Organizationally you may want to truly engage with Rigorous Empathy to understand customers for product development, or to understand employees when trying to lead a transformation. At an individual level, you might apply it towards a breakdown in a work relationship or a collaborative problem solving effort with another team.
This quote from mathematician Steven Strogatz (why do mathematicians have some of the best quotable ideas?) sums it up well:
“The theory of relativity is founded on empathy. Not empathy in the ordinary emotional sense; empathy in a rigorous scientific sense. The crucial idea is to imagine how things would appear to someone who’s moving in a different way than you are.”
The theory of relativity is obviously referring to Albert Einstein’s theory, and many of his thought experiments were rigorous applications of this perspective. As you can see here, depending on the information you already have or don’t, this can be done as a simply-but-challenging thought experiment.
Other applications include interviews and surveys, experiments, and any tools that leverage current state analysis from process mapping to causal loop mapping. Perhaps the pure opposite of rigorous empathy is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias, whether intentional or not, lacks both empathy and rigor and looks to confirm the beliefs you already have. Most confirmation bias is unintended and happens to use whether we’re watching the news or in a meeting. In many ways, Rigorous Empathy is the antidote to confirmation bias. If we practice Rigorous Empathy enough, we build muscle around it for every day applications, which is often where confirmation bias catches us off-guard.
Find processes and problems where Rigorous Empathy is beneficial and practice. Then observe and reflect on how your day-to-day perceptions, actions, and decisions change.