Emulating Empathy | Hacker News Reader

Emulating Empathy

steveblank.com

50 pointsnathanh21 comments

Reminds me of one my favorite passages from The Periodic Table:

"I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of Customer Service: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

It troubles me slightly that he suggests "emulating" empathy. That sounds mildly like using people. I think it'd be better to "develop" empathy. The same techniques are applicable, except that the end result is to care about people, not appear to care.

"Customer metrics are not the same as customer interaction."

This is a good insight. Sometimes startups assume customer development means gathering a lot of metrics. There is something about a face-to-face interaction which trumps metrics.

Empathy is an important trait no doubt.

If you find yourself, however, to be one of those people who seem to lack this trait, I urge you to look at the positive.

Someone who is in inclined to empathize, I find, is always more prone to try to guess what another person is thinking. "Oh will he/she like this?" "So and so said this, I bet they were thinking that". Over empathizing some times leads to this behavior and clouds your judgment. While you should take other people's feelings into account, you should try to act on what you know as fact and not on what you think a person is feeling or thinking.

The two dimensions are orthogonal - one is emphathy/sociopathy axis and the other one is epistemological hygiene/lack thereof axis.

One could be a sociopath and not aware of it, or one could be empathic and yet aware of limitations of their knowledge. The latter would recognize situations where more emotional participation could be required and probe to find out if that's indeed that case before pouring out emotions. The former would think little before "stepping on someone toes" and be completely unaware of his lack of tact despite the facial expression of the victim.

I feel cheated - iwas expecting more detailed advice than "keep trying it will come to you"

"Make eye contact", "shake hands" and so forth are that advice. However, since this is what you read, the piece you should pay attention to is "get a mentor." Until you do that, it appears you won't recognize the other bits of advice, which is one major reason to do so.

And that stuff actually works. I started out in life as someone on the borders of what would now be called an "autism spectrum disorder" -- I didn't "get" people, had trouble recognising them and distinguishing faces, and certainly couldn't make anything like a strong connection. When I was young, learning everything there was to learn about stuff was a decent substitute for life. Luckily (and here I use a meaning of that word that may be unfamiliar to most) I went through a grossly self-destructive phase involving poorly-planned and unreproducible chemistry experiments (even if you make the world suit your needs, you can make it go away for a while). The upshot of that phase was that I had to learn to be human as an adult after a period of being something completely other (the details of that period are beyond the scope of this discussion).

It took longer than I wanted, but I was able to learn to read faces, to associate body language and vocal modulations with various degrees and states of distress and "happiness" in others, making finer distinctions as time progressed, and after years of practice I found that I was no longer approaching the exercise from the viewpoint of clinical (but interested) anthropology -- the process had been internalised to the point where it was indistinguishable from empathy. What's more, I seemed to actually care, and my own emotional spectrum seemed to have more colours than "this sux" and "this rulez". It may be nothing more than an elaborate simulation running just below the horizon of observability, but it'll do nicely.

These days I'm not so good at technical matters -- a couple of strokes and the effects of Lewy Body Dementia have effectively removed me from that realm, though I still come to places like this to slow the rot -- but I've become the go-to guy for emotional support for a surprisingly large number of people who are emulating liking me in a very convincing fashion. And I'm emulating being happy with that, and can't tell it from the real thing.

The best model that I have discovered for "emulating empathy" in a work setting is "Appreciative Inquiry." See http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/ for an overview; the "Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry" offers an excellent introduction. http://www.amazon.com/Thin-Book-Appreciative-Inquiry-2nd/dp/...

I have blogged about early conversations with customers at http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2009/12/15/early-customer-conve... and suggest some other techniques as well.

I think one of the main advantages of building a start up that solves a problem you already have is that the empathy is automatic and built-in. There's no reason to emulate.

Alas, for Sales there still is. Not everybody has your specific flavor of that problem, or your way of looking at it.

Many of Steve Blank's posts are extremely illuminating. Others are very...here's-a-teaser-now-buy-my-book. I see this one as the latter.

Actually that article made me to subscribe to Steve Blank's feed. I didn't even notice reference to his book.

Hmmm... seems to me that his blog posts are more a response to the realization that many people won't/can't read his book.

But as it is, this blog post would of been very very helpful to me a few years ago. Now it's a pleasant reminder of how far I've come.

You could also title the article the "Art of Listening".

That's hilarious.

Dear Steve Blank! The problem you've been stuck at for whatever years is solved easily: everyone should do what he is good at, tech geeks develop, sociable people sell.

Or let's then take G. W. Bush and try to turn him into a Nobel wining physicist. How do you emulate that?

Steve has earlier advocated, at length and with good arguments, that a founder should be in touch with customers for a startup to survive. You can certainly dispute that premise but in that case we expect more from you than a snarky dismissal.

Read again the article. He never was a founder. In all the firms he worked at he was a hired employee. No startup whatsoever.

I suggest you look for what's right and can be used to improve your lot, rather than looking for what's wrong and can be used to dismiss an article or a person with righteous indignation. The latter never serves any useful purpose.

The examples he cites are from times when he was an employee. He has founded/co-founded two firms: Epiphany and Rocket Science Games. I would be surprised if he didn't apply what he had learned as an employee to those startups.

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