polarisventuresnz

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Excerpts:

First of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’ behavioural data – viewed as a free resource, there for the taking. Then the use of patented methods to extract or infer data even when users had explicitly denied permission, followed by the use of technologies that were opaque by design and fostered user ignorance.

And, of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was conducted in what was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free – territory. Thus Google decided that it would digitise and store every book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would photograph every street and house on the planet without asking anyone’s permission

This has profound consequences for democracy because symmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power.

But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.

And it won’t be easy to fix because it requires us to tackle the essence of the problem – the logic of accumulation implicit in surveillance capitalism. That means that self-regulation is a nonstarter. “Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”

Historians call it the “conquest pattern”, which unfolds in three phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate the declaration.

The first surveillance capitalists also conquered by declaration. They simply declared our private experience to be theirs for the taking, for translation into data for their private ownership and their proprietary knowledge. They relied on misdirection and rhetorical camouflage, with secret declarations that we could neither understand nor contest.

Surveillance capitalism originated in a second declaration that claimed our private experience for its revenues that flow from telling and selling our fortunes to other businesses.

As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities.

In my early fieldwork in the computerising offices and factories of the late 1970s and 80s, I discovered the duality of information technology: its capacity to automate but also to “informate”, which I use to mean to translate things, processes, behaviours, and so forth into information. This duality set information technology apart from earlier generations of technology: information technology produces new knowledge territories by virtue of its informating capability, always turning the world into information. The result is that these new knowledge territories become the subject of political conflict. The first conflict is over the distribution of knowledge: “Who knows?” The second is about authority: “Who decides who knows?” The third is about power: “Who decides who decides who knows?”

Surveillance capitalists were the first movers in this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what I call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the industrial age.

Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low cost out in the real world. For today’s owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal control over these processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead we are exiles from our own behaviour, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge, authority and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely “human natural resources”. We are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.

While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology.  

It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”

Democracy has slept, while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power

This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.

These dangerous asymmetries are institutionalised in their monopolies of data science, their dominance of machine intelligence, which is surveillance capitalism’s “means of production”, their ecosystems of suppliers and customers, their lucrative prediction markets, their ability to shape the behaviour of individuals and populations, their ownership and control of our channels for social participation, and their vast capital reserves. We enter the 21st century marked by this stark inequality in the division of learning: they know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them. These new forms of social inequality are inherently antidemocratic.

At the same time, surveillance capitalism diverges from the history of market capitalism in key ways, and this has inhibited democracy’s normal response mechanisms. One of these is that surveillance capitalism abandons the organic reciprocities with people that in the past have helped to embed capitalism in society and tether it, however imperfectly, to society’s interests. First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers. Instead, supply and demand orients the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating the behaviour of populations, groups and individuals. Second, by historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ relatively few people compared with their unprecedented computational resources. General Motors employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalisation. Finally, surveillance capitalism depends upon undermining individual self-determination, autonomy and decision rights for the sake of an unobstructed flow of behavioural data to feed markets that are about us but not for us.

This antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Paradoxically, this coup is celebrated as “personalisation”, although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.

We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain operations for surveillance capitalism’s surplus flows.

The result is that the choice mechanisms we have traditionally associated with the private realm are eroded or vitiated. There can be no exit from processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same processes upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our participation is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the foreclosure of alternatives, and enforced ignorance.

While there is no simple five-year action plan, much as we yearn for that, there are some things we know. Despite existing economic, legal and collective-action models such as antitrust, privacy laws and trade unions, surveillance capitalism has had a relatively unimpeded two decades to root and flourish. We need new paradigms born of a close understanding of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and foundational mechanisms.”

For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it – not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these operations.

So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented, the first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all among the young.

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Check them out -- and, more important, consider how your employees would rate you:

My manager gives me actionable feedback that helps me improve my performance.

My manager does not "micromanage" (get involved in details that should be handled at other levels).

My manager shows consideration for me as a person.

The actions of my manager show that he/she values the perspective I bring to the team, even if it is different from his/her own.

My manager keeps the team focused on our priority results/deliverables.

My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leaders.

My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about career development in the past six months.

My manager communicates clear goals for our team.

My manager has the technical expertise (e.g., coding in Tech, selling in Global Business, accounting in Finance) required to effectively manage me.

I would recommend my manager to other Googlers.

I am satisfied with my manager's overall performance as a manager.

And then a couple of fill-in-the-blank questions:

12. What would you recommend your manager keep doing?

13. What would you have your manager change?

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All other unsorted notes on Brené Brown’s, Daring to Lead

Sample script when needing a break: “The way you’re acting is keeping me from hearing what you’re saying. I get that you’re pissed, that’s okay, but we’re going to have to find a different way to do this because I’m just defending myself.”

When you can walk out of a difficult feedback session and say “I stayed connected, I stayed courageous, I stayed authentic, I stayed curious,” then that itself is daring, and that in itself is a win.

Exercise on assuming positive intent and dealing with behaviour: Write down the name of someone who fills you with frustration, disappointment, and/or resentment, and adopt the idea that that person is doing the best they can. Asking leaders to answer this question is almost always difficult because they quickly move to believing that if people are doing the best they can, they don’t know how to lead them. Their strategies of pushing and grinding on the same issues must give way to the difficult tasks of teaching their team, reassessing their skill gaps, reassigning them, or letting them go.

As crazy as it sounds, many of us will choose to stay in the resentment, disappointment, and frustration that come with believing people aren’t trying rather than face a difficult conversation about real deficits.

On non-judgment: Typically, we pick someone doing worse than we’re doing in an area where we’re the most susceptible to shame. This is also why parenting is a judgment minefield. In our parenting, we’re all screwing up, all the time—it’s such a relief to catch someone in worse struggle, even if it’s just for five minutes.  

On asking for help: We asked a thousand leaders to list marble-earning behaviors—what do your team members do that earns your trust? The most common answer: asking for help. When it comes to people who do not habitually ask for help, the leaders we polled explained that they would not delegate important work to them because the leaders did not trust that they would raise their hands and ask for help. Mind. Blown. Asking for help is a power move. It’s a sign of strength to ask and a sign of strength to fight off judgment when other people raise their hands. It reflects a self-awareness that is an essential element in braving trust.

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Learning to Rise: The Story Rumble Process

1. Let’s set the intention for the rumble and make sure we are clear about why we’re rumbling. 2. What does everyone need to engage in this process with an open heart and mind?  Container-building is important, even if there’s established trust in the group. 3. What will get in the way of you showing up? 4. Here’s how we commit to showing up: from #2 and #3. 5. Let’s each share one permission slip. More container- and trust-building. 6. What emotions are people experiencing? Let’s put it out there, and let’s name emotions. 7. What do we need to get curious about? Building more trust and grounded confidence by staying curious. 8. What are your SFDs? The Turn & Learn is very helpful here. These are vulnerable rumbles, and having someone with more influence go first, versus having everyone write their thoughts down and put them up on the wall at the same time, can change the outcome for the worse. 9. What do our SFDs tell us about our relationships? About our communication? About leadership? About the culture? About what’s working and what’s not working? Stay curious, learn to resist needing to know. 10. Where do we need to rumble? What lines of inquiry do we need to open to better understand what’s really happening and to reality-check our conspiracy theories and confabulations? 11. What’s the delta between those first SFDs and the new information we’re gathering in the rumble? 12. What are the key learnings? 13. How do we act on the key learnings? 14. How do we integrate these key learnings into the culture and leverage them as we work on new strategies? What is one thing each of us will take responsibility for embedding? 15. When is the circle-back? Let’s regroup so we can check back in and hold ourselves and one another accountable for learning and embedding.

--Brené Brown, Daring to Lead

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When we own a story and the emotion that fuels it, we get to simultaneously acknowledge that something was hard while taking control of how that hard thing is going to end. We change the narrative. When we deny a story and when we pretend we don’t make up stories, the story owns us. It drives our behavior, and it drives our cognition, and then it drives even more emotions until it completely owns us.

Brené Brown, Daring to Lead

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[On Millenials] They are all very different people, but as a group I experience them as curious, hopeful, always learning, painfully attuned to the suffering in the world, and anxious to do something about it. Because perspective is a function of experience, as a group they can struggle with patience and understanding how long it takes to cultivate meaningful change. It’s our job to help give them the experiences that broaden their perspectives.  ...almost every millennial who works with us has told me some version of “I never learned how to have these kinds of conversations. I never learned about emotions or how to talk so openly about failure, and I’ve never seen it modeled. When you’re used to using technology for everything, these hard face-to-face conversations are awkward and so intense.” The only exceptions are employees who have had experience in therapy, which is one reason we have a special reimbursement program for mental health visits on top of our regular health insurance.

Brene Brown, Daring to Lead

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Our research shows that leaders who are trained in rising skills as part of a courage building program are more likely to engage in courageous behaviors because they know how to get back up. Not having those skills in place is a deterrent to braver leadership, and teaching people how to get up once they’re already on the ground is much more difficult.

Brene Brown, Daring to Lead

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It’s much easier to deal with conflicts when you are able to engage your team in a values conversation. People, and I include Bill and myself, can get attached to specific tactics. But when you’re forced to tie those tactics to core values and then explain them to others, you are better able to question your own assumptions and help others question theirs. At the foundation, our guiding principle is equity. So when we disagree about, say, whether we should spend more on delivering imperfect tools to save lives now or discovering better tools to save more lives later, we can always go back to how each of those tactics aligns with the core value of equity. The thing is, there’s not a correct answer to any of these debates. Each side has merit. But making my case through the lens of equity gives me a sense of solidity about what I feel and why I feel it. Sometimes we go in a different direction from what I initially suggested, but it’s usually okay because I understand how other people see their preferences advancing equity. A values focus just leads to a much more productive conversation— and a feeling of satisfaction, of being heard, no matter what decisions those conversations lead to.

Melinda Gates on Daring Leadership

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Sample behaviours supporting values to live into

“Be brave”

I set clear boundaries with others.

I lean into difficult conversations, meetings, and decisions.

I talk to people, not about them.

“Serve the work” is about stewardship. 

I take responsibility for our community’s and consumers’ experience.

I am responsible for the energy I bring to situations, so I work to stay positive.

I take ownership of adapting to the fast pace of this environment.

“Take good care” has to do with how we take care of ourselves and each other:

I treat my colleagues with respect and compassion by responding when appropriate in a timely and professional manner.

I practice gratitude with my team and colleagues.

I am mindful of other people’s time.

Operationalized values --

set clear expectations

the process gives us shared language and a well-defined culture. It helps us determine cultural fit during hiring, and offers us very straightforward standards of behavior when there are non-performance-related issues

drive productive decision making. When values aren’t clear, we can easily become paralyzed—or, just as dangerous, we become too impulsive.

drive the sweet spot of decision making: thoughtful and decisive

forces us to get clear on the skills or combination of skills that undergird values

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Living into our values exercise

Have every person write their two values on a large poster. 

Over the course of the two days, have everyone else write down on each poster one reason they appreciated that person and how they live into their values.

from Brene Brown, Daring to Lead

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Guideline for readiness for giving feedback

[From Brene Brown, Daring to Lead] Are you in the right headspace to sit down and give someone feedback? 1. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I’m ready to sit next to you rather than across from you. Often, sitting across from someone is not just about logistics. It reflects that we think about relationships as inherently adversarial. Maybe it’s okay to occasionally sit across from someone, but if there’s something huge between you, then a massive desk is only going to create more distance. It is also a representation of a power differential. 2. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I’m willing to put the problem in front of us rather than between us (or sliding it toward you). A big lumbering issue between two people is very different than sitting next to someone and putting the issue in front of both of you, so that you can look at the problem from the same perspective. Often, this requires a shift in language from “You are wrong here” to “There’s something that needs to change.” It is a completely different physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual experience when someone is on your side and helping you through the hurdle rather than pointing out your participation in the problem. 3. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I’m ready to listen, ask questions, and accept that I may not fully understand the issue. Often, in the midst of a feedback session, we forget that we’re supposed to be facilitating and fact finding from a place of curiosity, not lecturing. When we lecture, we’re typically focused on getting it over with, on shoveling one lesson into one session. We want to get this difficult feedback or hard conversation over with, and we certainly don’t want to string it along over multiple sessions. Instead, we must lean into our grounded confidence: “Here’s what I’m seeing; here’s what I’m making up about what I see. I have a lot of questions. Can you help me understand?” Then dig in, take notes, and ask questions, followed by: “I need some time to think about this. Can we circle back tomorrow? I’ll come to you if more questions come up, and if you have questions, please come to me.” 4. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I’m ready to acknowledge what you do well instead of just picking apart your mistakes. Now, this can be tricky. Sometimes there’s a crisis, and sometimes there is a work product or a deliverable that has a tight timeline and is not coming along according to expectations. In those moments, it doesn’t always feel authentic to sit down and say “Hey, thanks for your time. Here are three things you do well” when you’re dying to cut to the chase with “This is not right, and it’s due at five o’clock.” But the latter doesn’t serve. I think back to Ken Blanchard’s wisdom and how catching people doing things right is so much more powerful than just angrily listing the mistakes. It takes two minutes to say “I know this is due at five o’clock, and the executive summary looks pitch perfect. The tables need some serious work, though. What does support look like?” 5. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I recognize your strengths and how you can use them to address your challenges. I believe a strengths-based feedback style is the best approach, in which you explain some of the strengths or things that they do really well that have not been applied to the current situation. “One of your great strengths is attention to detail. You do sweat the small stuff and it makes a big difference in our team. As I look at this, I don’t see you applying that skill here, and we need it.” If you are in such a state of anger that you cannot come up with a single positive quality that this person possesses, then you are not in the right headspace to give good feedback until you can be less emotionally reactive. 6. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I can hold you accountable without shaming or blaming. Unfortunately, many of us were raised in families where feedback came in only one of two packages—shame or blame. Giving productive and respectful feedback is a skill set that most of us have never learned. It can be helpful to think through a conversation and make note of where it might get shaming. When you acknowledge your potential to go to that place, you’re in a safer mindset to avoid it. 7. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I’m open to owning my part. If you’re not ready to own anything, if you’re convinced that you did nothing to contribute to the issue, you’re not ready to meet. As I mentioned in “The Call to Courage,” I’ve never seen a situation that required feedback where the person delivering the feedback didn’t own some part. 8. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I can genuinely thank someone for their efforts rather than just criticizing them for their failings. Look for opportunities to call out the good: “I want to share some feedback with you about that phone call. I think you did a really good job putting a time fence around this project with our clients. I know that was very difficult, and I think you kicked ass on that.” 9. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I can talk about how resolving these challenges will lead to growth and opportunity. Be prepared to discuss what needs to change within the context of productive feedback and career tracking. “What I’m asking you to change ties directly to what we’ve talked about as one of your personal growth areas or one of your personal challenges.” It’s essential to tie what you’re observing to what’s important for the people you’re talking to. 10. I know I’m ready to give feedback when I can model the vulnerability and openness that I expect to see from you. If you’re expecting someone to operate from a place of receptivity, then you had better show up open, curious, vulnerable, and full of questions. You have to model the behavior.  You can’t hold yourself to a different set of expectations and standards. If you come in defensive, guarded, and ready to kick some ass with hard feedback, that feedback will bounce right off someone sitting across from you who is also defensive, guarded, and ready to kick some ass.

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To opt out of conversations about privilege and oppression because they make you uncomfortable is the epitome of privilege.

Brene Brown, Daring to Lead

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In our experience, only about 10 percent of organizations have operationalized their values into teachable and observable behaviors that are used to train their employees and hold them accountable

Brene Brown, Daring to Lead

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Rumble starters and questions

 1. The story I make up…(This is by far one of the most powerful rumble tools in the free world. It’s changed every facet of my life. We’ll walk through it in the part “Learning to Rise.”) 2. I’m curious about… 3. Tell me more. 4. That’s not my experience (instead of “You’re wrong about her, him, them, it, this…”). 5. I’m wondering… 6. Help me understand… 7. Walk me through… 8. We’re both dug in. Tell me about your passion around this. 9. Tell me why this doesn’t fit/work for you. 10. I’m working from these assumptions—what about you? 11. What problem are we trying to solve? Sometimes we’ll be an hour into a difficult rumble when someone will bravely say, “Wait. I’m confused. What problem are we trying to solve?” Ninety percent of the time we’ll realize that we’re not on the same page because we skipped the problem identification process and set a meeting intention of finding a solution to a problem that we had yet to define. Brene Brown, Daring to Lead

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Easy learning doesn’t build strong skills

[Excerpt from Daring to Lead by Brene Brown] In an article in Fast Company magazine, Mary Slaughter and David Rock with the NeuroLeadership Institute write:

Unfortunately, the trend in many organizations is to design learning to be as easy as possible. Aiming to respect their employees’ busy lives, companies build training programs that can be done at any time, with no prerequisites, and often on a mobile device. The result is fun and easy training programs that employees rave about (making them easier for developers to sell) but don’t actually instill lasting learning.

Worse still, programs like these may lead employers to optimize for misleading metrics, like maximizing for “likes” or “shares” or high “net promoter scores,” which are easy to earn when programs are fun and fluent but not when they’re demanding. Instead of designing for recall or behaviour change, we risk designing for popularity.

The reality is that to be effective, learning needs to be effortful. That’s not to say that anything that makes learning easier is counterproductive— or that all unpleasant learning is effective. The key here is desirable difficulty. The same way you feel a muscle “burn” when it’s being strengthened, the brain needs to feel some discomfort when it’s learning.Your mind might hurt for a while—but that’s a good thing.

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Empathic Failures or Misses

Empathy Miss #1: Sympathy vs. Empathy Want to know what would have made me feel alone and worse at the airport? Sympathy. If Suzanne had said, “I’m so sorry. You poor thing.” Or “I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you.” She didn’t feel bad for me. She felt pain with me. Empathy is feeling with people. Sympathy is feeling for them. Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection. I always think of empathy as this sacred space where someone’s in a deep well, and they shout out from the bottom, “It’s dark and scary down here. I’m overwhelmed.” We peer over the edge and say “I see you,” then we climb down with the confidence that we can get back out. “I know what it’s like down here. And you’re not alone.” Of course, you don’t climb down without your own way out. Jumping into the hole with no way out is enmeshment—jumping into struggle with someone while maintaining clear lines about what belongs to whom is empathy. Sympathy, on the other hand, is looking over the edge of that hole and saying: “Oh, it’s bad, that looks terrible. So sorry.” And you keep walking. There’s a fun animated short on the difference between empathy and sympathy that the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce developed from a short snippet of a lecture I gave in London on empathy. It’s illustrated and animated by the talented Katy Davis. You can watch it at brenebrown.com/ videos/. The two most powerful words when someone’s in struggle are “Me too.” So powerful, in fact, that Tarana Burke started one of the most important movements of our time, the Me Too movement, with these two words, backing them up with action. The movement addresses the widespread prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, especially in the workplace, and is a great example of how empathy builds courage and can facilitate deep change. “Me too” says I may not have had the exact same experience as you, but I know this struggle, and you are not alone. Sympathy says Wow, that’s bad, I feel so sorry for you. I don’t know or understand what your experience is like, but I’ll grant you that it looks pretty bad and I don’t want to know. Again, the difference between empathy and sympathy: feeling with and feeling for. The empathic response: I get it, I feel with you, and I’ve been there. The sympathetic response: I feel sorry for you. If you want to see a shame cyclone turn extra deadly, throw one of these at it: “Oh, you poor thing.” It’s the equivalent of the Southern saying “Aww, bless your poor heart.” When someone feels sorry for us, it magnifies our feelings of being alone. When someone feels with us, it magnifies our feeling of connection and normalcy. Empathy Miss #2: The Gasp and Awe In this scenario, your colleague hears your story and feels shame on your behalf—they might gasp, and then they will likely confirm how horrified you should be. They’re appalled. They’re upset. There’s awkward silence, and then you have to make your colleague feel better. Here’s an example: “I finally turned in that report yesterday and I was so excited. I felt so good about it and then my principal called me and told me the last two pages of it were missing. I forgot to attach them.” You’re hoping your co-worker is going to say, “Oh, man, I’ve done that. It just sucks.” But instead, this person gasps and says, “Oh, God, I’d just die.” And then you’re rushing in to say, “No, it’s okay.” Suddenly, you need to make that person feel better. Empathy Miss #3: The Mighty Fall In this scenario, your friend needs to think of you as a pillar of worthiness and authenticity. This person can’t help you because they’re so let down by your imperfections. They’re disappointed. This is the person you confide in and say, “My performance evaluation did not go how I thought it was going to go and it kind of…I don’t know if I’m in a shame storm, or…I’m just almost numb right now. I cannot believe that my rating was so low this quarter.” This person’s response is: “I just never expected that from you. When I think of you I don’t think of you as the kind of person that gets that rating, I mean what happened?” Then all of a sudden, you’re not experiencing connection in an empathic way. You’re defending yourself to someone because they’re disappointed. (Hint: This happens frequently in childhood and is a huge driver of perfectionism.) Empathy Miss #4: The Block and Tackle Let’s bring that performance review to this scenario, where your friend is so uncomfortable with vulnerability that he or she scolds you: “How did you let this happen? What were you thinking?” Or the friend looks for someone else to blame. “Who is that guy? We’ll kick his ass. Or report him!” That’s a huge empathic miss. I came to you because I’m in struggle about something, and you’re making it easy on yourself by refusing to sit in discomfort—you’re choosing instead to be pissed off at someone else or stand in judgment of me. It’s not helpful. Empathy Miss #5: The Boots and Shovel This is a co-worker who desperately needs to make it better so that they can get out of their own discomfort. This person refuses to acknowledge that you can actually make mistakes or bad choices. This is the person who says, “You know, it’s not that bad. It cannot be that bad. You know you’re awesome. You’re amazing.” He’s hustling to make you feel better, not hearing anything you feel, and not connecting to any emotion that you’re describing. It is pretty disconcerting and reeks of bullshit.  Empathy Miss #6: If You Think That’s Bad… This person confuses connection with the opportunity to one-up. “That’s nothing. Let me tell you about my performance evaluation in 1994, fourth quarter.” Here’s what gets dicey with comparing or competing. The most important words you can say to someone or you can hear from someone when you’re in struggle are “Me too. You’re not alone.” That is different from “Oh, yeah? Me too. Listen to this.” The primary distinction is that the latter response shifts the focus to the other person.

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Theresa Wiseman, a nursing scholar in the UK, studied empathy across every profession that requires deep connection and relationship, and she identified four attributes of empathy. These attributes fully aligned with what emerged from my data, but they did not address the idea of “paying attention” to the degree that it emerged in my work. To solve for that, I added a fifth attribute from Kristin Neff’s research. Dr. Neff is a self-compassion researcher at the University of Texas at Austin—we’ll look at more of her work in a bit. While each of these components is rich for study—you’ll find hundreds of books in any research library on every one of the five—we’re going to explore how these elements come together to create empathy, the rocket fuel for building trust and increasing connection.

Empathy Skill #1: To see the world as others see it, or perspective taking We see the world through a set of unique lenses that bring together who we are, where we come from, and our vast experiences. Our lenses certainly include factors like age, race, ethnicity, ability, and spiritual beliefs, but we also have other lenses that shape how we see the world, including our knowledge, insights, and experience. Our take on the world is completely unique because our point of view is a product of our history and experiences. This is why ten people can witness the same incident and have ten different perspectives on what happened, how it happened, and why it happened.

Are there any observable, knowable, universal truths? Of course. Math and science have given us many examples. But when it comes to the swirl of human emotion, behavior, language, and cognition—there are many valid perspectives. One of the signature mistakes with empathy is that we believe we can take our lenses off and look through the lenses of someone else. We can’t. Our lenses are soldered to who we are. What we can do, however, is honor people’s perspectives as truth even when they’re different from ours. That’s a challenge if you were raised in majority culture— white, straight, male, middle-class, Christian—and you were likely taught that your perspective is the correct perspective and everyone else needs to adjust their lens. Or, more accurately, you weren’t taught anything about perspective taking, and the default—My truth is the truth—is reinforced by every system and situation you encounter. Children are very receptive to learning perspective-taking skills because they’re naturally curious about the world and how others operate in it. Those of us who were taught perspective-taking skills as children owe our parents a huge debt of gratitude. Those of us who were not introduced to that skill set when we were younger will have to work harder and fight armoring up in order to acquire it as adults. Perspective taking requires becoming the learner, not the knower. Let’s say that I’m talking to a colleague on my team who is twenty-five, African American, gay, and grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Chicago. In our conversation we realize that we have completely different opinions about a new program we want to develop. As we’re debating the issues, he says, “My experiences lead me to believe this approach will fall flat with the people we want to reach.” I can’t put down my straight, white, middle-aged, female lens and just snap on his lens to see what he sees, but I can ask, “Tell me more—what are you thinking?” and respect his truth as a full truth, not just an off version of my truth. This is exactly why every study we see confirms the positive correlation between inclusivity, innovation, and performance. Again, it’s only when diverse perspectives are included, respected, and valued that we can start to get a full picture of the world, who we serve, what they need, and how to successfully meet people where they are. I love what Beyoncé said in her first-person essay in the September 2018 issue of Vogue: If people in powerful positions continue to hire and cast only people who look like them, sound like them, come from the same neighborhoods they grew up in, they will never have a greater understanding of experiences different from their own. They will hire the same models, curate the same art, cast the same actors over and over again, and we will all lose. The beauty of social media is it’s completely democratic. Everyone has a say. Everyone’s voice counts, and everyone has a chance to paint the world from their own perspective. She was photographed for the magazine cover by Tyler Mitchell, making him the first African American photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue in its 126-year history. As we push on these issues and discover our own blind spots (we all have them), we need to stay very aware of the armor assembly process here: We cannot practice empathy if we need to be knowers; if we can’t be learners, we cannot be empathic. And, to be clear (and kind), if we need to be knowers, empathy isn’t the only loss. Because curiosity is the key to rumbling with vulnerability, knowers struggle with all four of the building blocks of courage. Empathy Skill #2: To be nonjudgmental It is not easy to do this when you enjoy judging as much as most of us do. Based on research, there are two ways to predict when we are going to judge: We judge in areas where we’re most susceptible to shame, and we judge people who are doing worse than we are in those areas. So if you find yourself feeling incredibly judgmental about appearance, and you can’t figure out why, that’s a clue that it’s a hard issue for you. It’s important to examine where we feel judgment because it can quickly become a vicious shame cycle. The judgment of others leaves us feeling shame, so we offload the hurt by judging others. I see this happen often in organizations. Shit rolls downhill and ends up in the consumer’s lap. I’ve yet to come across a company that has both a shaming, judgmental culture and wonderful customer service. Staying out of judgment means being aware of where we are the most vulnerable to our own shame, our own struggle. The good news is that we don’t judge in areas where we feel a strong sense of self-worth and grounded confidence, so the more of that we build, the more we let go of judgment.

Empathy Skill #3: To understand another person’s feelings Empathy Skill #4: To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings I’m combining these two attributes because, when we break them down to skills, they’re inextricably connected. Understanding emotions in others and communicating our understanding of these emotions require us to be in touch with our own feelings. Ideally, it also means that we are fluent in the language of feelings, or, at the very least, conversational and somewhat comfortable in the world of emotions. The vast majority of people I’ve interviewed are not comfortable in the world of emotions and nowhere close to fluent in the language of feelings. Emotional literacy, in my opinion, is as critical as having language. When we can’t name and articulate what’s happening to us emotionally, we cannot move through it. Imagine going to the doctor with an excruciating pain in your right shoulder, a pain so great that every time you feel it you’re left breathless and doubled over. But when you arrive at the doctor’s office, you have duct tape over your mouth and your hands are tied behind your back. The doctor is anxious to help you, but when she asks you what happened, you can only manage “Mmph. Mmph” through your tape. You’re desperate to explain, but you’re unable to speak, so you can’t name it, you can’t articulate it, you can’t describe it. The doctor asks you to point to it, but your hands are tied, and all you can do is jump up and down with your eyes darting to the right. You mumble and jump until both you and the doctor are exhausted and give up. This is exactly what happens when we aren’t fluent in feelings. It’s almost impossible to process emotion when we can’t identify, name, and talk about our experiences. And if that’s not enough of a reason to dig in and start learning, emotional literacy is also a prerequisite for empathy, shame resilience, and the ability to reset and rise after a fall. For example, how do we get back on our feet after a fall if we can’t recognize the subtle but important differences between disappointment and anger, between shame and guilt, between fear and grief? And if we can’t recognize these emotions in ourselves, it’s almost impossible to do so with others.  We’re finishing a study right now on emotional literacy, and I’ll give you the movie trailer. Cue the music and pretend this is the dramatic announcer voice: In a world of emotional literacy, we would be able to recognize and name between thirty and forty emotions in ourselves and others. I’m hedging on the number because we’re in the final stages of confirming the exact emotions, but it’s safe to say that fluency in emotional conversation means being able to name at least thirty of them. The last attribute, communicating our understanding of the emotions, can feel like the biggest risk because we can get it wrong. And not if but when we are off base, we need the courage to circle back. In fact, as long as we show up with our whole hearts, pay attention, and stay curious, we can course-correct. This is why therapists are frequently stereotyped as saying “What I hear you saying is…” It’s a check-in that allows someone to say, “Nope. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not sad. I’m pissed off.” For example, in non-therapisty language, you could say: “I’m sorry about the project assignment. That sucks and must be so frustrating. Want to talk about it?” This question tells your colleague that you’re willing to “go there” and rumble openly about what they’re feeling. Because you were willing to put emotion on the table, it gives them the opportunity to come back and say, “I don’t know about frustrated. I think I’m actually really embarrassed and disappointed. I mean, everyone talked about me being the perfect person for it. I never imagined not getting it. Now I have to explain why I didn’t get it and I don’t even understand.” This exchange alone builds the connection and alignment that we need to have a meaningful, trust-building, and even healing conversation.

Empathy Skill #5: Mindfulness I borrowed the fifth element, mindfulness, from Kristin Neff. Neff describes mindfulness as “taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated….We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time….Mindfulness requires that we not be ‘over-identified’ with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negative reactivity.” The word mindfulness can get on my nerves sometimes, so I opt for paying attention. Neff’s findings on mindfulness, especially the piece on not overidentifying with or exaggerating our feelings, are completely aligned with what we found in our work. Ruminating and getting stuck is as unhelpful as not noticing at all. In short, I try to practice mindfulness by paying attention to what’s happening in these conversations, to the feelings they’re bringing up in me, to my body language, and to the body language of the person I’m talking to. Minimizing and exaggerating emotions lead to empathic misses in equal measure.