Empathy Challenge

As we’ve observed in previous Fjord Trends reports, people are increasingly concerned about the purpose and ethics of the organizations they work for and whose products or services they use. More recently, the word “privilege” is everywhere, with renewed energy in the Black Lives Matter movement and countless impassioned discussions about racial injustice. Meanwhile, longstanding inequalities between rich and poor, old and young, men and women, and different ethnic groups came under sharp focus as Covid-19’s impact was felt unevenly around the world.

We flagged companies’ growing interest in meeting the needs of all stakeholders in last year’s Fjord Trends. As it becomes the norm, issues around stakeholder management—like guarding against disenfranchisement in staff, customers or shareholders—are moving centerstage, which made managing narratives well more important than ever.

Companies have to figure out how they want to handle polarizing narratives and which side of the story, if any, they choose to support. With inequality now top of mind, what companies do about it and how they talk about it matters a great deal. But mastering the art of shaping a narrative has never been harder.

Empathy is fundamental to good design. It’s an intimate understanding of the person you are designing for and shapes how you design an interaction or interface. But developing empathy for everyone is harder when companies take a stand on social issues.

Conflicting opinions on how best to address today’s concerns can create stress, division and disenfranchisement. It can lead to organizations and individuals telling themselves misleading narratives, leaving them vulnerable to criticism.

To address this challenge, an organization can go down two routes: firstly, it can narrow its focus from thinking about all society to smaller sub-groups, which starts with prioritizing subjects that are closest in line with its purpose, then building behaviors around it. Alternatively, it can try to manage the polarities. For instance, eBay chose to help small businesses that couldn’t survive months of lockdown by launching an accelerator program and offering a free ecommerce platform.

Over the years, Design Thinking has made empathy seem like something easily ticked off a list, by equating it with listening. Yet empathy is not just listening and nor is it a one-off exercise. Empathy is a way of behaving. This means that designers must not only craft the reality but work with communication experts to consider how to manage the narrative and what tools they can use to enrich it.