Empathy – Understanding Motivation in Systems
In the Systems Seeing Adventure we used an Empathy Map on Day 9. This is a nice tool to look at a system from other perspectives. In this case from other humans. My current favorite approach to systems thinking is the DSRP-method. The P stands for Perspective. The idea is to use the perspective of any element of the system to improve its model. Empathy can be used for human perspectives.
Donella Meadow’s used actors and their motivation to describe the empathy part. Why is an actor in a system and what is their goal and motivation participating in the system?
Empathy helps to understand other participants in the system. What is their job, what is their goal? This can also go to a more personal level. What is their story? Where do they come from? What experience do they have? How does that influence their behavior as part of the system?
Important note: You don’t have to share the opinion, motivation or goal of the other person. There is emotional and cognitive empathy to distinguish.
Cognitive Empathy: Understanding someone’s thoughts and perspective, like seeing their point of view.
Emotional Empathy: Sharing and feeling another person’s emotions, almost as if they are your own.
For Systems Thinking the Cognitive Empathy aspect is mostly relevant. You can take the point of view of an a$$hole to understand why they act like they do, but you don’t have to share the same feeling. That’s a huge difference.
When you apply this lens it is also important to understand, what part of the system do they see? What part of the system is relevant for them. What other elements might they see that you don’t see? Does this information has an impact on the system? These are a lot of unknowns and speculation might be necessary. Sometimes it’s already helpful to know that there is an unknown component to some element of the system that drives its behavior.
In my example in the exercise the other week, I filled out the empathy map for an administrator at my energy net provider. They need to check a circuit diagram, the completeness of information and certificates of the used electrical elements.
This is all they see for my specific problem. They are not aware of all the other context for me. So I need to treat this person as such. What is their motivation? Their job should be to ensure that home solar power plants installed in people’s houses are not endangering the safety of the energy network. Well, that is their job description. Their motivation to do the job is probably to earn money. Where do they come from? What is their background?
They see dozens of these documents a day. What is the difference in my document? How could this impact my way of communication? In my case, I tried to explain them the specific context and why in this case I can provide the information rather than the electrician as usual.
This way I discovered an impact on somebody else’s system, by understanding how my context might be an issue for them. I could also not care a bit, and just throw around angry emails. Does it help me? No! Does it help the other person? They probably already get angry emails and calls with people not understanding. It will make them less willing to solve my situation. And I can relate to that.
If I look at my professional background, especially in the first 10 years were I worked in this huge project. As a Release Test Manager I worked together with so many different roles and people. What helped me back then was to understand what each roles motivation was. This helped me a lot to understand the whole project. And that way I could better “bend” the system to my needs when necessary.
My advice is to learn more about the other roles in a company that you work with. Understanding what they need to do their job helps you to provide the relevant information. That way they are not blocked, coming back to you, disturbing you in another task, playing ping-pong with tickets. And maybe you find a better way to provide the information they need.
For the emotional empathy aspect: Put your ego aside for a moment and think about the others. Maybe they had a rough day and are in a bad mood. They are only people. Just like you. And they also only want to do their job. You don’t need to become their counselor. Just have some empathy.
