The power of empathy, or why CEOs should break rocks

The power of empathy has caught us by surprise. In an age of
information overload, we stumbled on it very nearly by mistake.
Originally, my NGO offered a single empathetic “experience”,
simulating poverty, as a one-off. That was a decade ago and we
have been running them ever since, at the insistence of our
stakeholders.
We have become convinced that, to engage with global
challenges, people seem to want more than presentations,
graphs or charts. They want empathy.
The journey began for us when we were preparing for our ten
year anniversary. What would happen, we wondered, if, instead
of an elegant meal in a hotel setting, we invited CEOs to spend
24 hours living on the wrong side of the Millenium Development
Goals?
No phones, no wallets
The CEOs arrived and we stripped them of their cell phones,
wallets and other appendages. We replaced those with a pile of
old wood, corrugated iron and plastic sheeting and invited them
to build a shelter for the night. They struggled somewhat but,
after a couple of hours, a set of tiny homes, much like the slum
communities we routinely serve, was more or less standing.
Afterwards, our corporate guests ate a meal which, according to
African colleagues, typified food in the slum communities of
their region. Then the participants went to bed, sleeping on the
hard ground under their newly made structures.
Next day, they went through a series of simulations. They broke
rocks with their bare hands to build a simple “road”. They
struggled to generate income for their “families”, seeking to pay
for education, food and rent by manual labour, battling loan
sharks to get by. They met corruption in the marketplace, red-
faced, at times, with frustration. “I am used to calling the shots
in my company,” one told us later. “I am not used to being in a
place where I am disempowered.”
Looking through another’s eyes
Afterwards, slumped in the doorways of their “homes”, they
debriefed: an insightful time, given that they were among the
shapers of Hong Kong’s sophisticated economy. They now
found themselves looking at that same financial landscape
through another’s eyes, the more so as they looked for solutions
that they could help execute, given their influence.
When the day was done, we packed up, with no intention of
repeating the programme. Participants, however, took us aside.
“Don’t stop doing this,” they said, with surprising earnestness.
“Never, in our Corporate Social Responsibility programmes, have
we experienced anything so powerful.” We couldn’t, at first,
understand their insistence. In the weeks following, though, our
phones rang off the hook and our email boxes overflowed with
requests for a variety of simulations. Today, ten years later, over
130,000 participants have taken part. It took us a while but, in
time, the reality dawned. We were looking at the power of
empathy.
Why does empathy work?
What is it about empathy that works? And why is the simulation
process different in impact, than, say, a documentary, a talk or a
discussion group in producing empathy?
The old adage probably says it best: “I can’t understand a man
until I walk a mile in his shoes.” Experts say that sympathy, while
of value, can keep people at arm’s length. Empathy, on the other
hand, allows them to see another’s world view and, more
importantly, to feel something of it.
As one CEO told us: “This takes it from hearing to being.”
Another added: “Reading 1000 books would not have taught me
what I learned in the past hour.” And another told us: “I spent
three months working alongside people in a slum community,
but I never saw life from their end, only my end. That changed
today.”
So empathy is powerful. Yet, we’ve found, there is a lot to learn
regarding empathy and simulation.
The limits of simulation
One of our greatest challenges is how we represent, in
microcosm, the issues facing our world, in macrocosm. We can’t
possibly offer a mile in another’s shoes. We can offer just a very
few steps.
With many participants asking for a one or two-hour programme,
how can we show the complexity of global need and the depth of
struggle for which we long to generate empathy?
The other difficulty we face is the fact that, while people ask us
to simulate a wide variety of needs, we ourselves have not lived
with all of these issues, first-hand. How, then, can we portray
them accurately? Like any other form of communication –
movies, documentaries, living museums, speeches or written
papers – we are painfully aware that simulation tools may fail to
give a realistic representation of people in need.
In dealing with both these challenges, two imperatives have
become critical to us. Firstly, we rely heavily on the guidance of
people who have themselves lived with the issue we are
addressing. Secondly, we work with NGOs and others who serve
people facing the topic at hand.
From empathy to action
Does empathy ultimately lead to action? For us, that question
has been a critical piece in this journey.
We faced CEOs, following the Refugee Run at the World
Economic Forum in Davos last year, who unashamedly wiped a
quiet tear and asked, “What now? How can I, and my company,
make a difference?” We were not really ready for that question.
We’d had no wish to make an ask of people following a
simulation. It was privilege enough, from our perspective, that
they were willing to have a taste of the pain and despair that
millions live with daily.
Yet their response, and that of thousands of others, has shown
us that empathy can be depressing if participants have no
platform for action, should they wish it. Without that, they are left
simply with the pain. We have discovered that empathy, in our
context, must be linked to opportunity.
Not all participants want to get involved, and that is fine. Over
time, though, we have seen some choose a deep level of
engagement in the years following their simulation. For some,
this has prompted change in their corporate responsibility policy
or practice. For some, it has fostered a different modus operandi
for those whose presence, in developing nations, could better
benefit local communities. For those at the Forum, in 2014, it
allowed participants to stand behind thousands of Syrian refugee
children given schooling. Beyond the corporate world, we have
also seen simulations birth NGOs, projects and deepened
engagement in the community, at both adult and student level.
We have a distance to go in our empathy journey. Since we
began, we have had to develop more programmes on HIV/AIDS,
war, the environment, water shortages, hunger, blindness/
poverty, hunger, the balance of trade and, currently, disasters.
More issues are being requested.
What keeps us going? We have a simple goal. We want to see a
dysfunctional world understood, cared for and, where possible,
changed, one participant at a time. That can’t, we believe,
happen without empathy.