10d • General discussion
Pt 1: 5 Spheres of Empathy: How to Build a Master Plan of Impact That Outlives You Part 1
We often treat empathy in business as a "soft skill", a virtue we aspire to because we want to be seen as "good" leaders. But in leadership, treating empathy as a mere nicety is a strategic error.
True innovation, the kind that lasts for generations, requires more than just a good idea or brute force (outside of pure luck!). It requires empathy. Empathy is a skill that helps you make better decisions. It validates if your "game-changing" idea is actually useful, or just an expensive vanity project.
Whether you’re solving a huge problem for people, or creating something incredible for the sake of it, it’s often something for people. This includes yourself! How could you possibly know if you’re on track without zooming out and considering perspectives of the people you’re trying to serve? Empathy here acts as the root source of data that helps you inspire, guide, and validate people-problems.
Additionally, my experience with leaders at all levels in public office, corporations, NGOs and even royalty have led me to a fundamental conclusion: almost all business problems and all sustainability problems are people problems. Even the most powerful people on the planet are not immune to incompetence, poor communication, poor teamwork and bad intentions.
Collectively, we have the technology, the financing, the authority and almost everything you can imagine to do incredible things today, but what blocks us, is each other. Without empathy, you’ll be stuck with the biggest roadblocks humanity has ever faced, other humans!
On that note, simply "being empathetic" isn't enough. Most of us confuse empathy with kindness, and that confusion creates two specific risks that can destroy both ventures and visions: waste and manipulation. Before we start master planning your legacy, we need to clear this poor definition in two parts:
- Empathy without kindness
- Kindness without empathy
1.Kindness Without Empathy
When empathy and values (like kindness) are decoupled, they become dangerous to leadership and the people you influence.
Consider the disastrous economic and environmental situation for Kenya and Ghana. In the 1980s, Kenya’s textile sector employed over half a million people, then charities began selling unsold stock to textile recyclers and aggregators to generate revenue, flooding the market with cheaper second hand fast fashion products . This sale is a key revenue stream for charities who typically sell only 10% to 30% of the donated clothes in their local stores. Both western consumers and charities think they’re doing a good thing by helping the poor and engaging in the virtuous act of recycling. The reality is that after decades of 'kind' donations flooding the market as Mitumba (used clothes), fewer than 20,000 of those jobs remain.
In Ghana, the Kantamanto market alone receives 15 million garments every week. Research by The Or Foundation reveals that 40% of these donations are unusable waste that ends up in landfill, clogging gutters and washing out into the oceans. According to the Trade Union Congress of Ghana, textile and clothing employment fell by 80% from 1975 to 2000.
What’s worse, is that in 2016, the EAC (Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania) proposed a ban on used clothing imports to protect local industry, their environment and dignity. In response, the US threatened to remove them from the AGAO (African Growth and Opportunity Act) trade agreement. Kenya backed down, whilst Rwanda stood firm and accepted the penalty.
So much for teaching someone to fish. This is a depressing case study of kindness without empathy.
An example where your loving grandmother feeds you more food even after you keep saying you’re full would have been far more humorous and done the job, but … where’s the fun in that?
Moving onto business, we see this played out as:
- Building expensive features nobody asked for because a decision-maker somewhere thought they were cool.
- "Protecting" your team from hard feedback, which ultimately stunts their growth.
- Launching sustainability initiatives that look good on paper but don't actually solve the community's real problem.
This is what we call "Expensive Guessing" at its finest. It is well-intentioned, but often wasteful, even harmful.
2. Empathy Without Kindness
This is much darker, because at least with kindness without empathy, there were good intentions. Empathy without kindness on the other hand, is manipulation.
Some of the world’s highest level executives and professionals in public office use empathy to understand and simulate how entire groups of people feel, think and could likely act in order to influence them for their personal benefit. This means understanding how someone feels to know their insecurities, their fears, and their triggers to exploit them. This is the formula behind predatory sales tactics, addictive algorithms, and toxic leadership.
People often say Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or even Donald Trump don’t have empathy. This is far from the truth, they have exceptional levels of empathy that have helped them walk into a room and close deals, design products that created genuine delight. Yet, they can do this all while holding daily, seemingly insignificant conversations that ruin the mental health of their teams, deliberately.
What they’re likely lacking is compassion and kindness, or perhaps they have a vastly different interpretation of these values to you and I.
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Pt 1: 5 Spheres of Empathy: How to Build a Master Plan of Impact That Outlives You Part 1
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