Empathy, AI and Leadership, with Minter Dial

When it comes to new technology and emerging digital opportunities, branding strategist Minter Dial gives companies a strong sense of where to go and what to avoid. Dial is an internationally known speaker and consultant on new technologies and digital branding, the coauthor of the award-winning book Futureproof: How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption , and a veteran executive with over 2 decades of hands-on experience in leadership and operations.

SPEAKING.COM: Your new book’s title is telling: Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence. What are some common misconceptions about empathy?

DIAL: The first misconception is that empathy is about doing something to someone else or about being nice. Empathy is essentially about understanding the other person, not about how you act with him/her. Being nice (e.g. sympathetic) or compassionate are often follow-up actions and, as such, are separate from empathy.

A second misconception is that empathy has no place in work. People assume empathy is all about emotions when in actuality, there are two types of empathy: affective and cognitive. The former means that an individual is able to feel the same emotions as the observed person. A person showing cognitive empathy is able to understand that the other person is experiencing an emotion and is able to associate that emotion to a context. As such, it’s as if you truly understand what the other person is going through. It is my strong conviction that cognitive empathy has an important and rewarding role to play in business.

SPEAKING.COM: Why are some people naturally more empathetic than others?

DIAL: The notion of nature versus nurture for empathy is quite contentious. It’s true that some people are just more able to listen in and relate to others. A ‘naturally’ empathic individual often has the qualities of deep listening, patience and humility. A number of studies have been undertaken that show how certain types of people tend to be more empathic. Insofar as the evidence is not definitive, there does tend to be a leaning toward saying that the feminine mind is more empathic. That’s not to say that it breaks down exclusively along gender, but whether it’s genetics, brain wiring or hormones, there are scientific grounds to suggest that women will tend to be more empathic.

For example, an article published on 23andMe.com, the genetic ancestry and health service, states, “The genetic variant associated with empathy in women is near the gene LRRN1 on chromosome 3, which is highly active in a part of the human brain called the striatum.” The article continues to say that this association was not found in men. Similarly, a study that was written up in Psychoneurodicinology in 2016 described how testosterone, the male hormone, can get in the way of the part of the brain that is used in emotion and the promotion of empathy. In an online survey I commissioned in March 2019 with 288 respondents, women self-declared themselves more empathic than the men who answered the survey by a factor of +10%.

At the of the far end of the scale are empaths, those who are deeply empathic, sometimes to the point of it becoming a pathology. Empaths are typically hyper sensitive to others’ emotions and are able to feel these emotions as if they were their own.

SPEAKING.COM: Why do you believe that “leaders who embrace empathy will drive higher returns”?

DIAL: In a study published in the HBR in 2016, Belinda Parmar described how companies that were deemed more empathic outperformed those that were least empathic. Parmar wrote, “The top 10 companies in the Global Empathy Index 2015 increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10 and generated 50% more earnings (defined by market capitalization).”

The reason why empathy is good for business is that it will help internally with employee motivation and engagement. It will also be useful in customer-facing activities such as product design, user experience design and customer service. Since empathy helps you get into the shoes of the other, it becomes an immensely important skill to employ when seeking to be more customer-centric.

SPEAKING.COM: You write that empathy can’t be taught but it can be learned. If I’m a leader, then, who wants to increase empathy in my organization, what are some ways that I can go about doing that?

DIAL: To be sure, when you want to increase empathy in your organization, you have to start somewhere, so it’s useful to create trainings. However, when I say that empathy can’t be taught, it’s to point out that empathy can’t be dictated or delegated. Just as you will struggle to teach people to listen, to concentrate on others or to stop being egotistical, empathy must be learned. It’s not something that can be mandated. Empathy is a muscle that needs to be flexed regularly in order to stay tuned.

In order to create a more empathic culture, it requires the top of the hierarchy to set the example and demonstrate empathy in the smaller moments as well as in the major programmes. It’s vital to create an environment where people feel encouraged to listen deeply and learn to explore other people’s experiences – especially those who come from different backgrounds.

There are many ways to help explore and foster empathy. For example, you might create role play games where, for five full minutes, individuals are asked to reformulate what others are saying without judgment or interjection. You could also encourage everyone to read classic literature.

SPEAKING.COM: What are the downsides of empathy? How can people figure out where to set limits?

DIAL: A major downside to empathy – depending on how it’s practiced — can be the weight of feeling and understanding someone’s else dire emotions. In certain roles, such as doctors, nurses, manning suicide hotlines or teaching in distressed zones, feeling into the others’ emotions can be burdensome to handle over time. In situations like this, it’s recommended that you know how to practice self-empathy and are aware of when you are being pulled too deeply into the other person’s emotions and experience. Empathy may be required, but as the practitioner, you need to take care of yourself, too.

Secondly, it’s important to recognize that being empathic can take time and effort. If there’s a critical business deadline, for instance, one should be pragmatic and get the stuff done on time. It’s neither useful nor realistic to wish to be empathic all the time with everyone. Not all situations require being empathic. There are inevitably specific times and people where empathy is more suitably exercised. But, if empathy is used disingenuously, it may be considered as manipulative.

Bottom line, I believe it’s about checking in on one’s honest intentions. If the intentions are bona fide, then empathy should be well accepted and provide better outputs.

SPEAKING.COM: How do you ensure as a leader that you’re using empathy to benefit others rather than manipulate them? Where is the line?

DIAL: Empathy can certainly be employed for more sinister ends. The most important consideration is to establish an ethical framework. You need to draw the line as to what you believe is good or bad behavior. To the extent that ethics is a personal call, each leader needs to be sufficiently self-aware about their intentions and why they use empathy.

SPEAKING.COM: Where are we right now when it comes to AI’s capacity to empathize? (i.e.: How close are we to creating the AI operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 film Her?)

DIAL: We’re very far away from creating a robot with the appearance of genuine sentiment and general intelligence. The current state of play is essentially limited to demonstrating empathy in very limited instances in specific cases and contexts. In programming, we call this containment. The best and most promising use cases are in enhancing human interactions: for example, in helping an agent to better understand a certain customer’s request and/or emotional state.

As empathy is about listening and understanding the other, there will surely be more and more examples of bots achieving cursory amounts of empathy. But not only are the learning data sets still inadequate, the combination of skills required by a machine to learn to understand many diverse profiles is still only a dream.

SPEAKING.COM: Why would we want to encode empathy into AI?

DIAL: To be empathic requires time, patience, data and being non-judgmental. A machine is perfectly equipped for this, given the enormous processing power, ever-cheaper and available memory, and enormous data sets. Furthermore, it is unencumbered by ego and a busy brain. AI will play an increasingly important role in customer-facing interactions as well as decisions relating to customer satisfaction. In a world where customization is not only possible, but increasingly demanded by customers, the opportunity for an AI to better understand the customer’s emotions and context in order to provide a better solution/service will undoubtedly become a game changer in many sectors and industries.

SPEAKING.COM: What are some ways that creating empathetic AI might backfire?

DIAL: There are several ways that empathic AI could backfire. First, if the AI were to become more empathic than your true internal culture, customers will quickly become aware of the discrepancy. It’s not healthy to want to seem empathic with your customers without treating your employees the same way.

Secondly, if the remit of the AI is not properly contained, the chances of the conversation going wrong will cause misunderstandings and aggravation.

Thirdly, in cases where handing over agency (to the customer) may be part of creating an empathic bot, if that agency is not checked, unbounded agency quickly can go wrong.
Finally, as empathic as one intends the AI to be, if the ethical framework is not well grounded in human empathy, issues of bias could easily creep in.

SPEAKING.COM: What compelled you to write a book about empathy, and moreover, empathy in AI?

DIAL: I’ve long thought about the power of empathy in work. I would write and talk about it as being one of the three most untapped levers of productivity in business. I tried to practice empathy when I was working in leadership positions in big business and saw its benefit in sales, design, marketing and management.

Meanwhile, as companies struggle with digital transformation, increasingly companies are cottoning on to the need for greater customer centricity. It seems desperately obvious (cf ‘the client is king’), but pressures and distractions have made many companies lose the plot.

If there is one skill to employ in any Know Your Customer project, it is empathy. But, I’m even more convinced about the power of empathy in improving employee engagement. An engaged employee is good for business on so many levels, especially since more employees are handling more diverse customer contact points. Thus, I felt the need to explore how to encourage empathy in business in general.

As for encoding empathy into AI, it is clear that AI will play an ever-greater role in business. With AI being deployed in customer-facing activities, notably customer service, it seems evident that savvy leaders will want to imbue AI with empathy. In writing this book, I also wanted to highlight the ethical challenges and issues that need to accompany such considerations and initiatives.

To bring branding and tech speaker, Minter Dial to your organization, please contact Michael Frick at: Mike@Speaking.com