The Empathy Map
In last week’s post, I wrote about my podcast conversation with Dr. Janet Moore. She mentioned that one of the tools she often uses in the Semester in Dialogue is the empathy map.
For those who are wondering what they are, empathy maps are one way to think about another person’s experience or perspectives in a particular circumstance. The map is really a structure for how to think about and break down an experience.
We start with a customer (or stakeholders, group, organization, really whoever we want to understand) and a context we want to understand. Often the context is a situation, such as trying to navigate a store or make a decision. The empathy map tool puts the customer at the centre of the diagram with six surrounding sections that include:
Think and feel. What matters to the customer and what do they think and feel regarding their experience?
Hear. What is the customer hearing from relatives, friends, and others that influences their thinking?
See. What does the customer see in their environment that influences them (competitors, friends, celebrity)?
Say and do. How does the customer behave and what do they do publicly?
Pain. What is frustrating the customer or creating obstacles?
Gain. What does the customer want from the experience? How can they be successful?
The process itself was designed by Dave Gray at XPLANE to understand a customer’s experience so that it could be improved. Of course, it’s been adapted and modified over the years by many users, and even updated by its original creator.
But the general intent of the empathy map is to understand what a customer sees, does, and hears during their experience, with the idea to get a sense of the underlying behaviours, pain points, and rewards that are part of the experience. It’s not about guessing, but seeking information from interviews, observations, or other sources so that your map is a real representation of a customer experience so that it becomes a resource from which their experience can be improved.
Empathy maps are among a suite of tools used to understand a customer’s experience and they can be equally as helpful in understanding the kinds of perspectives you might be interacting with in a collaborative project, or in community dialogue, as Dr. Moore described in our podcast discussion. And I suggest that they are also a tool for self-discovery and self-understanding.
Here’s a couple of my thoughts on how we might use empathy maps.
Remember the Context
Empathy maps are intended to help us understand an experience and they are context (or situation) specific. For example, my experience at one coffeeshop is not the same as may experience at every coffeeshop. Or my perspective on one issue is not going to be the same on another issue. So we need first to understand the context in which we are building our empathy map, and then keep that context in mind when making use of what the map might tell us.
As a general rule, the more detailed the context, the more specific the map’s information can be. Imagine you’re mapping out your experience in a grocery store versus your experience in the produce department of that grocery store. Or a person’s experience with a government department versus their experience with a service that department provides. We need to pick the scale at which we want to make our assessment, which is matched to the scale where we want to make changes.
Empathy Map Yourself
Ok, maybe it’s not an ‘empathy’ map if you chart out your own understanding of an issue, but it does give you a structure to use in your own reflection on a situation; a set of questions to ask yourself. It gives us a way to understand a bit more about our own experience or perspectives and may even allow us to better express ourselves as collaborators.
We might want to draw on what others see us doing or hear us saying to round out our own personal maps. I like doing this, because sometimes, somebody else’s words are better able to describe what we might be thinking or feeling or at least inspire words of your own.
Turn it into a conversation
Empathy maps are great tools. They give structure, organization, and can give us insights into why people or groups behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. They can be an exercise for an individual or a team. And they can also be a conversation.
Instead of thinking of it as a piece of paper with words written down, perhaps approach empathy mapping like a roadmap to a conversation in which you are working to uncover the answers to the various parts of the map. The key here, I think, is to make it a conversation and not a rapid-fire game of twenty questions. How can we smoothy and in a conversational way learn about the other person experience as well as share our own experience (see now the selfie empathy map comes in handy).
There is no doubt about the utility of empathy maps. They’re being used, modified, adjusted, and reimagined to fit any number of situations, all with the intent of better understanding those with which we collaborate. And that’s always a good thing.
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I would love to hear about how you have used empathy maps or modified them for your specific needs. Leave a comment or send me a note.
Here’s a link to an empathy map worksheet available through XPLANE.
Please check out my conversation with Dr. Moore on Dialogue and Collaboration, where she mentions the empathy map and so much more. .
Happy collaborating.
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. As the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
