Using empathy maps to build human-centric organisations

I recently had the pleasure of co-hosting Incite’s first virtual event on human-centricity. We identified three qualities that define human-centric organisations – the most important in our opinion is empathy (if you want to know the other two – you’ll need to keep reading!).

Empathy can be defined as “the ability to step into the shoes of another person, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives, and to use that understanding to guide our actions”. 

The two parts are important. Seeing the world from other people’s point of view alone is not enough; if our actions aren’t guided by deeper understanding then you’re just paying lip-service to empathy and in turn, human-centricity.

At Incite, one of the main tools we use for building empathy is the Empathy Map.

A major benefit of this type of tool is that it starts with a concrete description of what it’s like to be in your consumer’s shoes: What do they hear/see? What do they say/do? What do they think/feel? All laddering up to an understanding of what it means to them and why it matters. 

Following this step-by-step process lets us build up a holistic view of someone else and helps us avoid short-cutting to assumptions and defaulting to seeing things from our own perspective.

In addition to using them ourselves, we use these with our clients in two ways: 

  • As an active listening tool to help stakeholders engage more deeply with research findings. Empathy requires active engagement – it’s not something that can be outsourced or transmitted by PowerPoint slides. Encouraging stakeholders to use tools like this helps deliver that engagement
  • As a stakeholder management tool to better empathise with their needs. This helps us design better workshops, better outputs and better engagement throughout projects by grounding us in what the end-users of the work need

If you think a tool like this would be helpful for you and your stakeholders, please take it and use it! For more tools on building human-centricity into your organisation, check out our vision and mission framework here, and our planning template here. And if you’d like to understand more about how we use it, please get in touch.