When did soft skills like empathy become deprioritized in the tech industry? My guest today shares a little history lesson on how that happened and why initially those soft, human skills were always a vital part of successful innovation and technology before they got separated. Only now are they finding their way back to each other in software development and programming to solve the 21st century’s most complex challenges.
Today, I talk with Andrea Goulet. We talk about how soft skills like empathy lost favor in technology curricula, and how she built her business centered around empathy before it successfully merged with another company. She talks about the research she uncovered on programming models that parallel human communication. And we discussed why the current AI landscape is moving so fast but that her models can be used to ensure we intentionally apply empathy to deal with long-term consequences while still gaining short-term benefits.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Investing in empathetic communication will positively impact any team you’re on. Having a good understanding of empathy drives any industry.
- 80 to 90% of our miscommunications happen at the concept level because you can say something and someone can understand the word but might think of it as a different thing.
- The four dimensions of human communication and our ability to pivot and understand one another are: catch, collect, connect, and communicate.
“Whether we’re talking about software, building pyramids, or finding new ways to hunt and take down the mammoth, empathy is the mechanism that enables us to communicate, collaborate, and solve complex problems together.” — Andrea Goulet
Episode References:
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About Andrea Goulet: Co-Founder, CorgiBytes, Founder, Empathy in Tech
Andrea Goulet is on a mission to integrate empathy into the software industry. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker, experienced software executive, and award-winning industry leader. Her expertise centers on using empathy and effective communication to modernize legacy and mission-critical software systems.
Through her online courses, Andrea has taught over 50,000 students how to level up their empathy and communication skills to create better software. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Empathy-Driven Software Development, and the founder of Empathy in Tech, an online community where code and compassion connect.
Connect with Andrea:
Website: andreagoulet.com
Empathy in Tech: empathyintech.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andreamgoulet
Her coming book: Empathy-Driven Software Development
Connect with Maria:
Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com
Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
X: @redslice
Facebook: Red Slice
Threads: @redslicemaria
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. When did soft skills like empathy become deprioritized in the tech industry? My guest today shares a little history lesson on how that happened and why initially, those soft human skills were always a vital part of successful innovation and technology, before they got separated, only now are they finding their way back to each other in software development and programming to solve the 21st century’s most complex challenges. My guest today, Andrea Goulet, is on a mission to integrate empathy into the software industry. She’s a sought after international keynote speaker, experienced software executive and award winning industry leader. Her expertise centers on using empathy and effective communication to modernize legacy and mission critical software systems. Through her online courses, Andrea has taught over 50,000 students how to level up their empathy and communication skills to create better software. She’s the author of the forthcoming book empathy driven software development, and the founder of empathy in tech, an online community where code and compassion Connect. Andrea dived into the research and created an empathy driven development model that can be applied not only to software, but to embed empathy into any decision making scenario, she has mapped out a process to recenter empathy into the most unlikely decisions, but where it’s vital to be present. Today we talk about how soft skills, like empathy lost favor in technology curricula, and how she built her business centered around empathy before it successfully merged with another company. She talks about the research she uncovered on programming models that parallels human communication, and we discussed why the current AI landscape is moving so fast, but that her models can be used to ensure we intentionally apply empathy to deal with long term consequences while still gaining short term benefits. This was such a rich conversation. Take a listen. Welcome Andrea Goulet, to the empathy edge. I have been looking so forward to this conversation with you about empathy and software development.
Andrea Goulet 02:53
Yeah, thank you. I have too.
Maria Ross 02:55
So let’s start real quickly. We heard your bio, but tell us a little bit about how you got into this work, and what are you so passionate about, which sort of your mission and what you’re trying to do?
Andrea Goulet 03:06
Yeah. So the way I got into software was actually via Strategic Communications, which is like, How so, yeah. So I went to school, I went to business school, got a degree in Marketing. My first sales job, I realized that knocking door to door, and kind of doing old school cold calling was not going to cut it, so I systemized a lot of my communications, and I be what I called, like 80% templates. So it was 80% automated, but then 20% highly, highly personalized, and I had a lot of like, searches and custom variables and like all this stuff. And with my sales job when I was 25 started a consultancy specialized in small businesses and started a blog right so fast forward to my high school reunion. A few years later, a good friend of mine, Scott Ford, came up to me and said, I’m starting a software business. And every time I look about marketing. Your Blog comes up, and I know you, and now I know your work. And let me tell you, you might not think that you’re a programmer, but you think like a programmer, and I want you to be the CEO of my software company. What? Yeah,
04:18
that’s amazing. So I was like,
Andrea Goulet 04:20
You’re crazy. But from some due diligence, it was like, Oh, okay. And so we built a business, Corgi bytes. We actually just exited, which is exciting. But for 15 years, we specialized in modernizing software. And my one must have, like, my non negotiable was that if I was going to lead this company, empathy had to be at the center of everything. It had to be at the center of operations. It had to be at the center of communications, of our culture, of everything. Because through my work in strategic communications, I knew that you can’t affect change. You can’t communicate effectively unless you understand empathy. So. And through of my strategic communications and marketing work, I had gotten a lot of practice and education on that, and just got agreed. And then three years after I started the business with him, we also got married. Yeah, so I’m just waiting for the movie to come out, but what ended up happening, too was the, you know, I’m your kind of traditional sales person. I think big picture, right? Sky is typical software engineer, very detail oriented, and we had to work through all of the stereotypical like communication hardships that other people did. And because we invested so much in empathy, it really impacted our communications we built, you know, our team got to about 20, we ended up, like, really making traction, like delivery wise, being able to fix bugs faster, being able to increase performance, like, stuff that you wouldn’t think is empathy related, right? But I saw firsthand, just over and over and over again, just how much having a good understanding of empathy really drives any industry, any complex problem that humans want to solve, empathy is what we evolved to help us do that. So whether or not we’re talking about software, whether or not we’re talking about building pyramids or finding new ways to hunt and take down the mana like empathy is the mechanism that enables us to communicate, collaborate and solve complex problems together. Yeah, so, and if we want to get good at solving problems, we need to get good at understanding and applying empathy 100% and I think that’s why we’re seeing so much research showing that the number one skill for success in the 21st century is empathy, because our problems are so complex we can’t solve them alone, and we have to be able to work in teams. And we have to be able to work in teams effectively. Like a lot of people, work in teams, but it’s not always a great outcome, right? And we have a lot of work in teams with people who don’t think like us, yeah, exactly. If we’re only in a monoculture, then what we have is groupthink. We don’t have innovation. Innovation can only come and Scott Page has a great book, the diversity bonus, where he goes into some of the competitions of this. But we have to have cognitive diversity. We have to have people who think differently, who have different experiences, because it’s that clashing of ideas in a productive way, where we’re both respecting each other’s points of view. That Scott page book, he calls it, it’s the one plus one equals three, because we get that innovation byproduct that if we’re only talking to people who are like us in our affinity groups, that’s great for restoring our sense of belonging and helping us feel safe. Doesn’t drive problem solving, because we’re not getting those new ideas in there. So no, because it serves its purpose, but we need to know, like, strategically, kind of when to deploy which strategy,
Maria Ross 07:54
right? And I think, you know, I’m going to put a link in the show notes, because a few years ago, I interviewed the founder of the empathy toy, and it’s a collaborative I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it’s collaborative toy, and she brings it into groups where each section of the group sees a different aspect of the completed toy, and they can only put it together with the pieces they have in front of them if they’re able to have empathy and understand each other’s point of view and perspective. Because I might see the back of it, but you’re seeing the front of it, and I can’t see what you see. And I think that’s just such a real example of what diversity and thought can do for us, that diversity of perspective means we’re going to see more opportunities, and we’re also going to uncover more hidden risks that way. Yeah,
Andrea Goulet 08:38
I think it’s a really good example, two of how empathy is not a psychic ability where you just walk into a room and are like, Oh, I immediately know what everybody’s thinking, because I can read their facial expressions. That is a trope that, you know, some outdated research, you know, kind of postulated, you know, while ago, but then science fiction actually, like, really perpetuated that stereotypes, if you think of a psychic like Deanna Troy or, you know, versus data on Star Trek Next Generation, Jameel Zacky actually has, he coined the term the Roddenberry effect, because we tend to identify with one of those stereotypes. And I think, to me, one of the biggest insights, you know, coming from somebody who identified as an empath when I started doing the research for the book that I’m writing, which is empathy driven software development. I had to eat a huge piece of humble pie because I realized that I was making assumptions without validating them. I was inferring how people were feeling and feeling like I didn’t need to, you know, confirm my instinct, because I had this idea of like, Oh, I’m an empath. I know what people are feeling, but what that empathy toy, what you just described, empathy requires dialog. It requires us to learn from each other and say, Hey, here’s my assumption, here’s my hypothesis about how you’re feeling is, is that how you’re feeling right? Right, and then you select data, and you learn exactly right. So, you know, kind of getting past the kind of stereotypical cultural understanding of what we’ve all, you know, thought empathy to be, and moving into this new paradigm. You know, that’s why I love chatting with you and all the other empathy folks that we connect with is and why this podcast is great, because it’s really helping us understand what this skill is, what these tools are, right, what the biology like, what are our bodies designed to do? And how can we pay attention to that and operate effectively,
Maria Ross 10:37
exactly? And so before we get because what I love the most about your work is the way that you’ve created, like a process for embedding empathy into a decision making process or the software development process. We were just talking that it’s not just the software development process, it’s any process where you need to make a decision. But before we dig into that, I want to talk about why you know from your research, what did you find about why and how soft skills, like empathy, became de prioritized in the tech industry? Because I think we need to look at that. Yeah,
Andrea Goulet 11:13
so the term soft skills actually, there was a conference in the 1970s with the US military, and there was a organizational psychologist who really, like, embraced this term, and it was supposed to be around people and paper so they had done some really great training programs in World War Two. And you know, for a lot of processes, you’re able to, kind of like, say, here is what you do, but for people in paper problems, it’s less cut and dry, right? And so originally it was a term to kind of help identify some of these areas where training could happen. But what was interesting is they had this soft skills conference, and unanimously, everybody said it was a bad idea. They were like, this is confusing. It unnecessarily separates things. But people went ahead and adopted it anyway. And I think a big piece of this, especially in the technology space, was it has to do with the idea of soft skills in or soft science and hard science. So, you know, there’s a physicist, Richard Feynman, and there’s this idea of like science that can be deduced into a like yes or no, true or false. Is hard science, anything that deals with complexity, where you’re looking more at patterns, such as social science, economics, psychology, he had a quote that that’s not science, it’s pseudoscience. So it shouldn’t even qualify as a science. So in the 60s, 70s and 80s, there was this idea of, like, hard science versus soft science, and then that becomes technical or non technical. And, you know, we start to see that. But as far as the tech industry, specifically, in the 1970s the tech industry was starting to scale really rapidly, and so there was a big push in the industry to standardize curriculum for universities. We got to train people really fast, right? And in an effort to be taken seriously and to legitimize this emerging field, it was rebranded as computer science, and it was considered a hard science. And so anything that had to do with empathy or people, it’s like, no, it’s all logic, it’s all math, it’s all analytics. And it wasn’t until about 2008 that the bodies that you know, make recommendations about where they were, like, oh, actually, you know, we need to, we need to bring this back. So, yeah, no, there’s a lot. And I think that, to me, was the biggest thing, was, a lot of the reason that software developers don’t have these skills is just they didn’t get it. Yeah,
Maria Ross 13:45
exactly. You know what? It’s funny, because this is your background too. It sounds like it was all caused by a marketing problem. Yeah, I just didn’t brand it correctly, and people fought against it, and so they
Andrea Goulet 13:56
based on the goal that they had. But so often, like, we don’t observe the long term impacts until years later, and then we’re like, oh, actually, okay, so now, how do we backtrack? And I think that is for me, where I get really excited and where I feel like my mission is because I have this, like, really specific, bizarre set of skills and understanding and coding alongside people for so long. You know, when I would speak at conferences, I’ve been speaking at conferences about taking empathy as a technical skill for over a decade now. And everybody was like, I want more concrete. I want, like, more specifics, more details. So I kept getting pushed by my audience, and yeah, now it’s like, oh, okay, this we can process size. This so similar to what I did in my sales world, where it’s like, no, we can, like, use kind of a process that we can then repeat, and as long as we have these foundational, fundamental kind of ideas, you know, it’s going to change based on the context, but it gives us something to anchor to, because otherwise, you know, there’s a great quote by. Arthur C Clarke, which is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think we see this with AI right now. It’s like, oh my gosh. How does that even happen? Yeah, but I think that this is applied to skills too. Any sufficiently advanced skill is indistinguishable from magic. I look at Simone Biles like at the and I was just like, oh my gosh, yeah, I look at a software developer before I knew how to code, and I’m like, how do you make these things? I have no idea. So software developers because, you know, soft skills, empathy skills, anything related to people or paper, was intentionally excluded from their curriculum and training. When we talk about interacting a lot of times, it looks like magic, but it’s not because they can’t, it’s not because they don’t have the capability or the capacity. It’s the, you know, we need to be able to train, and we need to be able to associate to the work they’re already doing. But I think that’s where, like, Yeah, I like to play, and I love that. I need to see the lights just go off and feel, see people feel empowered for something that they felt so yeah, it has been so hard. Yeah,
Maria Ross 16:07
I love that, and I love that brief history lesson for us, because I think that’s so important to put all this in context and understand that there was a time when people didn’t think that way, and then they started to parse things out based on how advanced the technology got to your point when it started to seem like magic. It was like, oh, okay, where’s the and to even put a line, like, why did we even need to put a line in there between, you know, analytical and it’s, I feel like so much of this is human induced, and we’ve made our lives harder because we always
Andrea Goulet 16:39
do make decisions, and we don’t always know what the outcome of those decisions are, right? We have to make them. That’s how we navigate the world. I think another thing is that I tell people that you know the word technical actually comes from the Greek word technique, which means skill or craft. Technology is something different, right? It’s comes from the same root. You can be technical about any domain, artists, basketball players, parenting, gardening, software development, empathy. So technologists do not have a monopoly on technical capabilities. And so separating out technical ability, which is understanding something really deeply, knowing its mechanisms, knowing how it works, and then being able to use that to consistently get the results that you want. And it takes lots of practice, right? That is what technical is. Sometimes technical is related to technology, but not always. I love that.
Maria Ross 17:40
That’s a really, really great point. So I want to dig into your model, because and it’s it’s very complex, and I know you’re continuing to hone it. And I’m just going to encourage folks to go to your website, Andrea Goulet, G, o, u, l, e, t.com, and sign up for your email list, because I know you’re going to have more things coming out as the book gets further along, and I know at some point you’re hoping to have some infographics and things like that, and so I really want to encourage people to go there and sign up for your email list to stay in touch with the progress that you’re making on this. But can you give us a top line of this? You know, what started out kind of as a software development model, but you realize later was really a decision making model for anyone that needs to make decisions and how you do a model for empathy Driven Development, or empathy driven decision making. Can you give us the top line of the model?
Andrea Goulet 18:34
Yeah, so it’s four words. They all start with a C patch, which is recognizing an opportunity in psychology, it’s also called a reappraisal, collect, regulating yourself, grounding yourself in compassion, thinking about what is it you want to say, knowing what you value, right, knowing your own place. So catch, collect, connect. This is the part of empathy that we typically think of right, which is trying to make an inference about how somebody else like, what their internal state is, whether or not that’s what they’re thinking, they’re feeling, what their internal beliefs are. And then the last piece is communicate, which is, now we’re creating a system because me inferring something from you, like, what’s the purpose of that? It’s so that we can collaborate, and we can’t collaborate and we can’t collaborate without communication. So it comes back to me being able to adapt my message so that I’m most likely to create communication message that will land right. And what’s really exciting for me is this model was really inspired by the work of Claude Shannon, who I wish I could go into like, you cannot overstate the impact that Claude Shannon has had on our world. Like, he founded information theory, and he created a general model of a communication system in the 1940s and basically it’s like, how does a bit of information get? Machine a to machine B, and he developed this model where you have a source of the information. That source encodes a message. It then goes to a transmitter, and it goes across a channel. That channel is then impacted by noise in some way, like it’s distorted, and then it goes to receiver. That receiver then decodes the message, and it arrives at its destination. And what surprised me was that when I learned how to code, I saw this model. I was like, Wait a second, I know this. It’s the communication literally. It is literally the same model that I learned in my strategic communications class.
Maria Ross 20:39
Exactly. I was going to say. It sounds just like it. I can see the little, the little pictures of the talking heads talking to each other, yeah, yeah. So
Andrea Goulet 20:46
once you’ve, like, caught an opportunity, right? It’s like, oh, this is a good place where I can apply empathy, right? You just think about that model. So the first place is collect. That’s where you’re thinking about yourself. You are the source. That is your brain, right? That is your ideas. Then you think about the destination, right? You think about the other person, that’s the Connect, right? And then you think about, okay, what’s the way that I can get this across the channels in a way that is going to be the highest fidelity possible and is going to be interpreted the way that I intended right now. One of the things that is slightly different is that when we’re dealing with computers, and Claude chain was very clear about this in his paper, was that meaning is something different. He was only focused on, like the physical signals, right the electrodes, the airwaves, that kind of thing we have to add a little bit more when we talk about human communication. And this is why this is sometimes referred to as the Shannon Weaver model, because there was a government administrator Warren Weaver who really was like, Oh my gosh, we can use this for human communication too. And in addition to thinking about how a bit of information gets from machine a to machine B, we can think about how a message gets from brain a to brain B. So you know, the adaptation to that general communication system is that when we’re thinking about humans, we have to think about four channels here, or four elements of the main channel. So first is the physical signals. If I talk to somebody and they’ve got noise canceling headphones on, that’s they’re not gonna be able to hear me, right? The physical signals not there. Next is language, and this is our ability to, like parse the phonetic sounds that are coming out of people’s mouths. So I write. I spoke in Amsterdam recently, and everybody there speaks Dutch. So when I got on the train, somebody would come up and speak in Dutch, and I just looked at them blankly, and they were like, Oh, she clearly doesn’t speak Dutch, and so they would repeat it in English. And they said, Do you have your train pass? I was like, oh, oh, yeah, here you go, right. But it was because I couldn’t farce, right? They were just sounds language, yeah, of Dutch, right. But as soon as it was in English, it was like, oh, okay, now I understand it. The next one is concepts, and I would hypothesize that about 80 to 90% of our miscommunications happen at this level, because you can say something and I can understand the word, but I might think of it as a different thing. And so this is where empathy comes in, is being able to reconcile what did you mean? This is what I meant, right, and having that negotiation. So an example I give is that Scott really wanted to embrace agile methodologies. And a big part of that is this idea of failing fast. And he would say, fail fast. We want to fail fast. And I’m coming in from, like, running a business and doing more strategic stuff, and I’m like, we don’t want to fail. I need to eat and pay our mortgage. Like, yeah, we No. Failure is not something that we are striving for. And this went on for like, years, and I couldn’t we kept I’m like, But then one day, Scott was like, Well, I mean, we need a rapid result. It’s like, no, like, we need to learn something really quickly, to learn whether or not this is something we should pursue or not, right, right? I was like, oh, that’s what you meant. He was talking about fast iterations. I was thinking about long term strategy, because that’s just naturally where our brain went, right? So then we were like, well, let’s just toss that language, because it’s confusing. We’ll just say rapid result instead. And then we moved on. So being able to reconcile that conceptually with respect, instead of saying you’re stupid because you don’t understand the right exactly, yeah, why? Is kind of devolving into contempt. But if we can stay in that place of compassion, right, recognize that everyone’s doing their best, right, how can we, like, figure this out, and the way that we do that is the last part of the channel, which is relationships, yeah, and this is trust. This is psychological safety. This is history, like, mean, a. Like, I struggle with sarcasm. It’s very hard for me to parse. Mm, hmm. Scott, like, loves it. So when he’s with his friends, he’s like, crazy sarcasm. When he’s with me, he knows that, like, that’s not something that is going to typically land just because that’s who I am, right, right? And so our ability to adapt a communication based on the needs of an individual, we have all of those four things present that helps us get our message across. So the four things collectively are catch, which is the reappraisal right, noticing an opportunity collect, which is anchoring yourself and your own experience, grounding yourself in compassion, thinking about what you want to what you want to say, What’s your point of view, connect, trying to infer how somebody else is thinking, feeling, what their needs are, what their wants are, right? All of that stuff, and then communicate, which is thinking about those different aspects of the channel, which are physical signals, language, concepts right?
Maria Ross 26:01
I think this is why. So this is so good, this idea of these, this these four dimensions of our human communication, and the things that we take for granted when we decide that we’re just going to say something and people are just going to do what we say, and then we’re going to move on, right? That the element that comes through all of these is the curiosity, the pause, the you know, even in the in the catch, it’s, you know, I’m curious about, about what this is and what I’m trying to communicate. In the collect, in the Connect. It’s all about asking questions and being curious enough about how, you know? How will this person receive this message? Yeah, how will it land? Now, I know to some people listening, this may sound like a lot of work, but do we already do this to some extent in some of our communications without thinking about it?
Andrea Goulet 26:55
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, think about how you communicate with your friends versus how you communicate with your boss. Like you’re you’re constantly adapting your communication style. I mean, like to me, when I travel to other countries, my I get back home and people are like, you’re got, you’ve picked up a little bit of an accent, right? Like, there’s a different works of the way that we work. And I think the other thing is that we don’t all communicate the same. We all have very different communication styles. And I’m really inspired by the work of Dr Jean Z city out of the University of Chicago, who has done some work on the functional architecture of human empathy. So like in our brains and bodies, what are the things that make empathy like happen Yeah, and emerge. And so he’s got four different elements, which, you know, he, he gives some technical terms, but in in my book, and in the process, I describe it as regulating. So that’s that, right? Like, we body, yeah, into that parasympathetic, rest and digest. Like, if we’re in fight or flight, we can’t empathize,
Maria Ross 27:59
we can’t because we’re in self preservation mode. Yeah, yeah. That was a huge
Andrea Goulet 28:03
like, you don’t see that a lot. This was kind of new. I just came across it a couple years ago. I was like, oh, yeah, just see it. It’s like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But that’s a really important piece, which is why it’s like, catch and collect, are the first steps in this. Then there is feeling, so emotion sharing, right? Affective empathy, thinking, which is the analysis. It’s cognitive empathy. It’s like using your rational brain and then doing, which is, what am I motivated to do? How am I motivated to act? So this is that communicate piece like, what am I motivated to say, you know, or gesture, or whatever? Because you’re constantly communicating, right, constantly sending signals out into the world. And the idea is that when you are using empathy to drive your development decisions or your day to day decisions, what you’re doing is you’re injecting intention
28:54
into that. So give us an example,
Andrea Goulet 28:56
pause like that, reappraisal. It’s the pause, and then the collect, connect, communicate is, what do you do during that pause?
Maria Ross 29:04
So give us an example of how this would apply if you are a software developer. So if there’s a developer or a development team lead listening right now, yeah. What’s an example of them injecting empathy into the process? Yeah.
Andrea Goulet 29:18
So developers have to make a lot of decisions, a lot of decisions. That’s the main part of their job, right? So there are several key aspects. So one is like, what do I name things and how do I organize the code so it’s easy to interact with? Now, when I was when I first came into software development, there was a joke that I heard someone give on stage, and it’s in software development, there are two hard problems naming things, cash invalidation and off by one errors, which, haha, right. But I remember hearing this, I was like, Y’all think naming things is hard, like, Yeah, but a lot of times what has to happen is you are constructing these crystal palaces of like, abstract. Concepts, and if you have to split your attention to think about what a good name would be, then all of that, like mental work just comes crashing down, right? And we’ve all experienced this at some point where we’re just like, holding this big concept in our head, and then something interrupts us, and we’re like, we get really disoriented. So software developers, a big part of their job is having to manage this, like cognitive balance. So one strategy that it can be useful is that when you’re in this process of naming things, so it might be a variable, it might be a function, it might be whatever you use, something that’s kind of nonsense. So sometimes it’s like Boo or bar or, you know, applesauce, when it’s like different people have different strategies. So if you never come back and change that, that’s where the problem is. So it’s balancing the present needs versus the future needs. And so empathy can really help you with that. So an example that I give that’s a little bit more concrete around this is that when I was, you know, first line of code, and, you know, before it’s like on websites, there’s alternative text, which is what people use screen readers for images, right? So you have to type that in. And a lot of developers, it’s kind of feels like a check the box activity. It’s like, who even uses this? It feels like, what’s the point, right? And this is that motivation piece and empathy is directly related to our ability to motivate ourselves to do so. The example I give is that I had a really good friend, Taylor. He is also a software developer. He was in a car accident. Thank God he survived. Lost his vision, and he was still a software developer. But then we were talking, he’s like, I had no idea every time I skipped alt text, just how miserable and hard I was making it for people who use screen readers. So the difference between having empathy is knowing that personal like having some kind of human connection. You don’t have to know that person specifically, but you need to know to intentionally think about them. Yeah, yeah. And when you recognize not just like a group of people, because we can’t empathize with a with a demographic, right? That’s called compassion, fade like we have to individualize it. So now, like every time I come across alt text, I think of Taylor, and it’s like, okay, yeah, this might feel like my but then it gives me the motivation to actually do it. Mm, hmm, whereas otherwise I would be kind of like, eh, right. So this process comes into play a lot when we think about things like ethics, yeah, yeah. And this comes into play a lot, too with AI, because we can do this, move fast, move fast, move fast. But just because we can build something, should we build it? Right? And so when we’re using empathy to drive our decisions, it can help us think through, okay, if I use this test data set versus this one, right? It helps us kind of create an additional layer to the richness, right? You’re able to evaluate that. So it’s no longer just the analytical piece of it, it’s thinking about the human impact and the human outcome, right? And that is becoming so much more important as things develop technologically so quickly, and so I just feel like it’s a huge thing that we have to address the sympathy skills gap in the tech industry as quickly
Maria Ross 33:27
as possible. Yeah, so are you worried about what you’re how fast you’re seeing AI develop? Do you feel like there’s enough people sounding the alarm on this? I know, at least in the circles we’re in, we hear it all the time, but I don’t know if, in the the general population, in the general tech population, they’re hearing it enough,
Andrea Goulet 33:47
yeah, what do you think? I mean, I I think that there will always be like optimists and like tech optimists where it’s like, yeah, this is going to change everything, and it’s going to create this utopia. There’s also dystopian people who are like this is going to lead to the downfall of humanity. And right? I tend I call myself a technological pragmatist, like it probably will be somewhere in the middle. We will have existential things that we have to grapple with. Right happens with technological innovation and and leaps. And I think the big challenge with AI is this one’s happening so fast that, I mean, like the biggest thing that in in the software developer circles is even people who understand this stuff can barely keep up, like it is just it is moving so fast. So where’s the room for empathy? Then working room? Yeah, so I think it’s in the decisions, right? And it’s not just people who code right? It’s where do we allocate our resources? It’s what projects are we going to think of, What problems are we going to prioritize? Because there is a lot of stuff that AI, you know, like when we think of AI, right? Like, one thing I did was I gave a talk at Princeton, and I was really diving into this concept with the. Did Claude Shannon work around entropy? And so I had a chance to talk to a bunch of physicists. I was like, Oh, my God, they’re like, experts in entropy. I really want to, like, have them, like, criticize my work so I know where I can do better, because I’m not trained as a scientist who understands right? So I was able to, you spend a day and just ask chat GPT a whole bunch of questions about entropy, and get an understanding and figured out, oh my gosh, there’s like 15 different types. And here’s how it built on this, and here’s the Boltzmann model. Now, yes, there are hallucinations, but in terms of getting a broad overview, and I saved the chat and included it in as an appendix and saying, if anybody wants to see my notes, you know, and kind of how I research this. But I had been struggling to understand that and read books around it for 18 months, and in an afternoon, I was able to comprehend the different nuances because I was able to ask questions. So I think that’s really powerful, right? There’s a lot when we talk about AI, it’s really about automation and getting things faster, yeah. But I think too, there’s the, what are the impacts on, like, people, right?
Maria Ross 36:18
And that’s, I guess that’s where I’m getting at is in the circles that you’re in. Are you seeing the developers and the decision makers make time for empathy, or are you concerned that they’re not?
Andrea Goulet 36:30
I think there is absolutely a desire. And one of the biggest myths is that software developers have no interest in Exactly, yeah, that is not it ever. I mean, I am very convinced that a majority of software developers want to do better. They are trying to do better, right? The biggest problem I see is a little bit more systemic, which is, where are we putting the resources and where are we putting the pressure? Because the tech industry is moving so rapidly and so fast that people functionally don’t have time to have conversations, right? We are constantly in a state of fight or flight. And if we are managing this existential dread as a way to motivate us, that is the antithesis of what we need to actually operate with empathy effectively. So I think for me, it’s like, I think that people are trying, and I think the intentions are there. Now absolutely there are bad actors. Well, I don’t like using the term bad actors. There are people who are very personally motivated and have the ability to cognitively understand how their impact so they can manipulate and stuff. There are definitely people who are motivated personally by money and they prioritize that like, yes, that happens. But from my experience, the vast amount of people who are in the tech industry either feel powerless and feel like ticker ticket takers and feel like the business in big old air quotes is the one who’s making decisions, and they can’t really do anything and they can’t have any influence, or they are trying really hard to raise concerns. But either there’s a but there’s a communication breakdown somewhere, be it operationally or culturally or I mean, people from, you know, when I was from the communication side, I’m really intimidated by people who understand technology a lot of times, because I think they’re smarter than me. And so I think there’s some of that too, where people feel intimidated by each other across domains. But I think that’s more of the problem.
Maria Ross 38:45
And I think your point about speed is where the pressure is coming from. Because even the people that try to raise the alarms, they’re being told, No, just put your head down and go,
Andrea Goulet 38:56
yeah. I mean, like, I think one of the things is that, like, we need to recognize that ethics is everyone’s job, right? Like, and I think this is kind of one of the challenges, like, when we were thinking about organizational behavior, is as soon as you assign a title to it, then it’s like, oh, not my job. That’s their department. Yeah, right. So you know, kind of decision making in general, we can use empathy as a way to help us think about the impacts and whether or not the choices that we’re making today are likely to create the goals we can it can help us predict, you know, what are some of the likely outcomes? You know, it can help us scenario plan a little bit, and then that way it’s like we can like in software, there’s the idea of, if you, if you deploy a bug that happens, like people bring down production, like they bring down systems, and that’s kind of the mark of you’ve actually made it as a software developer, because you’ve accidentally sent a bug into production and you’ve messed everything up. That is so common. But what we want to do is we want to create the structures where we. Roll back, we can fix it, and we can deploy a fix quickly. And so when we’re constantly assessing, we’re better about thinking about how our emotions and our memory and our experiences and language and all of these things go into our communication. And then we can have kind of a process or a heuristic that’s like, Okay, in this moment, I’m going to try to reduce my cognitive load, to imbue some empathy into my decision making, without having to, like, have an existential crisis of, like, I don’t even know what stuff is, ah, because why? Yeah. And so that’s kind of my goal is just to kind of synthesize stuff so that it’s a couple model. George Box has a great quote. Of all models are wrong, some are useful. So it doesn’t embody everything, yeah, but hopefully it’s like in that moment where you’re like, oh, okay, I need to make a decision, whether it’s about development or something else, right? It’s a framework that you can use to think about other people think about the systemic impact of right, like what you’re doing? Well, your
Maria Ross 41:01
work is so empathetic to people that think that way. You know what I mean? And there’s been a lot of empathy experts. There’s been a lot of psychologists that have tried to talk about empathy, but to your point earlier, about the communication model in a way that couldn’t land with people that think a certain way, with people that are more process driven, or analytical, or whatever you want to call it. And I think what you’re doing is remarkable, because it’s about getting that message to those people in an accessible way, where they understand how it applies to their work.
Andrea Goulet 41:31
Yeah, and then it goes the other way. Danny Milton’s is a great researcher who coined the term the double empathy problem, which is a lot of times, uh, he’s autism researcher. He said that a lot of times, like, there is so much pressure for people who don’t conform to that kind of, like psychic empathy stereotype, that it’s their problem. I’m empathetic. You’re the one. You’re an efficient Yeah, right. And so it has to go both ways. There is no like, I’m better at empathy, like I have some more sensitive things that, and so do other people, right? But just respecting that, like, this is not a superpower, it’s our superpower. It’s humanity’s superpower, and as soon as we make it an individual, like character trait, I think that’s where things become dangerous, because that’s where we start to silo ourselves into different groups. Like, oh, I’m an empath and you’re not. No. We all crave connection. We all work together. We are a hyper social species that uses communication to solve complex problems. Empathy is that the heart of that so as soon as we recognize that it is expressed differently. There’s a lot of diversity when it comes to it, and once we respect that, and once we say, oh, okay, you’re going to try to understand me, and I’m going to try to understand you, and we’re going to try to understand each other through this community, you know, through communication processes and learn and grow and adapt like that’s where we get that innovation. That’s where we start to solve the problems. That’s where we start to get traction. And, you know, I’ve seen it happen in the companies I’ve built. I’ve seen it happen like in, you know, the industry at large, on big projects. And I think we’ve just got a lot of complex problems that we need to solve. So, you know, diving in, getting smart, learning about it, practicing, trying, failing,
Maria Ross 43:27
it’s all part of it. It’s all part of the process. Oh my gosh, so much good stuff. Thank you, Andrea for being here today and sharing these insights. We can’t wait for the book to come out. It’s going to be empathy driven software development. So I’m again, I’m going to invite listeners to go to your website, Andrea Goulet, G, o, u, l, e, t.com, and sign up for your email list so they know when the book will be available. But also to be able to take advantage of a lot of your thinking and your research as you go along, and definitely look to you to bring you into some groups to speak, because I think your work is so important, we’re gonna have all your links in the show notes. I guess I just did it for you, mentioning Andrea goy.com is the best place, and I assume it’s okay for people to reach out to you on LinkedIn. Yeah,
Andrea Goulet 44:14
I do get a whole whole lot of requests. They’re not to sound like I’ve had to set some boundaries, like how much I get in so please leave a note if you want to connect with me that you heard me on this podcast, because I do get a lot of bots, and that’s
Maria Ross 44:29
always my PSA, when people leave their LinkedIn is put a note, or they’re going to think you’re trying to sell her something. Yeah. So yeah,
Andrea Goulet 44:35
yeah. And if you mention this podcast specifically, that helps me know that, because yes yes refreshes
Maria Ross 44:40
the conversation. Of course, I love it well. Thank you again, so much for your time, and I have so enjoyed getting to know you over the past year now and sharing our work with each other. So thank you yes. Thank you Maria, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard. You know what to do, rate, review, subscribe and share with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
