What kind of future becomes possible when we lead with empathy?
This episode of How We Future features Notre Dame Leadership professor, executive coach, and Master Teacher of Business Ethics Christopher Adkins. Chris and Lisa explore why empathy may be one of the most essential skills for navigating an increasingly complex future.
Drawing on decades of experience designing transformative learning experiences, Chris shares how empathy goes far beyond simply understanding another person’s perspective. It’s about creating the conditions for people to feel seen, heard, and capable of contributing their unique experiences. Whether you’re leading a team, designing products, facilitating conversations, or building community, empathy is a powerful tool for unlocking creativity, trust, and possibility.
In this conversation, you’ll hear about:
Why meaningful learning begins with listening before solving.
How great facilitators create spaces where everyone feels they belong.
The role of vulnerability and trust in building stronger teams and communities.
Practical ways to strengthen your empathy in everyday conversations and leadership.
If this conversation sparked a new way of thinking, we’d love to hear from you. Share your reflections in the comments, subscribe to How We Future, and leave a rating or review to help more people discover conversations about building better futures together.
Exploring the Science of Empathy, Lisa’s reflection on Chris’s visit to the d.school
Give and Take by Adam Grant
Want to contact us? Email hello@howwefuture.com
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
This season, we’re exploring big ideas, and today’s big idea is empathy. Empathy is one of the most foundational leadership skills we can develop, and it helps us understand how people think, what they feel, and what motivates them.
My guest is Christopher Adkins, leadership educator, executive coach, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Together, we explore the science behind empathy, why attention is one of the most valuable resources, and how small moments of intentional connection can transform our relationships, our teams, and the way we lead. For more reflections on this episode, check out the How We Future Substack. The link is in the show notes. Let’s get started with Chris Adkins.
Chris Adkins, I am so excited to welcome you to How We Future. You and I have been friends for a long time. We’ve worked together for a long time. Probably most importantly, we’ve been learning partners for a long time. I remember one of the first times we met, I think 10 years ago, we talked into the wee hours about our nerdy passions of leadership and empathy and helping other humans, and I was like, “This is a person I want to get to know.” Here in our fourth season, Chris, we are talking about big ideas, and I can’t think of a better person to talk about the big idea of empathy than with you, so welcome.
Christopher Adkins: Thank you so much, Lisa. It is so exciting to be full circle moment, be having maybe it’ll be a nerdy conversation, but it’ll be a fun conversation around empathy. I’ve always learned so much from you, both from your writing and through our conversations. Of course, we always love the, let’s peel back what makes great design, what makes great human-centered leadership. I’m really excited for today.
Lisa: Oh, me too. The other thing I think that I hope we can talk about in this conversation is also: how do you teach these things? You teach at Notre Dame, and one of the things I love about your work is that you go deep on the research, and you also then focus on the applied. Then around all that is, “Hey, how do I create conditions for leaders of every level of experience, from your younger students, MBA students, to executives?” How do you really help them learn some of these core skills that seem easy or seem like throwaway skills, like, oh, yes, everyone needs to be empathetic, but are foundational?
Christopher: Yes, absolutely. As you get older in your career, you think about what’s at the core of your work, and I think, how do you teach something like leadership? Yes, what are the core skills, but what are the conditions? Now I’m even thinking about what are the preconditions for learning a skill like empathy? What does the research tell us, particularly the neuroscience and the social psychology? Then, of course, I’m so fortunate to be at Notre Dame, where teaching leaders to grow the good, that’s how we talk about in the business school, Notre Dame being a powerful force for good. Well, how do you make that come alive with undergrads?
I teach mostly juniors and seniors, as well as MBAs who I teach, and then executives. To be able to meet people at different points in their journey and seeing what I call timely for whatever they need personally and professionally, and then timeless, and then how does the research inform that? I get to experiment a lot, which I know you love to do too. I’ve been experimenting with the pedagogy of empathy. What is the pedagogical strategies that work best?
Lisa: Well, I know, Aakash, was in the pre-times, as I like to say before COVID, you came to the d. school, and you did a phenomenal workshop on the science of empathy, which is interesting because the d. school obviously teaches a lot of design thinking, which usually starts with empathy.
It was interesting to bring you into a bunch of practitioners and instructors that feel like, “Hey, we know a lot about empathy, this is what we do, it’s part of the design thinking,” and yet you brought this whole body of work, particularly around the science of what’s going on in our brain, that really, I think, expanded so many of my colleagues’ perspective on how they can, first of all, be more empathetic instructors, be more empathetic colleagues, be more empathetic innovators, knowing that there’s actually a biological thing happening with empathy, and I think your focus on the neuroscience of it, the social brain, as I’ve heard you talk about it, is just really enlightening, that it’s not one of these throwaway things, but it actually has many levels of science and nature and connection that’s going on.
Maybe we’ll start there. Tell us a little bit about your perspective on empathy, and particularly the connection between empathy and our brain.
Christopher: Absolutely. I’m going to share just a very quick story to stay there, and then I’ll pull into the neuroscience. I always, when I’m in a room of experts, even with my executive MBAs, I want to learn from them. Even with my undergrads, I want to learn from them. I saw that moment at Stanford with all those faculty from the d. school as an opportunity for me to ask them a very ethnographic question, which was-- I don’t know if you remember what it was. I had people pair up, and I asked them, what does it feel like when somebody empathizes with you? Think about someone who’s really good at empathy.
This is before we’ve even defined it. What’s the experience of when somebody empathizes with you? Then they had that discussion, and then we got the feedback from the group. What was really powerful for me is that the experience of empathy that emerged was the experience of being held. To me, that immediately connected to psychological safety, the idea that someone’s holding space, really seeing and hearing my point of view, not waiting for the other person to stop talking and put their two cents in or their point of view in. That’s really consistent with the research.
First, I think of empathy as a core muscle. I’ve been using that metaphor for a long time. Like your abs at the gym, if you have strong abs, you can do all these other moves much more easily. Leaders can do a lot of moves, but if they lack empathy, every move’s going to be harder to do. I tell companies when I work with them, as well as my students, that if you’re going to invest in a core leadership skill, it won’t get you everything, but it’ll be foundational for everything, will be empathy because it allows you to think as another person, feel as another person, and understand what motivates another person. That’s the other exciting thing about empathy.
When I discovered it in graduate school, as someone who was moving out of existential philosophy and into psychology, both the psychology and the neuroscience, empathy is not one thing; it’s three things. It’s, really, first, are you trying to understand how the person thinks, how they feel, or what they want? Then each one of us might have a default setting, whether it’s nature or nurture, that makes it a little bit easier to get inside someone’s thoughts versus feelings. Then what are the strategies that if you, whether you’re good at it or not, like if I want to dial up someone’s thought perspective or perspective-taking, cognitive empathy, what are the strategies that work?
If I want to understand someone’s feelings or affective empathy, what are the strategies that work? Those different lenses for empathy are exciting because it’s one of these things that is something we’re wired to do, but it’s a skill we can develop. I said the last thing is, I use empathy inside and outside of the classroom, personally and professionally, every day, and I get it wrong every day. There’s always where we are for growth.
Lisa: I love it. We’re going to spend the rest of our time together unpacking so many of those awesome things that you just said. Maybe I’ll start with the last one, which is that it’s a muscle that you always need to flex and grow from. I’ll just share quite candidly: this morning I had a call with my daughter who has been studying abroad for a number of weeks, so we don’t connect that often. Everyone has this, and I want to learn, and I’m really practicing on listening, trying to understand her experience. I ended up thinking about, I was like, “Man, Lisa, that was just not an empathetic response.”
I was like, “Why do you have to insert yourself?” “Could you have just listened a little more, been a little bit more curious,” recognizing I was so excited to make a connection that what I really needed to do was hold open more space for her to share. All this to say, I feel like it is one of these things that we can reflect on and get better at. Just like you don’t do 100 sit-ups one day, and then you’re empathetic for life, you’re core for life. It’s one of these things to be mindful of.
Let’s go back to that awesome prompt that you talked about when you went to the d. school about asking people to reflect on a moment where they felt like someone was empathetic with them. Was that the exact?
Christopher: Yes.
Lisa: You did something there that I learned from you. Again, I always learn so much about both dance floor and balcony, like what’s going on and what’s the theory? I think you really, at that time, made the distinction between episodic empathy and somatic empathy, like an episode that you felt or how you felt. I don’t know. Talk a little bit about why that prompt was so intentional.
Christopher: Sure. First, I was very fortunate both in my graduate work in philosophy and then in educational psychology to come across both some great faculty and then sometimes some concepts that just unlocks everything for you. The first one, and this was before I even got into empathy, Joseph LeDoux, who was a professor at NYU, a psychologist; he talked about something called the mental trilogy. If we are going to use the technical terms, that’s cognition, emotion, motivation.
We can organize how a human brain processes in those three categories. It’s really thinking, feeling, wanting. Whenever I design a workshop, whether it’s at Stanford or a class, I think about what do I want the participants to think and feel and want to do. I also have to begin by empathizing: where are they beginning from? What are they currently thinking, feeling, or wanting? With most groups, your shortcut is going to be emotion. You really have to do emotional tuning. If I can get them to tune into their body, because I remind my students all the time, we’re all animals. Don’t forget, we are animals.
It was designed to take them to an emotional and physical memory. The last one was episodic. There’s such incredible research on memory that, I think, we as practitioners, we as leaders, have not tapped into. I became pretty obsessed with it and dove into how we learn through different memory systems. One of the primary ways we learn a social skill like empathy or leadership is through episodic memory. Think of episodes like Season 1, Episode 4 on Netflix, right? Different chapters.
There’s two types of episodic memory: episodes when you’re the observer and episodes when you’re the main actor. That’s called autobiographical episodic memory. I’ll toggle back and forth between those two, whether I want you to be on the receiving end or I want you to be on the leading end.
Lisa: I love it. All you nerdy instructors. The truth is, we joke a little bit about it, but Chris, I think, you and I, we’re so passionate about this because it actually is so applicable to everybody. When I hear you say things like, “Hey, what is someone thinking? What are they feeling? What’s their motivation?” I hear that through the lens of design. For me, it was a breakthrough moment, 15 years ago, maybe more, when I realized meetings can be designed, cultures can be designed, organizations can be designed, relationships can be designed, networks can be-- Everything can be designed because everything is about the connection we have.
If you’re willing to pause and say, “Hey, what do I want people to feel? What do I want them to learn? What do I want them to be able to do because of a choice I made that set them up for success?” That’s a design skill. I’m really hoping that as everybody thinks about this and are listening to you and how you go about your classes, that they’re asking themselves for the next interaction, whatever it is, “How can I be more empathetic in that? How can I just pause and be like, ‘Where are they coming from? What is it that would really help make their day joyful, that would really help them be successful in the project that they’re working on?’”
That has, I think, outsized leverage and impact because they’re able to be a better version of themselves. At the same time, they’re probably building confidence in their abilities, too, so it has this multiplier effect.
Christopher: Totally. I think working with you is how I came up with, or about the same time, my definition of leadership is leaders are designers. They design the ideal conditions where individuals create value for themselves and others. Designing conditions, in some sense, one size fits all because we’re all human. In other sense, I have three kids, three boys, and even just designing the morning launch sequence for different styles of personalities, how they want to start their day.
That’s why when you put on the design glasses, it’s both energizing and exhausting. It’s energizing because you realize, oh, these small intentional tweaks or intention, all of that can really change how you launch your day or launch a session, launch a workshop, or design a product. Yet, at the same time, every user, every human, a little bit different. I think sometimes people get frustrated as leaders because not everybody on the team wants to do it your way, wants to do it the same way. You’re designing for all those different learners in the room, also different styles around the table.
With my undergrads, they do something called the Empathy Project, where they have to design three conversations. Many of them are like, “Doesn’t designing a conversation seem a bit much?” Because we take weeks designing, workshopping, seeing practice, what makes a great question, when do questions die. Ultimately, the goal is to deeply understand another person. It’s amazing how transformative that project is, because taking those micro moments throughout a day, you just hit a bunch of them: designing meeting, whatever.
If you put that effort in, three things, I think, happen, one of which is, you become more confident because you walk in ready. Just like anything, you’re prepared. Once you’re in the room, you can let go. You can be fully present. That’s an idea I hope we’ll come back to, because I’m realizing, as I’ve done this work for a long time, that empathy may mean more about presence than anything else.
Then the last thing is you’ve just created a rare moment of connection that people are so hungry for. I think it’s timeless, but I think it’s really timely to actually have somebody put their device away, and really be like, “I want to have a great conversation with you. Let’s do this.” No one ever puts that much effort into having just a real great moment of human connection. Not that no one does, but it sometimes can seem rare.
Lisa: I love that. As you’re talking, Chris, I’m really thinking about the power that you can have when you start to see it through the lens of design. We have an adverse reaction to power. It is very powerful to create conditions for people to feel like their best selves. That’s an amplifying power. Power is not necessarily negative. I love how you describe that. It has all these benefits, and then they trickle out, they ripple out, like, wow.
What I found too is that a lot of times when I teach undergrads or folks newer to the world outside of structured school, and I’ll teach them how to design strategic conversations, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” They don’t quite get it. Then you, you work with people that have been in the work world for a decade, two decades or more, and they’ve been through painful meetings that waste their time, don’t really feel inclusive, don’t really feel like that they’re congruent with the values. They’re much more responsive to some of these because they’ve been through the pain, versus-
Christopher: After a long day.
Lisa: -some of the younger students who are like, “What are you talking about, lady? What do you mean I need to design a meeting?” You’re like, “Oh, just wait.”
Christopher: Totally. Exactly. You think about what are those things you need early, middle, or late in your career. My undergrad class, consistently, and I even use this in graduate classes, but Adam Grant’s first book, Give and Take. In the first chapter, he highlights that there are four things you need to be successful: hard work, talent, luck, and relationships. We’re not often given courses that teach us how to build real strong, healthy relationships, and then what is the Harvard longitudinal study of well-being, of lifespan, health, and its relationships.
So much of relationship is about, do you really feel connected? If we unpack that, it’s like, “Does that person really slow down to see and hear what I’m going through?” Over the last several years, and I didn’t have this definition when I was at Stanford, my simple definition, I wouldn’t use it in a research paper, but it would be empathy is to stand under another person’s experience. Obviously, I took the word understanding and split it in half and reversed the order. Of course, you’ve probably heard the expression that if you want to walk in someone else’s shoes, you got to take your own shoes off first.
The idea of designing a meeting, or a product, or an app, or a conversation, where it’s not about my agenda, I’m not always trying to get you to perform or do something, so it becomes less transactional. Then if it’s a human-centered approach to leadership like we teach at Notre Dame, now it becomes it’s not you and me, but it’s we. We have to do this three-step move that I call: pause, reflect, connect. Pause, reflect, connect. I got to pause and reflect: how am I showing up? Then can I design a moment that invites them to pause and reflect, and then we connect together.
There’s a mindset to it. There’s even a spirituality to it, but there’s tools that I teach the students about how they can just, even in these micro moments, have these moments where they invite someone to share their experience. You don’t even have to share yours necessarily, but you can just hold space, be present for it. You just watch how powerfully transformative it is, both for the receiver of the empathy and the giver of the empathy.
Lisa: So powerful. I want to connect a couple of things that we’ve been talking about, which is this power of pausing and reflecting, which requires us to do something you said earlier, which is be present. I want to add another component, which I’ve heard you talk a lot about and want to invite you to reflect on, which is being intentional about your attention. In this moment where so much of our attention is being taken from social media, from the dings, the zooms, all the advances in productivity of technology, WhatsApp and Slack and this, that and the other, very hard to find space to pause, reflect, connect, be present.
Maybe, let’s just start, Chris, because I’ve learned so much from you about this and would love to share it with others; let’s talk about attention for a minute.
Christopher: Beautiful.
Lisa: What is attention?
Christopher: I’m so glad you asked. If you were-- my students would be like, “Okay, Professor Adkins is going to go to Latin town.” I like to use etymology of words. I share with them that I studied Latin for four semesters, thinking that I might be a hardcore philosopher and killed my GPA, but I’m still going to try to use it. If you take the word attention in Latin, it means attendere. Tendere means to stretch, and the prefix ad means towards. Attention is what we stretch toward.
Apple knows a lot about you if you use an iPhone, because it knows what apps you stretch towards or what’s time of day. Then it will even make suggestions, like, at this time of day, you typically stretch towards this app, so maybe you want to stretch at it. Of course, Spotify or Netflix is going to see what we paid most attention to. We get all excited when Spotify plays back to us, what our top things were. You can connect attention to value. I define value very simply: what matters most and who matters most. If you’re a leader, your team knows what projects you stretch toward, you get excited about, you put more energy in, and who on your team do you get most excited about and stretch toward, and who you do not?
Of course, it’s related to intention. Intention is to stretch into. Intention is on the inside, what matters to me, what motivates me? Does my outward attention reflect my intention? What does my outward stretching toward? Is it really aligned with what my core intentions are, and do people see that or not?
Lisa: Yes. I think that’s such an important set of questions. What am I stretching towards? Am I doing it intentionally, or is the world making me stretch, or am I being stretched out of my control? Earlier in the podcast series, we had Ahmed Best, who is a dear friend, actor, Afrofuturist, and he says, “Don’t let people future all over you.”
I feel like what you are offering people is an opportunity to reflect on who’s getting this most precious resource that you have called attention? Are you giving it away, or are you really being thoughtful about it and creating conditions for you to put it towards the things you really want to accomplish or the people you really want to build relationships with? I think it’s getting harder and harder to do.
Christopher: Absolutely.
Lisa: With technology that’s basically stealing from us and really hijacking our attention. When you and I first started working together, there wasn’t really a vocabulary around the attention economy. Now, people talk about it.
I was thinking about this, preparing for this conversation, knowing we were going to talk. I was very lucky to be in Dubai last fall for the Dubai Futures Conference. One of the opening talks was a provocation of what if a country’s most precious asset is its ability to harness the collective attention of its country, of its economy, of the people? I thought, “Oh my gosh, attention is really now a currency.”
Christopher: Totally. Also like an antenna, right? It’s what are you reacting to? The way that I think about leadership, and fortunate to be at Notre Dame because it was so in tune with this approach, is that leadership is an inside-outside game. It doesn’t have to be. You can be reactive to everything on the outside, but it begins with leading yourself, knowing what matters most and who matters most, and it’s hard to live in alignment or in integrity that all the time. You can do an attention audit to get a sense of how these things are aligned.
I think here’s what’s exciting. There’s been a lot of great podcasts, books, research around attention. How do we harness it well for different types of tasks? I even do a workshop for our MBAs around designing your day, like the first few hours, this, what time of day, and of course, some of that’s unique to your own physiology. Even Cal Newport’s work on deep work and designing for that, what are some of the best practices? Because basically, attention is a scarce resource, and lots of people want it from you. You have to really see it as precious and know how to best harness it.
Just going back to empathy for a second, because we’re so easily have things clamoring at our screens and other things, and we do need to pay attention, and we may have elevated fear or threat when we can actually slow down, pause, and reflect, and then connect with another person in a deep empathy conversation, it almost feels like an oasis.
Like that moment you were having with your daughter. What I have found is I used to worry so much, like, “Am I asking the next best question to my kid to connect? Or, “Am I supporting,” whatever? Just relax and be present. Enjoy it. Even as I’ve developed this empathy project over the last 10 years, wanting the students just to have a really joyous, fun conversation, and they’re amazed.
I said the conversations should be 25 minutes. They’re usually an hour or more with three different people: someone who’s their bright spot, who they know well, someone they don’t really know, that’s their mid spot, and technically someone they avoid, their dim spot, and it’s amazing. They’ll have these powerful conversations with people they’ve spent their whole lives with, to somebody they actually don’t really like that much. It’s just amazing showing your attention fully to any human being, no matter what your relationship is, really deeply powerful.
Lisa: I just want to make sure I get this straight. You actually make that an assignment, go find someone that you may not think that you like, and have a conversation with them?
Christopher: Yes. I’ve been teaching this class called Values-Driven Leadership. It’s the required class for all of our strategic consulting management majors. I piloted this a decade ago, standing on the shoulders of Gordon Allport’s idea of contact theory. The idea is like you bring people who might be different in contact with the other, then they realize they have some common ground and what that might look like.
The idea here was three conversations, at least, 20, 30 minutes. I’m going to share with them the research. We’re going to design the conversations. You’re going to work on design teams in class and practice and workshop these questions, but it’s three different sets of questions. You can have some with the same.
Yes, your bright spot, usually it’s like a parent, a friend, sibling. Then there’s somebody who’s like a mid spot. This is usually like a teammate or a classmate or a hallmate who you’re an acquaintance with, but you don’t really know. You don’t really have a positive or negative toward them. Then the dim spot is somebody you know you disagree. Maybe you’ve had a falling out. Maybe it was your freshman roommate, and it just didn’t end well. It’s somebody you tend to avoid. I use that quote; it’s attributed to Lincoln. I haven’t been able to find exactly where it is, but “I don’t like that person. I should get to know them better.” It’s that idea, and it’s amazing.
It’s 25% of their grade they end up being, they have to-- What do I think I’m going to hear before the conversation? What did I hear during? What was my reactions afterwards? What were the patterns across? What are the connection to the research? These are like 30-page papers by the end, but they’re so rewarding. I’ve learned so much about empathy. It’s amazing just the power of a great question, too. They just see that, and here’s what’s really powerful. They’re getting feedback from both friends and then professionally like, “You’re a great conversationalist.” Amazing. It’s such a core skill, and we’re just not taught to do it.
If they tend to be on their screens or maybe they’re a little more introverted, just like anything, the more you do it, and you get some feedback, we coach them in class. Yes, you can tell I love the project. It’s super exciting.
Lisa: Oh, I bet it’s the kind of project where when they come back five years later for reunions, that’s the class they’re going to talk about. I imagine when you first assign it, they must be like, “Oh no, I can’t do that.” You and I have talked a lot about David Rock’s SCARF model.
Christopher: Yes.
Lisa: The response we have to discomfort, particularly social situations like this being the same as how we experience physical threat. Like, “No, this professor’s crazy.” Yet creating the conditions, having everybody be. There’s a peer component to it, really working through it. It’s like, “Oh,” and then when they face it in the real world, they’ve had this practice.
Christopher: This is a powerful idea for me, and I think about it quite deeply, that I want them to design animating questions. I use that word intentionally. It goes back to the Latin animus or anima, which is soul, and these are questions that invite someone to share their soul with you. They’re really hesitant because they don’t think people will share. It is so powerful to see what people will share.
We also talk about this is not an interview, so it’s a conversation, so it is a back and forth. They have to be willing to share. These are the ingredients of what makes a great animating conversation. As just a call back to earlier, they’re not semantic questions. It’s not like, “Tell me the three adjectives that define a leader.” No. They’re stories, they’re episodes, and you’ve see in empathy, we call it vicarious emotion, where you’re doing emotion sharing. That’s a part of the brain, or experience sharing, and so we’re mirroring. It’s called the mirroring network, where you’re just mirroring the other person’s emotions, and just this incredible power that happens.
Even with people, I will tell you as a parent, this one always hits me pretty good. I tell the students that if they’re going to design their conversation for their parent, you realize your parent had a whole part of their life before you were born. What do you know about it, right? Or a grandparent. They learn so much about this person who they’ve spent more time with than anybody else, or they see Dad cry for the first time at age 22. It’s amazing. It’s not just the stranger or the person you avoid, it’s the person most familiar.
Lisa: Oh my gosh. I’m not sure I’ve heard of the term animating question. I’ve certainly heard a more beautiful question that Warren Berger asks us to consider, which is really about discovery. An animating question has a little bit more of that internal, like, does it get you excited?
Even Chris, when we were thinking about how to describe this podcast and the concepts of we wanted to have conversations, not interviews, conversations about hope. How does learning empathy, how does that help us be more hopeful in an authentic and grounded way, and not in a fake Pollyanna way? How do we use hype? This was a controversial word, but what it was really meant to be was around capturing energy. That it’s okay to be energetic. It’s okay to be nerdy about these things. It’s okay to feel excited about something, and that felt scarce to me in a moment that felt so heavy that it was like not okay to be energized or animated about something, that that was taboo.
Of course, gratitude, really, centering on core relationships and how we can honor what each brings, with the spirit of gratitude. This idea of learning how to ask animating questions is a really profound one, and to go back to people that you’ve maybe spent a lot of time with, but maybe not really entered the soul level, really knowing what they are experience has been. What a gift. I want to get your advice, Chris, on, look, it’s easy for us when we design classrooms because we get to control the settings and we get to be very intentional. What advice, though, do you have for people that are within organizations that want to bring more of this work within their organizations, maybe to their next meeting, maybe they have an offsite coming up, or just wanting to further relationship with a teammate? How would you advise someone to bring in more of this empathetic work in an authentic way that doesn’t feel like today we’re going to put on our empathy cape and we’re going to be empathetic?
Christopher: Great question. I do a lot of workshops with executives, either at our executive MBA program or with different companies, as you know, over the years with Deloitte and others. I’m going to do a couple of shout-outs. One is to Bill Pelster, who we both know. One of the Bill phrases I use all the time is, “In order to go fast, you have to go slow.” In design, that’s taking that time to slow down and really understand the user. Sometimes I get pushback on it, but do you go slow enough to really know what motivates each person on your team? Then do they know about each other?
Because I think executives will often say, “Well, wait a second, I have to take that time to know each person.” It doesn’t have to be you. Can you create a culture of empathy where it’s not just what does the person do, but who are they? This distinction between what and who. You heard it in my values, like what matters most, who matters most. As you know, I just completed, about a year ago, training from the Hudson Institute of Coaching. I now do executive coaching. They always remind us of the, there’s the U-curve, and you can look this up, but it’s most conversations stay along the what. We’re trying to solve the what problem. Just like in design work, it’s who has the problem.
I think, and I’ve heard this as a main theme across multiple seasons on your podcast, which is curiosity, just deep curiosity. Another shout out, this book just came out a year ago, took the empathy project to the next level, which is Talk by Alison Wood Brooks. It’s based on her course at Harvard for the MBAs. It’s an acronym for topics, asking questions, levity, and kindness. Here’s a technique every leader could use. The superhero of a conversation is a follow-up question.
Lisa: Can you say that again?
Christopher: It’s her work, so she gets all the credit. This is from her research on the art and science of great conversations. The superhero of a conversation is the follow-up question. In that empathy project, the students design these questions, but I’m like, it’s just a starter question. Like, stay there, stay there, don’t rush it. I actually came across this. A couple of months ago, back to the etymology of words, I was like, you really want to savor it. The word savor in Latin is connected to sapien, which means wise. When we savor something and we’re really present, you’re seeing it come back to presence again, we’re being wise to just stay with the moment of the story.
What happens is that that person leans in more, shares more, and you get this richness of conversation and data and connection. How rare is that? Because we’re all clicking around and moving to the next thing. That ability as a leader to just ask the great follow-up question. The last thing I would say is, because I think so much, just like Aristotle, you learn virtue from being around virtuous people. You learn great leadership from being around great leaders. One of the best leaders I ever had, he was a master of the 5 to 10-minute coaching.
Like, we’d be walking back from a meeting and he’d be like, “What did you think? What did you observe when this happened?” He was pointing my attention to teach me different things, but just 10 minutes. You have that walk anyways. How do you design intentionally those little moments in the day? I think we think about that with our kids, like driving to practice or something, but you can do this as a leader. I’ve got one more technique that I think is really powerful to share for leaders, but I’ll wait to see where you want to go [crosstalk]--
Lisa: Oh, no. Well, listen, I’m savoring this conversation, so let’s hear it. What’s the fourth?
Christopher: Well, I don’t know about you. I feel like I’m always in transition. I’m moving from this thing to the next thing. Like, I don’t know what you have next today. Of course, in a world where we’re always interconnected personally, professionally, and then sometimes we’re working from home, like I’m at home today, that transition from personal, professional, it’s a lot. It requires energy. This is like how we’ve already gotten on deep work. You’ve got to just stay. Locked in on one thing. We can be intentional about our transitions.
A practice that I recommend, and many of our executives do at Notre Dame, and I now know that some of the senior leadership at Notre Dame now do, is something I call the arrival sequence. When I come into Notre Dame, and anyone who may have seen the campus of Notre Dame, whether on TV or in person, it’s the Golden Dome. It’s the iconic. As I come through the gate, I want to be in a place of deep gratitude and responsibility for what I get privileged to do. You probably feel the same thing when you come onto campus at Stanford. It’s like, how awesome that I get to be a part of people’s journey.
What I do as my arrival sequence is, first, I put on the same song. It’s always the same song. It doesn’t matter what the song is. People always ask me, I’m like, it’s the song I listen to when I walk around Lake Michigan. To me, it’s a very stilling song. I look up at the dome, and this is the sequence, and this is the episodic memory part. I think of three leaders who, if they had not shown up in my life, I would not have the honor of teaching at Notre Dame. It takes me to the right head and heart space. It’s my high school soccer coach. It’s the best boss I ever had and the best academic mentor I ever had. It’s always the same three people.
My family’s like, “You don’t think about us now.” I do, but it’s always those same three people. Part of it is gratitude for what they gave, honoring their memory. One of them, the best boss, has passed away, Howard. Then I also steal their moves. I want to copy their behaviors, how they did what they did. What I love about it, for me, is it really gets me present for the performance I have to have. Athletes do this. Musicians do this.
They all have their ways of locking in. I don’t know if leaders do it. You have that transition from home to work or work to home. We’ve all had our driveway moments as I call them an NPR where we have to transition back in. The arrival sequence has been a powerful one. That’s for you, so that you can be better for your team.
Lisa: I love that so much, Chris, because you can design it to be however you want it to be. A lot of things just come to mind. One is, we talked earlier [00:37:01] with Matt Abrahams, who really focuses on-
Christopher: I’m sure. I listened in that.
Lisa: -communication and the connection. He says, “Have a mantra for yourself before you go on.” Other related to what you said earlier. The superpower being the follow-up question is this idea that your job is not to slay it in the conversation or up on stage. Your job is to build a connection, is to get the next conversation, the next meeting. We talk about that even in Moments of Impact, my book, about designing strategic conversations. It’s not about solving. It’s about the opportunity to advance in some way.
This arrival sequence, too, also, I love it as a design construct because so often, again, we think of more narrowly defined things to get you in the right mood. The power pose. It doesn’t have to be that. What about just putting on a song that gets your body moving or, as you were saying, a memory that reminds you of the best version of yourself before you’re about to go into your home, which conceivably has the people that you love most in the world. These are gifts to your future self, but your future self is not in the far future. It’s in a minute or two ahead.
Christopher: Totally. When you really are intentional about that design, and if you know a little bit about the psychology and even the physiology of the human being, you can make all these little small tweaks that make a huge difference. That’s why I love working with leaders because you can teach them something. You start class with music every day with a different song to set the tone, set the mood. Some of that, too, I think is, for a leader, I would say, you don’t have to do my arrival sequence. You can customize it, make it yours. The idea is that you’re being intentional because it is a pause, reflect, so that you can connect. Then customize it, make it your own.
Lisa: Yes, love it. You’re also reminding me, too, of years ago, I invited Robert Poynton, teaches improv over at Oxford. He came over, and he talked about how he was coaching a leader to walk into a room. He made the leader do it 10 different times with 10 different mindsets so that they could feel in their body. What does it feel like when you’re rushing in the room? What does it feel like when you’ve taken time? It’s that mind-body connection. Then once you’re like, “Oh, this was so much better, I’m going to do it like this again.” Honestly, I know it sounds so basic, but sometimes I think my job is to help my students feel something that they haven’t felt before in a class, whether it’s an instructor that truly cares, someone that actually thought to bring snacks, or time for the end, or whatever. Not in a gimmicky kind of way, but in a like, “It could be this good kind of way. I could learn and have fun and be inspired and have awe. How do I get more of that?” Then a point that you made subtly that I just really want to emphasize is this idea that even before you master it yourself or even develop a practice plan to master it, you can get good at observing it. Really get good.
If you’ve been a part of a great class or a great meeting, ask why. What happened? How did the meeting start? What was present? What did they ask you to do ahead of time? How did they summarize? Just by being a great observer of others, you can start to say, “Well, would that work for me? Would that work for my style?” That can be such a powerful mechanism. I think you talk about this, too, this idea of social learning, like we are learning from each other.
Christopher: Totally. Yes, you just nailed something that’s so important, I think, for leaders as a skill to cultivate, which is reflection or reflective observation. Frankly, I don’t know if we do it as much as we could in the classrooms. I don’t know who’s listening will know this work, but Donald Schön’s work on reflection back years ago, I wrote a couple of papers on it. The exciting part about this, and you mentioned this briefly at the beginning, you can cultivate the skill to be in the meeting and above the meeting at the same time. He calls it reflection in action on action.
Wow, it’s like you’re reflecting in real time, and you’re also not just thinking about what is Lisa saying, what am I saying, but what’s the dynamic between us, who’s leaning away at this point in the conversation, who’s getting excited, who hasn’t been called on in a while. We get to do that a bit as facilitators, but great leaders do that in meetings. They’re picking up on all of that. You can hone that skill, but again, I don’t think it’s one we teach. It’s back to this superpower of reflection, which you can learn, but again, it can be cultivated.
Lisa: I love that reminder, reflection in action on action. Dare I say, Chris, not something that AI can do right now. This is maybe one of the final things I want to talk to you about, which is this moment of AI mimicking empathy. We’re looking for, well, what is uniquely human? I just want to bridge to say reflection in action on action, profoundly human, and something that people can build, what’s happening at all levels. You and I haven’t really had a chance to go deep on what’s going on now that cloud OpenAI can mimic empathy.
Let me give you a great example. I love this example. My sweet 84-year-old father and mother, God bless them, very lucky they’re still with us. They love to go to this country house that has been in my family for decades. My father loves to garden around there, and my mother is very sensitive to smells. There was a situation where he planted these beautiful lilies, and my mother was convinced that the smell from these lilies were giving her vertigo. She said, “You have to move the lilies.” Now he’s on OpenAI, and he says, “I have these beautiful flowers, but my wife says that they’re making her sick. Is that true?”
Claude says, “Well, show me the flowers.” He shows the flowers, and Claude comes back and says, “Those are beautiful flowers. You’re right. I can understand why you’d be reluctant to move them.” Then Claude says, “And you’re a very thoughtful husband for being willing to move them and pay attention to your wife’s needs, that they may be causing her vertigo.” Whoa. That’s just one example of playing back feeling in this moment. I don’t know. I’m just curious about it. It’s fresh. It’s happening all [crosstalk]--
Christopher: If you go back to the three different types of empathy, understanding, thinking, or feeling, or wanting, or motivations, the responses there are trying from-- and it’s a large language model. It’s basically trying to say when the language is structured this way, it probably means the user wants this. I know that if I mirror Andy Bernard on The Office, he’s going to mirror whatever Michael Scott says, so there’s a likeability algorithm built in here. It’s trying to appreciate how you are signaling what you want through your language. Then I do think it also can tap into-- this is actually where I think a cognitive empathy, maybe not taking your perspective, but understanding your helpful or less-than-helpful thought patterns, could be helpful. The real challenge is a variety of different things. First is, even if it does fully stand under your language, it doesn’t stand under your experience. It has so many biases when it comes to what it pays attention to. We’re part of the problem, because if you don’t ask the right question the right way, or if it’s been holding onto all these other questions that you’ve asked it, it’s focusing its attention in ways that you may not realize. Then, of course, it doesn’t disclose.
There’s just a variety of challenges there. It’s funny, my colleagues and I, faculty, we’ve been playing with in a variety of different ways, whether from how does it help us in research, how does it help us in designing classes. For example, it was really helpful for me to design some rubrics. It’s actually quite good at designing some rubrics, but it does take a lot of input from me. After a while, this is becoming a waste of time because it really can’t harness the expertise of 20 years of teaching. Now, maybe it can, but I just don’t think it can because I think so much of that expertise hasn’t been captured in quite language yet.
There’s all these, back to attention, all these little things you look at and pay attention to as an expert that I think is hard to cover. Maybe we’ll get there. That’s in terms of it’s what I would call, in empathy, you call it empathetic accuracy. How accurate is the AI going to be as an empathizer? Then, is that even what we want? Because if it is about relationship, I don’t think there’s an authentic relationship that’s there. I don’t ever really walk away from Claude feeling seen or heard.
Lisa: Yes.
Christopher: Sometimes it’s helpful. I’m sometimes grateful, but I don’t feel seen or heard.
Lisa: Yet another reminder that, as powerful as these technologies get, to not outsource our most human capabilities. I think, just returning to what you said earlier, empathy as a core leadership skill, core in foundational, core as in connected to everything else, and something we have to keep working at. I can’t outsource getting my app stronger. I got to do it myself. I shouldn’t do that with these technologies either.
Christopher: Exactly. We didn’t talk about this in detail, but I’ll keep it really brief. The exciting thing about empathy is it helps us understand or stand on our own art to a person’s experience. For many of us, not always, empathy helps us get to compassion. I’m not sure the AI is compassionate, but we want human beings to be compassionate, thinking about futureing. A world where we deeply care about the well-being of not just those around us now, but those around us seven generations from now. Do we move from understanding the experience we’re building now for the future, and then is that done in a way that is a more compassionate world?
That link from empathy to compassion, I think, is another area that the technology clearly has a gap.
Lisa: Maybe a great place to end, Chris, to thank you for being a compassionate friend, colleague, educator, leadership coach, and leader yourself. Just so-
Christopher: Oh, thank you.
Lisa: -grateful that you could spend time with us on How We Future because I think there’s a lot of things that’s going to change in the world. Needing empathetic relationships, cultures, communities, leaders, that’s not going to go away. I’m so grateful for you and the work that you do and that we can share it with so many.
Christopher: Thank you. Thank you for-- I know it’s going to be four seasons of the podcast, but I’m so glad that people are getting to experience the empathy and the excellent conversation. Lisa Kay Solomon is, and you’re bringing to us so many, like I said at the beginning before we got on together, such diversity of perspectives, but really rich, deep, compassionate, empathetic leadership. I’m excited to be a part of it. Thanks so much, and I look forward to our continued friendship and collaboration.
[music]
Lisa: Thanks for listening to this episode with Christopher Adkins. Here’s an empathy practice to try this week. In your next conversation, resist the urge to jump in with your own story. Instead, ask one thoughtful follow-up question and see where it lands. You might be surprised by what you learn and how deeply someone feels heard. If this conversation gave you a new perspective on empathy or leadership, we’d love to hear from you. Leave us a comment and tell us what resonated. Thanks for listening to How We Future. We’ll see you next time.
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