Empathy AI Era Readiness Assessment

Most of us think of empathy as a purely person-to-person skill. Yes, how coworkers, managers, and leaders connect with and treat each other will always be important!

But in the AI Era, we need to change our thinking to also include digital and structural empathy: How empathy is hard-wired into our tools, support, infrastructure, training and development, career development, our job satisfaction and career development, and everything we use to get stuff done.

Cognitive science and user-experience expert Don Norman calls this humanity-centered design, where we go beyond just making digital tools better and easier to use, and we actually help people improve their lives, tailoring to very human needs. That’s what we assess here — the ultimate AI Era form of empathy!

I leveraged this profound wisdom when developing the Jensen Group’s 50-75 question Future Strong Assessment?, which is excerpted here.?

6-Question Readiness Assessment for Empathy in the AI Era

One Rule: Raise Your Expectations

The AI Era means that we must view empathy beyond person-to-person connections, and examine how humanity-centered designs are (or are not) built into your company’s tools, processes, and infrastructure. How those things also meet your personal needs, not just the company’s needs.

When thinking about the following questions within the pix...

• Respond Strongly Agree if you’d consider your organization’s hard-wired empathy performance among best-in-class.
• Respond Agree if your organization does some hard-wired empathy well — but not as well, or as often, or as consistently, as you know you it should be performed.
• If you believe that a skill is not organization’s strength, and that their performance needs to improve: Then Disagree or Stronger Disagree.

1. Company uses of AI need to meet all stakeholder’s needs, including yours. It’s not enough to focus just on corporate-centered scaled efficiencies, or how customer’s needs are met. Hard-wiring empathy into your work means that AI designs and structures should also make your life easier by helping you work smarter, not harder.

2. AI makes it much easier to tailor information flows, training and development, change implementation, and so much more to your needs. Hard-wired empathy means better understanding of your needs.

3. As previously mentioned, up to 20% of jobs will be eliminated by AI, and about 80% of us will have at least some of our key skills replaced by AI. Hard-wired empathy means greater efforts to keep you, not just let you go as part of AI cost-saving initiatives.

4. This is part of our raised expectations for the AI Era: It’s no longer sufficient for leaders to focus on scaled efficiencies as they build our infrastructures. We need to trust that they have our backs.

5. Culture. Connections. Community. Collaboration. All crucial. And usually better face-to-face. But post-COVID, most organizations mandated remote/hybrid/in-person work structures for different reasons — to meet its managing-you-by-seeing-you needs or its real estate investments needs — not based on your needs or on actual work needs. And few did the necessary analysis to understand the right balance to establish strong connections among teammates.

Hard-wired empathy means greater efforts to understand your needs as well as how to create greater and more meaningful connections, as they create remote/hybrid/in-person structures.

6. Work environments are no longer just places to achieve income and benefits. They also need to help create our personal agency in the AI Era — how we succeed in achieving our growth and personal fulfillment. Hard-wired empathy means greater rewards and greater personal agency in a disruptive world for bringing your whole self to work.

Scoring

Next Steps

How did your organization do? For those who truly answered with deep honestly — if you scored Future Passive or Future Shackled, welcome to the club! You’re among the majority of us. Most organizations still have a lot of work to do in hard-wiring empathy into its infrastructure.

Remember the context: This is about AI Era humanity-centered designs, where your organization’s infrastructure and digital tools do or do not meet very human needs.

If you scored Future Passive (3 or more Agrees)...

Or Future Shackled (3 or more Disragrees, Strongly Disagrees)...

• Discuss your results with teammates. Ask them to also take the assessment and compare notes
• If you are in a position of power to make infrastructure changes — make them fast! Learn from this exercise. Change quickly!
• If you not in a position of power to make infrastructure changes, and this exercise has illustrated for you major gaps in hard-wiring empathy, with no likelihood for improvements, maybe it’s time to consider moving on. You need improvements in these six questions to be your best.

Bill Jensen is a seasoned strategy and transformation executive, advisor to C-suite execs, globally-known keynote speaker, and author of nine best-selling leadership and change books, including Simplicity, Disrupt, Future Strong, and The Day Tomorrow Said No. Reach him at [email protected].