VR Will Make You Rethink Empathy

By Jay Newman and Mike Smith

This post originally appeared on the Jump Associates blog on June 29, 2017.

If you’re a current or former Jump client, you may have encountered an activity we call “Crossing the Line” at a meeting or workshop you did with us. It’s an activity that’s designed to elicit unspoken commonalities and misalignments, pre-conceived notions and expectations that we often use to help teams get on the same page. We adapted it from a diversity awareness experience that freshman at Stanford have been doing for years.

Many of you have told us that this short activity was a transformative activity for you and your team. Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Starting at 1:30 in the Oculus VR for Good video that Mark Zuckerberg shared a few weeks ago (and which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival), you’ll see a similar activity being facilitated between two very different groups of people — the inmates at the California State Prison in Los Angeles and a group of corporate executives hosted by Defy Ventures visiting the inmates. Watch it.

Just seeing it on our computers gave us chills. In VR, the experience goes further. You’re not just visiting a prison. You’re stepping into the shoes of someone as they visit with prisoners. As they learn how much they have in common with these folks. And the crucial, yet often small and very human ways their lives have been different.

Mark posted the film because he wanted to show us all what VR could do for spreading empathy.

Broadly spreading empathy becomes infinitely cheaper.

Experiences for broadly spreading empathy are becoming infinitely cheaper. Spreading HD video through Facebook, Snapchat, or Youtube is effectively free.

The Oculus for Good VR experience of the visit to the California State Prison makes the “step to the line” moment of meeting with prisoners so much richer. It’s immersive. It feels like you’re having a personal experience, and you feel more.

VR can play a big role in taking the immersiveness of empathy-building experiences to the next level . It currently costs $500 for an Oculus Rift headset. The video above was created using a $40,000 grant from Oculus for Good and a donated Nokia Ozo 360 degree VR camera that costs $40,000 if you’re buying one for yourself.

In just one example of companies using VR to help a large numbers of their employees understand people and situations foreign to them, Walmart is planning to roll out VR training to store employees by the end of this year to simulate conditions otherwise difficult recreate like a hectic Black Friday rush.

Most of the customer experience and insights groups that I know aren’t experimenting much with VR yet. Maybe it’s time to start.

VR opens doors to inaccessible experiences.

Why invest in VR? While Facebook has been publishing lots of examples of what its Oculus headsets and software can do lately, the prison video shows VR is more than a new channel for today’s social networking experiences. Virtual reality opens doors to inaccessible experiences. It does more than connect you with people remotely. It’s a tool that unlocks new ways to connect or become more kinds of people (and things). It lets you explore new territory — of places and people, of understanding and emotions.

VR’s ability to transport people into situations that are physically and emotionally inaccessible shows much promise. Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is experimenting with using it to influence choices people make in their everyday lives. They’ve found that after VR interactions like playing the role of cow eating and drinking before being sent to slaughter, or virtually eating lumps of coal representing energy used to heat water while taking a shower, people see a connection between choices they make and the potential environmental costs of their actions.

Empathy In Your Company

Over the past twenty years we’ve done a lot of research on how to spread empathy at your company (including writing a book on the subject). Here’s a quick summary for those of you who haven’t read it yet:

1. Make it easy.
2. Make it experiential.
3. Make it everyday.

The imperative to “make widespread empathy easy” has always offered organizations the biggest bang for their buck. Leading customer-centered companies figure it out the quickest. (Many are born with this as part of their culture straight down from the founders and leaders.)

But organizations struggle more with their goals to “make it experiential” and “make it everyday.” And it’s here where virtual reality may eventually play a big role.

Scale involvement with VR.

Make your empathy experiences more accessible.

“Experiential empathy” has always been the most transformational on any one leader’s or team’s mindset, but also the most expensive to scale. Customer experience and insights groups use face-to-face interviews with customers as a key tool for learning about unmet needs. The best of these teams bring executives and stakeholders along on interviews so those leaders can gain first-hand experience of real customers’ lives. But even in the most customer-centered organizations, most leaders get deep, face-to-face interactions like this only a few times per year. At best.

Outside of the customer experience or insights groups, few employees get access to these types of one-on-one moments with customers. If you’re a fortune 500 company, you have on average 50,000 employees. And you have hundreds of strategic partner companies, agencies, etc who each spend thousands of hours each year thinking about your business. Isn’t it time that everyone knew your customers as well as the select few?

You can’t take your whole team into a person’s home during an interview. But you might be able to if you have them join and follow in VR. Frequently, rich customer data like videos, testimonials and stories are shared around companies these days at one-off events (meetings, off-sites, customer summits, etc). VR could play well into these situations, making the storytelling more experiential for all involved.

Don’t forget the everyday empathy.

Use VR to make a splash, then establish the habit with a daily practice.

So if we can envision ways for VR to help make empathy “easy” and “experiential” inside a company, that leaves us with “everyday empathy.” Of the three principles, making empathy “everyday” has always been the hardest to maintain. Everyday activities are about building organizational habits, and embedding them deep into the culture.

If you close your eyes and try hard, you can start to envision a future where we could start framing up VR more like a mindfulness practice than a quarterly off-site. Spend 10 minutes a day, every morning, in the home of one of your customers. And maybe that’s one of the bets that Mark Zuckerberg is making. That VR headsets will become so prolific that, like in the sci-fi adventure Ready Player One, we eventually transmit ourselves to alternative environments than traveling between here and there. (As if to say to the venture capitalists — invest in Facebook+Oculus, not Uber.)

VR is way too early on the technology adoption curve for the majority of your employees, so we wouldn’t start designing your organizations for it just yet. Stay closer to home. If you’re not yet, start using the today’s everyday technologies to spread the stories of your customers. Think email. Facebook. SMS. Slack. And remember the analog, too. Bulletin boards in the hallways. The names of your conference rooms, cafes, and buildings. The fixtures in your parking lot. The notes in your bathroom stalls. Opportunities for increasing empathy are everywhere — in the virtual world and the real one.

Pair individual immersion with collaborative sense-making.

Observing is one thing. Understanding is quite another.

When we bring our clients out to interview their customers, we typically take each individual leader to meet a different customer with a guide from Jump. Together, we go into the customer’s home or place of work, and we talk with them for as long as 3–4 hours. The clients each get to know this customer in a deep way. They often build a real connection, and their eyes are opened to something about their customers that they hadn’t noticed before.

We then gather together with the extended research or leadership team, each of whom has been interviewing other customers. We debrief together. We share stories, note commonalities and differences. We start to unpack the things that surprised us and what was unexpected. And we talk about implications — like ideas for what to do next, what new features/products/services might be helpful, or changes to how we’re doing things.

The same should be true if you’re using VR to build empathy in your organization. VR is just an observation tool. As a customer experience or insights team, you’ll still need to guide your people to help them make sense of it all. This means facilitating discussion, probing to go deeper, pushing past misconceptions, and helping the team capture what they’ve learned so they can do something with it.

VR is in an early adoption period. Don’t let the hurdles of explaining new technology stop your team from experimenting!

It might be premature to go all in and set up a desktop VR rig for everyone in your organization. The hardware is still new, and many of your colleagues will assume it’s just a science experiment. That makes a big roll out risky. But the time is right for testing now. Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Defy Ventures showed us that well-designed storytelling with VR can allow empathy to spread. That’s impact we all need. And it’s starting to happen now.

Jay Newman and Mike Smith are Directors of Strategy at Jump Associates, a leading strategy and innovation firm. Learn more at www.jumpassociates.com and connect directly with Jay at www.dhirubhai.net/in/jaynewman1 or Mike at www.dhirubhai.net/in/mikedesignstrategy.