A Practical Type of Empathy

Perhaps only 20% of real-life thinking is represented by the numbers and the predictions, yet organizations hate risk and insist on using these inference and assumption-based predictions. The only way to find out the other 80% of the story is to take time to listen to people. Explore how each person makes decisions in many similar scenarios — not just the one involving your product or service. Develop a sense of empathy that you can use later in your own decision-making. These patterns are what you use to balance big data. It’s pretty simple, but if your boss may resist this fuzzy qualitative data. Your best weapon is to then develop empathy with your bosses, then address the underlying goals confidently with your qualitative data.