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Empathy and Organizational Effectiveness with Belle Walker
58 Plays2 months ago
Belle Walker is the owner of Belleview Consulting, which takes organizations from Friction to Function by developing human-centric organizational models that help clients across many industries recapture lost efficiency and engagement.
Belle is an international bestselling author of the book Generation Innovation, a TEDx speaker, and has built several successful technology teams including one responsible for the quality of maps for autonomous vehicles, where she was awarded two patents. Belle began her career at Google, building a nation-wide aerial photography operation.
Belle has a Mechanical Engineering degree from Harvard and a Systems Engineering master’s from University of Southern California where her research studied organizations as systems.
LINKS
- Belleview Consulting
- Belle's LinkedIn
- The Friction Project by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao
- Graceful Extensibility by David Woods
- Resilience Engineering for Systems Engineering lecture by David Woods
- The Systems Bible by John Gall
- Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows
HOSTS
- Andrea Goulet LinkedIn | andreagoulet.com
- Ray Myers LinkedIn | Mender.AI
ABOUT EMPATHY IN TECH
Empathy in Tech is on a mission to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry by:
- Closing the empathy skills gap by treating empathy as a technical skill.
- Teaching technical empathy through accessible, affordable, actionable training.
- Building community and breaking down harmful stereotypes and tropes.
- Promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice.
Learn more at empathyintech.com
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Transcript
Rethinking Leadership Beyond Hierarchies
00:00:00
Speaker
I don't believe that leadership is uniquely tied to hierarchical authority. And so you are in trouble as an organization if your CEO is not a leader. You're probably in trouble if any of your managers are not leaders. However, you're also in trouble if all your leaders are in these managerial positions.
Introduction to 'Empathy in Tech' Podcast
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to Empathy in Tech, where we explore the deeply technical side of empathy. And the critical need for empathy in technology. I'm your host, Andrea Goulet. I'm Ray Myers. Today on the show, we have Bell Walker. Bell is the owner of Bellview Consulting, which takes organizations from friction to function by developing human-centric organizational models that help clients across many industries recapture lost efficiency and engagement. Bell is an international bestselling author of the book, Generation Innovation, and has built several successful technology teams including one responsible for the quality of maps for autonomous vehicles, where she was awarded two patents.
Bell Walker's Background and Career Path
00:01:03
Speaker
Belle began her career at Google, building a nationwide aerial photography operation. Belle is a mechanical engineering degree from Harvard and a systems engineering master's from University of Southern California, where her research studied organizations as systems. Thank you so much for being here, Belle. Thank you so much for having me. So to kick things off, tell us a little about yourself. What got you interested in business ah efficiency and engagement?
00:01:28
Speaker
I would say it might be less of a fascination with business efficiency and probably appropriate for this podcast, more of an interest in the humans in the businesses, because I noticed very early on in my career that pretty much everyone I worked with, and I'm even talking pre-Google, working at at airports and in construction companies, everyone I worked with kind of wanted to do good work. And often when there were efficiency gaps or challenges or roadblocks, it was very, very frustrating. And so no one was winning. The business wasn't winning. The employees weren't winning. And I started to realize that a lot of those roadblocks were this kind of invisible infrastructure that was underlying how people work together.
00:02:19
Speaker
And it struck me as an awfully similar problem to many engineering challenges piqued my interest. And ah that's kind of where I've played ever since. ah it's So cool. I
Balancing Empathy and Organizational Theory
00:02:31
Speaker
love that. And so you've led these large global software projects that have had major impact on the lives of everyday people, right? Like every time now I like use, you know, my maps, I think of you. Right. And in your experience, though, what specifically, what role does empathy play in these types of projects that you do? Yeah, I think empathy comes into play, particularly when you need to balance the human element with the theory.
00:03:03
Speaker
Right. I often talk about the evolution of organizational design, and it really started being codified back in ah parallel with a lot of the manufacturing, ah industrial revolution growth. And there was a whole theory of scientific management, where the idea was that people were interchangeable cogs in a machine.
00:03:28
Speaker
I think at this point, we know people are not interchangeable cogs in a machine. Also, cogs are not interchangeable in a machine. You can't just swap gears around, expect your watch to keep working. ah But I think we've swung really far the other way, and we end up creating organizations that I think of as the snowflake.
00:03:47
Speaker
models where it'll take one super unique and amazing person and end up building this whole organization around that person. And at the surface, that may seem very empathetic. Look how well we're supporting this uniqueness and humanity that the challenge is the singular nature of it, right? When you talk about a snowflake, a central component that's so difficult to find a balance with, it can harm succession planning, it can require everyone else to now conform to this one person's unique skills and strengths and needs. um And so for me, I think empathy is this much much more general characteristic of recognizing that everyone involved has things that they want to be working on and things that they don't want to be working on. The areas where they're going to thrive and excel and areas that are more challenging and
00:04:44
Speaker
you know Sometimes the things they want to work on are the areas that are more challenging. There's so much complexity there. However, if you ask the questions, a lot of it is quantifiable and can be brought together into solutions that serve a greater good. But you have to find that balance between what is the abstract theoretical design and what is the, oh, it's all about Ray.
00:05:09
Speaker
version and and that middle ground where many people can be successful and effective.
Systems Engineering and Resource Management
00:05:16
Speaker
So, Bill, I'm excited actually to be talking to someone who has studied systems engineering because I have been studying resilience engineering guru David Woods a lot, for instance, and he has been talking a lot about what do we need to change about systems engineering. And that was really the first time It even occurred to me like there is a special concept that systems engineering is uniquely. So maybe we should actually start there. What to you is systems engineering? like Why is it a separate field? Because I found that fascinating. Yeah, i I think of systems engineering as engineering the interfaces.
00:06:00
Speaker
and the boundaries and the dependencies. And so, because I happen to be married to an aerospace specific systems engineer, the default example I tend to lean on is a satellite. ah Because when you shove a satellite up in space with the one i believe exception of the hubble repair there is no maintenance there is no new you know there there are no new parts coming there's no additional power that's gonna start being generated one day you have a very fixed set of constraints that all need to play nicely together and before you do that launch the systems engineers.
00:06:39
Speaker
are the ones who are looking at all the different components the you the instruments that are on there the power generation the navigation controls and ensuring that the resources available and the needs of the entire spacecraft come into balance and alignment.
00:06:55
Speaker
And I like that example because I think there's a lot of parallels with an organization. There's more fuzziness at the boundary than a satellite in space. You do have access to more fungible resources. But in general, you can think of teams as being those kind of black box components. There are things that they need coming in and able to function effectively. there are There's information, there's products that need to come out.
00:07:24
Speaker
You absolutely can get really deep into how each individual team functions, but my experience has been that how you optimize a sales team and how you optimize an engineering team can be incredibly different, very similar to power engineering versus software engineering.
00:07:43
Speaker
ay But the boundaries, the interfaces, kitting those controls in place, that's something that can generalize much more effectively. Yeah. You mentioned David Wood's work. I love his work on the theory of graceful extensibility.
00:07:59
Speaker
because it talks very much about these things where it's like we have to manage the complexity so that we're growing responsibly and contracting responsibly and thinking of things as ecosystems. And Belle, I loved the idea of systems as interfaces and interactions. I haven't heard that before. That's really awesome.
00:08:19
Speaker
It's an explanation I came up with quite a while ago when I was part of a much larger organization running a systems engineering team, because it turned out most of my colleagues had no idea what we did, what we were there for. And the other challenge with systems engineering, much like project management and many other kind of glue functions, is that success is defined by the lack of failure. And so if If everything flows from A to Z, your systems engineers have done good work. If there's enough power for everything that needs power, your systems engineers have done good work. ah When there are issues, it's really easy to celebrate how quickly those issues are addressed. It can be much harder to articulate all of the fires that were prevented versus the ones that were put out.
00:09:13
Speaker
so I think anyone would agree that it sounds great to have better systems. It's good for the people. It's good for the business.
Challenges Leaders Face in System Improvement
00:09:23
Speaker
And yet, why don't more businesses already have better systems? What gets in the way of that, do you think? i It's a great point. And I think there are quite a few primary obstacles. Often, the biggest obstacle I see is the number of needs pulling at the leader and leadership at any given time. and so It is easy to fixate on revenue. It is easy to fixate on releases. It is easy to even fixate on number of bugs fixed.
00:10:04
Speaker
All of those metrics, when you turn your attention to the systems underlying your ability to deliver on them, are going to experience a slowdown. There is an almost inevitable go slow to go fast component to systems analysis, improvement, iteration, and very few organizations have the discipline and bandwidth and leeway to commit to that go to slow to go fast moment, even if it's only in a certain part of the business, without some sort of external forcing function. And so this is part of why I think there's real value in coaches, consultants. I i tell a lot of my clients, I have one job. My job is to come and help you fix your systems.
00:10:54
Speaker
you whoever I'm talking to has probably eight jobs, right? You are, you need to fix your systems and you need to deliver on your targets and you need to care for your team members and you need to and you need to and and so they've got a whole list. This is part of why it's so helpful to have people who can be really focused and dedicated, because you know, it's important. But it's so hard to keep that prioritization in balance with all of the other more immediate demands.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah, it makes me think too. like You mentioned leaders, um but who creates a system? like Who's responsible for this? Because I think you mentioned that a lot of people feel like cogs in the machine, and that is absolutely true from you know my experience. I know a lot of people who um I've talked to over the years. like They just feel really disempowered. And you know I think it makes sense that you know the CEOs, the executives, that they would be you know responsible for system optimization. But what about um people who are more individual contributors? Maybe a software developer or a test engineer or product manager? Do they play an active role or just a passive role in systems engineering?
00:12:04
Speaker
Oh, for sure. active And this gets into a terminology question where I try very hard to use the word leader specifically, because i I don't believe that leadership is uniquely tied to hierarchical authority. And so you are in trouble as an organization if your CEO is not a leader.
00:12:25
Speaker
you're probably in trouble if any of your managers and positional authority people are not leaders. However, you're also in trouble if all your leaders are in these managerial positions, right? I i tend to think of leadership as ah that motivational element that inspires people to want to move in a particular direction. The ability to articulate that vision for the future, to march forward and to have folks march along with you. um I see it as a ah necessary but insufficient component for management because you have to motivate, inspire, and support and enable if you're managing. um But so I really appreciate that.
00:13:11
Speaker
call out because leadership comes from any seat, any chair. And I'm going to lean a little bit on the like the COGS metaphor again because What I've realized is that practically speaking, a leader in an in the C-suite is like a giant cog and they only have to turn a little bit and then all the other cogs in the machine are going to go moving right along with them. And often as you're farther down in a hierarchical organization,
00:13:42
Speaker
The impact is like a smaller cog. You can move the whole dang machine, but you're going to have to rotate a lot more times to get the same impact that a larger gear would be able to create. And so I think it can be frustrating as someone who's not in those more senior positions But I really hope that that doesn't stop people from trying and pushing because the end result absolutely can be as great or greater from really anywhere within the organization.
Leadership as Motivation, Not Position
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think I mentioned this on an earlier episode, but in the research that I've been doing on empathy and how it relates to systems, that's also changed my view of leadership because now it's like now a a leader to me is somebody who thinks in a relationship system. So they have made that kind of conceptual leap. So rather than just thinking about their own conditions, they're thinking about myself and it can just be one other person.
00:14:40
Speaker
right? Myself plus another person and the interactions between them because Donnella Meadows, ah I love her book, Thinking and Systems. And she defines systems as it's got elements, it's got interactions and a purpose. And so if we look at that, that can be as tiny as like me and you and we're interacting for a purpose. So as soon as somebody starts like making that conceptual leap to seeing their relationships as systems, then I think that unlocks a lot of the you know what we would classify as a leader because then you're you're moving people along um exactly like you said.
00:15:18
Speaker
And I think sometimes it can be hard because sometimes people identify more as introverts or it's like there's that idea of, oh, I'm not really a leader, but I know I've seen this where it's like, no, you you really are a great leader, but you've internalized this idea of a leader is very charismatic and they're the CEO. Does some of your work um revolve around changing mindsets and you know getting to more of that human element of you know thinking about how we think about things? so but honestly not I often differentiate between what I literally call hearts and minds work and the more structural
00:16:01
Speaker
systemic pieces. And so i I do think it is important to talk openly about some of those mindset shifts and the implications. um However, I think that to be effective in the system design for the broader organization,
00:16:21
Speaker
recognizing those different approaches to leadership can be really important in constructing a system that takes best advantage of all of those skills that are coming to the table. so For example, if you define successful leadership in your organization as someone who can get up in front of a large audience and inspire everyone and have them all ready to go back to work, pumped and motivated.
00:16:52
Speaker
and That is what leadership means in your organization you are going to miss out on a ton of talent and a ton of people who really thrive in those one-to-one moments and honestly tend to have much more consistent and net net larger impact.
00:17:10
Speaker
And so I i think it it is important to have open dialogue about it, but I tend to think of it more, again, at that broader level, making sure that there are that there's terminology and there's roles and there's opportunities for different styles.
00:17:23
Speaker
versus me personally sitting down with individuals and and talking about their style and how best to do it. but That's why I love that there's people like you all in the world who can make sure that those leaders are having that individual support to see themselves in their leadership.
00:17:41
Speaker
Great. So we've talked a lot about what it looks like if we get to the state where we want to be. But as far as tactics, how to get there when you're absolutely not in that place, ah getting to specific implementations, what are some important things our listeners could start doing immediately to use empathy to create more effective organizational systems?
Empathy's Role in Organizational Systems
00:18:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm pretty open about my process. I've written articles about it. I'm happy to share it all over. I have pretty much lifted and shifted the engineering problem-solving process. I make sure I spend a lot of time with the teams digging into what are the problems they're trying to solve. No, really, right? Borrowing on the five whys.
00:18:29
Speaker
And I think if there's any one thing you can do to best serve your organization, that that's the starting point, right? Having alignment around not the symptoms, but the problems, the underlying issues, the sources of pain and inefficiency in your organization, it can be much, much, much harder for those sources to survive once they've been exposed and seen the light of day. So that's practically probably the number one thing.
00:18:59
Speaker
And once you have clarity around the problem or problems you're trying to address, really digging in on what are the resources? Who are the people? What are their strengths that they're bringing to the table? Also looking at the constraints you're working within, right? Somebody may only have a direct impact on ah the team that they manage or the team that they're a part of.
00:19:22
Speaker
And so there's going to be a lot of constraints in that scenario. But even a CEO is working within often budget market big picture constraints. And by the time you really talked through, what is your problem statement? What are your resources? What are your constraints? My experience has been that there's you very, very rarely one solution, but you have heavily constrained your solution space and it becomes much easier to kind of define two or three philosophical approaches to how you want to now create these structures and processes and pick the pieces that will serve your organization best. So for me, it's really about understanding what you're working with, using that to limit the solution space to things that can be effective.
00:20:09
Speaker
and then really getting down to what works best in this case. What you're talking about makes me think of the language pearl. And there's a motto in there of like, there's more than one way to do things, which I think is really neat. um But I wanted to come back to the five whys, because I know that's something that if we're in this world, like, and we're familiar with some of these ideas, that that might be like, oh, yeah, I know what that is. But for listeners who are they're not familiar with that, what is that practice? And like, how might they actually go about ah doing that exercise. Yeah, it is an aptly named exercise. The theory is if you ask why and then take the answer you're given and ask why again and keep doing that five times, at least five times down, you will get to some point where there is no deeper
00:21:01
Speaker
why. And so the sort of canonical example that I learned in school had to do with airports and runways and i one particular airport having no noise control noise abatement issues on one approach and always using that approach and the issue is how do we reduce the noise and the answer is the airplanes are too noisy. Why are the airplanes too noisy? Well, they keep having to go around when they're on that approach. Why did they keep having to go around? oh Because there's birds on that approach more often than not. Why are there birds? oh Because we don't cut the grass very often. and so
00:21:43
Speaker
they were able to reduce the airplane noise on that particular approach by mowing the lawn more frequently. Yeah, I love that. It's so cool how like when you go through a process like that, it's like, wait, what? And I think it can be helpful, too, to articulate the specific path of how one thing impacts another. One of the challenges that I've had when I've done this and is that there can sometimes be multiple reasons that are contributing. So when you do this exercise, how do you determine what
00:22:19
Speaker
is the major impact because sometimes it's like you have why, but then it can quickly become this like unmanageable thing because there's so many different ah kind of dependencies and conditions that when you start digging into it. So how do you help people think through what is the most important thing to focus on?
00:22:38
Speaker
right Yeah. and ah For a couple of different answers to that, I think one is setting baseline expectations as much as possible upfront about what is the level of depth appropriate for the conversation. If you're talking to a CEO, it may be that there are five root causes as to you know why the market has shifted. And yet,
00:23:04
Speaker
knowing that the market has shifted is is actually the only level of depth you need to go to in this particular conversation. and so artificial constraint, honestly, is one of the easiest ways to agree not to go down that rabbit hole. um And then as is my won't, I would say the ah sort of other end of the spectrum is to just lean into it and say, okay, for a certain period of time, classic brainstorming, let's go to all the wise, get them all laid out there. And then you can start looking for patterns and aggregations and seeing, okay, there may be 50 different root causes, but are there really?
00:23:43
Speaker
fifty different root causes when we start allowing ourselves to get granular, what are the patterns, what are the aggregations, and can we now sort of go back? ah this's Something I i ask a lot of and try to ask everyone i I work with is, when you are problem solving, are you someone who is more comfortable thinking at the high level and then coming back and saying, how do we do this? Or are you someone who really needs to think about the building blocks?
00:24:12
Speaker
and then look for the patterns among them. And I found very few people have asked themselves that, but almost everyone hears me ask that and and just has an answer. they're They know which which approach they're more comfortable with, and I try to lean into that. Yeah. I know you mentioned the theory of constraints, right? I know that that's an area where you love to nerd out a little bit.
Learning Resources for Systems Thinking
00:24:33
Speaker
What are your thoughts there around constraints, and what have you seen in your work?
00:24:37
Speaker
Oh, so much. You know, a theory of constraints I see is, you know, one of the many flavors of systems thinking. And I think it fits well into the engineering brain and it does a good job of targeting blind spots that people habitually have in a similar way to you mentioned earlier that you think systems engineering is kind of defined by the interfaces.
00:25:05
Speaker
I think one of the reasons why it's useful to think about systems thinking in that way is that people have no trouble envisioning that the system has components. They're not unaware that there are components, but they are often oblivious to the relationship between those components. So, you know, that's where, OK, put your goggles on and now just see the edges instead of the notes, just see the edges between them. You're going to open yourself up to more insight.
00:25:33
Speaker
In that vein, and I would I don't think it's exaggerated to say over the last couple of years, learning about systems thinking has like been one of the biggest changes like in my entire life. So um I put a lot of weight on this. I know a lot of people are interested in diving more into it, but it can be really challenging. What resources do you recommend for people who want to learn more about systems thinking?
00:25:55
Speaker
For systems thinking broadly, um I tend to keep coming back to John Gall's systems Bible. and it's It's an oldie. It's a goodie. I love things like the Twin Limit Theorem around you can't change one thing without changing everything, but you can't potentially change everything in a system that that is not the most articulate version of that. Go read the book. Man says it very well.
00:26:21
Speaker
um Also, more recently, there was a book that a couple of Stanford professors put out, and Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, called The Friction Project that is very near and dear to my heart as my company's motto has been taking organizations from friction to function. i mean That's been our motto for years. and that The Friction Project really dives deeper into sources of friction and also distinguishing between positive and negative friction areas where it most leaders tend to focus on negative friction. This is slow, this is hard, this is painful, and I don't want it to be. There are also areas in the business that should be slow and hard and painful.
00:27:09
Speaker
because they're not serving the greater business or the greater good. So that can sort of serve as a disincentive as well. So that level of nuance is not something I can often get into on my own. So I love that book as a resource to help clarify some of these nuances. And they really get into specifics as well around how leaders and individual contributors alike can drive change from their corners of the organization, tools available, etc. Yeah, when I was reading that book, I loved it too. And it also made me think a little bit about kind of the um
00:27:48
Speaker
tension between transparency and privacy. I really liked how they framed the like, there's good friction and there's bad friction. And in more like, I think concrete example there is like, we don't want everyone to have access to everyone else's bank account numbers, right? Like we do need to have friction there and the friction there is privacy.
00:28:10
Speaker
But at the same time, we can't keep everything secret and everything private and everything componentized because then we don't get those interactions that we need. So yeah when we're thinking about it in terms of software specifically, that to me, and like especially when we're talking about like AI models and like You know, are they opaque or are they you know open? There's a lot of different stuff there that I think a lot of people today are really Trying to grasp and I love the way that you're thinking about this in terms of the more human centric model and the interactions Like what is it that humans are going to be doing with this system?
Dialogue on Empathy and Technology
00:28:46
Speaker
um I wish I could keep talking with you forever and it's awesome. And this is such a great episode I we have one final question and And we ask all of our guests, which is what do you think is the most important thing that should happen at the intersection of empathy and technology right now?
00:29:04
Speaker
I think the most important thing that needs to happen in that intersection is open and ongoing conversation. um I think these are two very complex concepts. I think technology is constantly evolving, and I think that individual humans are constantly evolving. So effective empathy in one situation, in one moment, is going to look different from effective empathy 10 minutes later, let alone 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 months.
00:29:34
Speaker
And so the more we can do to, there's a reason I'm on this podcast, right? there's more The more we can do to encourage the conversation and bring these ideas into open dialogue and open engagement, the better chance I think we have of effectively leveraging empathy in our technology solutions and leveraging technology to enhance our empathy.
00:30:03
Speaker
This has been an amazing conversation. How can people get in touch with you and learn more about your work? I'm pretty easy to find. LinkedIn and my website are probably the two easiest ways to get a hold of me. LinkedIn, I'm Belle Kay Walker and my website is bellevueconsulting.com. It's B-E-L-L-E like my name, V-I-E-W because this company does share my views on the world, consulting.com.
00:30:30
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you so much, Belle. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Just a reminder, empathy in tech is on a mission to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry by doing several things. First, closing the empathy skills gap by treating empathy as a technical skill, teaching technical empathy through accessible, affordable, and actionable training.
00:30:51
Speaker
building community and breaking down harmful stereotypes and tropes, and promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice. So if you found this conversation interesting, join our community of like-minded technologists who care about compassion and empathy and technology. Go over to empathyintech dot.com to keep the conversation going. You can sign up for our newsletter and we've got a Discord channel. That's also where you'll find podcast episodes.
00:31:19
Speaker
And thank you so much for listening and we will see you in the next episode.