A company stays relevant when it keeps learning what people actually need and adjusts what it creates around that understanding. In a fast-changing environment, plans age quickly, technologies arrive faster than organizations learn to use them, and teams often begin working on solutions before they have spent enough time understanding the problem.
In this conversation, we explore empathy as a business practice: a way of getting closer to customers, employees and other stakeholders so that we can understand their experience before deciding what deserves to be built or changed.
My guest is Michiel Bloemendaal, one of the people behind Studio Why in the Netherlands, an organization that helps companies become more entrepreneurial. His work focuses on organizational behavior, design thinking and human-centered innovation. He has worked with organizations across education, government, financial services and other industries, helping teams approach complex problems through the perspective of the people involved.
Michiel defines an entrepreneurial mindset around the ability to see opportunities and translate them into value for other people. From his perspective, an organization is ultimately the behavior of a group of people. Strategies and structures provide orientation, while everyday behavior determines how adaptive an organization becomes.
That changes the way we think about innovation. A team can have access to new technology, build sophisticated systems and invest in new structures. The outcome still depends on whether people find what was created useful enough to adopt. Empathy gives us a way to investigate their experience: what they see, what influences them, what frustrates them and what they are trying to accomplish.
People react from their own experiences, but that’s something that that is not helping if you want to investigate what’s important for someone else. So you need more like an exploration driven mindset. Want to know more about someone else.
Michiel Bloemendaal
This exploration-driven mindset runs through the entire conversation. We tend to enter discussions carrying years of experience and assumptions about customers or colleagues. Experience helps us recognize patterns. It can also make us too confident in what we think we already know. Michiel suggests approaching conversations with curiosity and spending more time exploring someone else’s experience.
The same principle appears in design thinking. Michiel describes it as a human-centered innovation method that begins by identifying the stakeholders involved in a challenge and learning from them through conversations, observation and data. As those perspectives accumulate, teams begin to see patterns. The original definition of the problem frequently changes along the way.
There is a useful consequence here for entrepreneurs and managers. Having an idea is only the beginning of the learning process. Once we become attached to a solution, conversations with customers can quietly turn into attempts to defend or sell it. At that point, feedback becomes less useful. People sometimes agree because they feel that agreement is expected, and the weakness of the idea appears much later, when the finished product receives little adoption.
Testing therefore becomes a learning activity. We put an early version in front of people, observe their reaction, ask why something works for them or fails to work for them, and use what we learn in the next iteration.
And there’s a whole iterative process. And that’s what design thinking is all about. You come up with an idea that you think, okay, this could be something, something helpful for someone else. And then they say, no, this is not it. Okay, why is it not like this? And then you’re starting to learn.
Michiel Bloemendaal
One of the more useful parts of the discussion comes when Michiel connects this process with participation. When customers, employees or other stakeholders contribute throughout development, their experience becomes part of how the solution evolves. The organization learns alongside them.
So you want to learn all the time from all different people, what’s good and what’s bad for them. And then you’re trying to figure out, okay, is this helpful for you? And a side effect of this is that you have this, these stakeholders. Involved in the innovation process, which means that when you want to introduce it and you really listened to them, and you iterated your own ideas with with their ideas, yeah, that you come up with a solution that that really fits to them, and that they really want to buy or use as well because they were involved.
Michiel Bloemendaal
The conversation also looks at what happens inside organizations. Change depends heavily on the environment people experience every day. Employees need enough psychological safety to share ideas, challenge assumptions and contribute perspectives that managers themselves do not have. Complex problems usually involve several stakeholders, each seeing a different part of the situation. Understanding those perspectives helps a team redefine what it is actually trying to solve.
This is also where empathy becomes closely connected with business relevance. Customers rarely hand us a complete description of what they need. Sometimes they have adapted to a problem. Sometimes they describe what they want through the vocabulary of existing products. The work is to explore their environment and behavior until patterns begin to emerge.
For readers who want to continue exploring the approach discussed in the episode, Tim Brown’s Change by Design is a useful companion. It examines design thinking as a human-centered approach to innovation and shows how organizations can move from understanding people’s experiences toward experimentation and iterative development.
Our conversation with Michiel ultimately leaves us with a practical question to carry into our own work: how much of what we believe about customers, colleagues and users comes from observing their actual experience, and how much comes from assumptions accumulated over time? The distance between those two can shape what we decide to build, how we introduce change and how well our work remains relevant as the environment around us changes.
Main Ideas
- Your organization is shaped by what people do every day. Plans and structures give people a framework, while the behavior inside the organization determines how well you adapt when circumstances change. If you want a more entrepreneurial organization, focus on creating an environment where people look for opportunities to create value for customers, colleagues and other stakeholders.
- Empathy helps you understand the problem before you work on the solution. Complex situations rarely arrive with an obvious problem statement. You see symptoms and know that something needs attention. Empathy helps you explore how other people experience the situation. Spend time with customers, employees and users. Learn what matters to them and use their perspective to define what deserves your attention.
- Curiosity changes the quality of your conversations. Experience easily becomes a filter through which you interpret what other people need. When you explore someone else’s experience, listen with the intention of learning more. Ask what influences them, what they see around them, what they are trying to achieve and what sits behind the words they use. Several conversations with different stakeholders help you identify patterns that one conversation would easily miss.
- Treat your ideas as things to test. Once you believe in an idea, you can easily start defending it while asking people for feedback. That changes the conversation because people sense what answer you want. Put your idea in front of the people who would use it and pay attention to their reactions. When they reject something, explore why. Each iteration gives you information that helps you improve the next version.
- Technology creates value when people choose to use it. A sophisticated technology still depends on human behavior. Before introducing a new system, understand what employees or customers find useful, what creates resistance and what influences adoption. Observation, conversations and data help you see the situation from their perspective. This human-centered approach helps you redefine the original challenge and develop solutions around real behavior.
