Otter.ai Transcript

Dr. Stuart Nolan, an empathy trainer and author, discussed building empathy cultures in the UK, focusing on workplace empathy and data proof. He emphasized the importance of physical empathy, using ideomotor responses to teach participants to sense and read emotions without words. Nolan shared metrics from his workshops, including a 4.2x increase in empathy and confidence, a 22% reduction in patient complaints, and a 45% improvement in care coordination. He highlighted the need for more evidence-based empathy training, especially for SMEs, and introduced an AI diagnostic tool to assess organizational empathy levels.

Action Items

• [ ] Arrange a follow-up conversation with Dr. Stuart Nolan to discuss how her eco village could support his empathy training work.

Outline

Introduction of Dr. Stuart Nolan

• Cara Wilson introduces Dr. Stuart Nolan, highlighting his credentials as an empathy trainer, keynote speaker, stage performer, and author of "How to Train an Empath."

• Nolan's background includes a PhD in cultural history and theatrical and scientific mind reading, with over 35 years of experience.

• The focus of Nolan's talk is on building cultures of empathy, practice research, and innovation in the UK.

Empathy in the Workplace

• Nolan begins by discussing the two main challenges in the UK related to empathy: understanding empathy and data and proof.

• He reads an introduction from his book, "Catch a Smile," emphasizing the importance of physical empathy.

• Nolan explains the ideomotor response, where the body responds to thought in unusual ways, using an example from the Library of Congress.

• Physical empathy workshops start with ideomotor responses, teaching participants to sense and read intentions, emotions, and thoughts through physical contact.

Physical Empathy Exercises

• Participants in Nolan's workshops learn to sense ideomotor responses in others and read intentions, emotions, and thoughts.

• Examples include duplicating unseen drawings and finding hidden objects by holding hands.

• Nolan highlights the importance of physical empathy exercises, which have been part of his practice for the last 25 years.

• He mentions collaborations with UK universities and the significant return on investment for participating organizations.

Case Studies and Outcomes

• Nolan shares case studies from various sectors, such as a technology company, logistics company, creative company, government organization, and a Premier League rugby team.

• The outcomes include reduced resolution time, fewer late handovers, more viable ideas, improved teamwork, and reduced processing time.

• He emphasizes the importance of training all three dimensions of empathy: cognitive, emotional, and physical.

Diagnostic Tool and AI Integration

• Nolan introduces a diagnostic tool to help organizations move through the awareness ladder of empathy.

• The tool, available at stuartnolan.com/oed.html, is AI-based and trained on the three-fold model of empathy and past case studies.

• The tool aims to capture data before people take the step to talk to an empathy trainer.

• Nolan highlights the need for more evidence-based work in the field of empathy, especially for SMEs.

Challenges and Future Directions

• Nolan discusses the challenges of empathy training in the UK, including active resistance and the need for more evidence.

• He mentions a LinkedIn post titled "Does the word empathy give you the ache?" to address these challenges.

• The focus is on building an evidence base for empathy to make organizations more human.

• Nolan concludes with a personal note, emphasizing the importance of empathy and the potential for positive change.

Transcript Preview

Cara Wilson  0:00  

It is now my pleasure to introduce Dr Stuart Nolan, as he is an empathy trainer, keynote speaker, stage performer and author of How to train an empath. Lessons from a professional mind reader with a PhD in cultural history and theatrical and scientific mind reading and over 35 years of experience unlocking empathy through science, performance and play. Dr Nolan will be speaking on building cultures of empathy, practice research and innovation in the UK. Take it away. Dr Nolan,

Speaker 1  0:36  

hello, everybody. Give me a nod if you can see my slides. Cool. Okay, so I'm I'm going to be focusing on fairly recent work done with organizations. So I'm going to be talking about empathy in the workplace, and focusing on two different challenges that we have in the UK here. One is an understanding of empathy issue, and the other is more about data and proof. So they it's really a talk of two different halves that are quite different. So I want to begin by reading you the short introduction to my book. This introduction is called Catch a smile, and so play along with me, if you can, before diving into the pages ahead, take a quiet moment to try something simple but powerful. Close your eyes and bring to mind someone you love. Picture their face as vividly as you can now imagine that their face breaks into a smile, a real, joyful, unexpected smile. What happens as you picture this, notice what thoughts rise in your mind. Notice what emotions you feel. Notice what happens to your own face. This tiny moment contains all three kinds of empathy. You think about what that about what they are feeling. You share the emotion they feel, and most importantly for this book, you smile. Your body shares their smile. This book is about that third kind of physical empathy, the kind that moves through bodies before it is ever explained in words. Thank you for joining again. I saw some really lovely smiles happen then when you when you were thinking about those loved ones. Thank you.

Speaker 1  3:10  

So this is, this is the ideomotor response, the body responding to thought in ways that are interesting, unusual and sometimes astonishing. This is a group at the Library of Congress where I did my kluge fellowship. Eyes closed, imagining the future, their bodies tilt forwards. When they shift to imagining their past, their bodies tilt backwards. It's how all of our physical empathy Workshops begin. We then build step by step, teaching how the ideomotor response underpins empathy in the body through physical contact. Participants learn to sense those responses in others and read intention, emotion and even thoughts. They find objects somebody has hidden simply by holding their hand, they duplicate unseen drawings again by holding the hand of the person who did the drawing, they're continuously amazed. It feels like rediscovering something we can all do, but have somehow forgotten. Imagination and physical reality are not always as separate as we might assume.

Speaker 1  4:42  

You these physical empathy exercises have been at the heart of my practice for the last 25 years, eight UK university collaborations, two and a half 1000 people trained across 14 sectors. Three to six times return on investment on average with participating organizations. Here is someone duplicating another person's unseen drawing, simply by holding their wrist while they think about the shape they drew.

Speaker 1  5:23  

Here is the original drawing, and next to it the duplicate made in this exercise. They're not the drawings aren't always duplicated as accurately as this, and it kind of doesn't matter how accurate they get. The point is that they are feeling and managing to draw a drawing that they haven't seen through reading those IDEO motor responses. Here are some figures from an independent evaluation of a leadership program for the NHS that I was involved in. The headline, significant, immediate and lasting. 4.2 times, uplift in empathy, confidence, 22% reduction in patient complaints and a two year follow up, 45% improvement in care coordination, measurably reduced sickness absence, staff retention in improved within two cohorts. So here is the model that we work with, three dimensions to empathy, head, cognitive empathy, perspective, taking, active listening, theory of mind, foundational, necessary, widely talked in the UK. We should keep doing it. But it isn't sufficient. It doesn't stick heart, emotional empathy, feeling what another person feels. This is where genuine trust lives, and it is systematically avoided in professional contexts in the UK, because it is seen as too messy, that avoidance is a problem that we're trying to address here. Hands, physical empathy, somatic attunement, body to body, sensing, micro movement, reading, the ability to receive information about another person's emotional state that never becomes words. This is what somebody falls back on two weeks after they've been through training and cognitive empathy and trouble happens at work. They don't think in their minds, oh, what was that thing I learned two weeks ago? They respond physically. They respond with habit. And the only way to make these things stick is to build that habit in the smile you felt earlier, your face didn't wait for permission, the tilt in the body that didn't consult a three a theoretical framework, these are biological capacities, and they are trainable. We have a three dimensional model as a field in the UK, we are consistently training one dimension and only occasionally two. So some more quick case studies, the outcomes of the physical empathy work holds across sectors, especially when combined with other hands on strategy tools such as Lego series play a technology company, 54% reduction in resolution time. A logistics company, 43% fewer late handovers in a quarter a creative company, 38% more viable ideas per section, a government organization, Nesta, 87% staff engagement during a restructure sport, a Premier League rugby team, 25% improvement in teamwork on the field of play. As a Welshman, rugby is very important to me. In finance, payment processing time down by two weeks. Six sectors, six smart outcomes train all three dimensions of empathy. People work better together, and you can measure it

Speaker 1  9:22  

so we have we work to this awareness ladder. Why isn't the things I've talked about already standard practice, the awareness ladder describes where organizations sit in the UK at the bottom, entirely unaware of of what empathy is, unable to even define the word at the top, ready to engage and all those levels you have to go through before somebody will even think of booking an empathy trainer one minute. Oh, so this diagnostic tool we built to kind of move. People through that, I just said, be sure we have six minutes, because it's still you have six minutes. I have six minutes. In that case, I'll go back and ease off. Yes. So we have only 10% of UK employees actively engaged in their work, an estimate of 340 billion lost annually to disengagement, only 82% 82% of managers are appointed with nothing even related to empathy training in their training, and there are barriers before people will even begin to get on this ladder. We have all this active resistance to the whole idea of empathy. I wrote a LinkedIn Post this week to promote this that I called does the word empathy give you the ache? We have this problem, and we're trying to address it in different ways. So one approach is to make this AI based tool. So this is at Stuart nolan.com/oed.html

Speaker 1  11:11  

I've trained this ai, ai up on the three fold model, and the way my organization works past case studies, and it will take you slowly through a kind of a diagnostic, no replacement for a human of course, but it captures a bunch of stuff before people have to take that step to actually talk to me, which for a lot of people, is difficult. So please try that out. Hopefully, if lots of people use it, it'll also become a source of evidence, because evidence is the infrastructure of a movement, after all. So two questions that we have in the UK today that I flagged up at the start, what would our field look like if physical empathy got the same attention as cognitive empathy, both in academia and out in the field, and how do we build the evidence base for empathy with there is increasing good, strong evidence out there, but we need more, and we especially need more for SMEs, the most we have tends to come from large organizations, so we need more of this and To be less siloed and using it more so thank you. The hard evidence based work of making organizations more human matters more than we sometimes let ourselves believe in the UK. But this is the line I end my book with, because I believe it, people are bloody lovely. Thank you.

Cara Wilson  12:42  

Thank you. I apologize. I pushed the time early

Speaker 1  12:47  

to share. I feed, stop the shit. Okay, that was quite exciting when you I was, like on adrenaline rush, like I was on a fairground ride. I hope

Cara Wilson  12:57  

it was enjoyable and not stressful. No, no, I like those things. I loved this. I instantly smiled in that medit, in that practice, I will be using it before meditations and journaling to put me in the right state of mind. And I loved that head, heart and hands that makes it so visceral, dimensional, and then you took it to measurable and trackable. My BS, my belief system aligns beautifully with that is those, those metrics are what are going to allow us to take us from that empathy ick into that empathy evidence. And on a personal note, I would love to talk to you later, because my Eco village would love to support this awesome i.