SST 11 Podcast | Ep 25 | Redesigning Using Empathy Interviews

How do you find the root cause of an issue? Host Eric Neal sits down with the co-founders of Community Design Partners, Kari Nelsestuen and Julie Smith, to talk about understanding the perspectives of others and the design that is causing the problem in a system. Empathy interviews are 1-on-1 interviews grounded in asking for stories, and they are changing the approach towards the way we design "with" instead of "for". Learn more at CommunityDesignPartners.com.

Creators & Guests

Host

Eric Neal

State Support Team Region 11 Consultant and Podcast Host

What is SST 11 Podcast?

Podcast by State Support Team 11

Eric Neal:
Welcome to the State Support Team 11 podcast. I'm your host, Eric Neal. Today we are joined by Julie Smith and Kari Nelsestuen, of Community Design Partners. Welcome Julie and Kari, how are you today?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Oh, we're good, thanks for [inaudible 00:00:24].

Julie Smith:
Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Eric Neal:
Great. It's great to have you both. Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves, and the work you do at Community Design Partners?

Julie Smith:
Sure. I'm Julie, and I came to Community Design Partners out of working in the classroom as an educator and a building administrator, then at a school, and then did some state policy and advocacy work, and really started thinking about this whole mechanism of change was not centering those most impacted by the problems, nor by the solutions. So I met Kari, she had some great ideas and we co-founded Community Design Partners. That's how I came to it, Kari's slight difference.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah. My background, interestingly enough, is in research and evaluation. So I was almost 20 years on that side of education, looking at programs, and studying implementation of them, and what's working and what's not working. But the more I did that work, the more I craved to be on the other side. So that popular mantra in design of designing with not for, as an evaluator, it was always for. "Here's your report, here's your findings." And I just craved being on the with side, and helping people design themselves, with communities, and not apart from them. And so together we launched and have grown Community Design Partners. We do a lot of different work, and we're excited to be here today to talk about one of the things we do around helping teams do part of that with not for, through empathy interviews.

Eric Neal:
I attended your session on empathy interviews at this year's Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education. Can you explain empathy interviews a little bit more, and where they fit into the continuous improvement world?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah. So empathy interviews are a type of interview, it's a one on one situation, and they're really grounded in asking for stories. That's how they're different from a more traditional interview. People ask if you can have them as a focus group, or use them as a survey, but really an empathy interview is a particular type of interview. So I might ask just a few questions that go really deep into a story, like tell me about a time you couldn't wait to go to school. Tell me about a time maybe that wasn't the case, and you didn't want to go to school.
And you go really deep into those few stories and keep asking more questions like why? Tell me more about that. How did you feel? And through those stories, lots and lots of needs of the system emerge. And so it fits with continuous improvement, which is all about changing systems, right? Because these interviews can help uncover problems that we want to solve. They can help uncover the root causes of a problem that we're charged with solving, and they can also, again, raise those needs in the system so we can begin immediately to design and do some continuous improvement cycles over what we think are the improvements of the system.

Eric Neal:
Yeah. I came into the session with a misconception. I thought empathy interviews were a way to get the thoughts or perspective of the people in the system, but specifically about the system. And it seems like there are more of a way to find out about the needs of everyone that's in the system. Is that a fair way to explain it, Julie?

Julie Smith:
Yeah, I think it's a both/and though, not necessarily a misconception. We want to try and understand the perspectives and feelings of others, and I want to emphasize the word try because we will never actually be able to walk a mile in somebody's shoes. That's what empathy's all about. And then if we believe the improvement mantra, every system is perfectly designed to get the outcome it's getting, then we need to understand the design that is causing the problem. And that can often surface the needs of participants in the system that are oftentimes unacknowledged, sometimes hidden, but oftentimes they're right in front of us and we just don't acknowledge them in our system.
And sometimes it's better to ask about those stories that Kari was telling about outside of our existing system, because if we only ask questions about their experience within the system, they have that limited experience within those design parameters that's perfectly getting the outcome it's getting, that limits their ability to grab a story and tell us about it. So if we ask about a place where maybe they do feel a sense of belonging or a place that they never miss an opportunity to attend, to build on some of the examples Kari was sharing, we might learn about the qualities of that system that we want to use to redesign our system, and get different outcomes.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, that's where I came across the idea, where I think I heard the term first, was I did a training with Carnegie about how to launch and manage a network improvement community. And part of that was talking about root cause analysis, and empathy interviews were one of the things that they had brought up as one of those pieces of data that you would get to really get down to a root cause. So I mean, is it then asking those specific questions, Kari, about you want to know about who they are and their experiences and their needs, but you want to ask something that's going to get you some information that's going to tell you about the system. Maybe not how do you like the reading program, or something like that, but something more, I don't know, something harder to nail down?

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if I can, Eric, the first thing to just add is we try to really help people understand that empathy interviews should not be a one and done, like "Oh, we're doing our root cause, let's do them now, and then we've checked a box," but that we're doing them for multiple purposes at multiple points in time. And one of the beautiful things about this strategy, this tool, is that you don't have to spend interview every single person in the system to really have some deep learning. And so yeah, you're going to craft a protocol to your question. You're going to craft a protocol that gets at both questions related to however big or small your topic is, right? So you might be starting really broad with finding out about experiences in a place and you have to craft questions for that.
Or you might, let's say in one district, we worked on the issue of chronic absenteeism. And so you're going to want to craft questions that get at some of the root causes of that without specifically asking, "Why are you absent?" that isn't going to be helpful. It's not going to get the same sort of data as if you really are asking parents and their students some of those questions that I was starting with. Let's just start with tell us about, I think the question we used in that situation was, "Tell us about a time you wanted to go to school and you didn't make it." "Tell us about a time you did make it to school this week. What was that like?" And from those stories emerged the real root causes of what the barriers are to coming to school. And it often is not what the adults in the room thought, or the adults in the room wanted to start with as the priority.

Eric Neal:
Yeah. It's interesting that we don't do that in education very often. I've had conversations with districts before where they'll be attempting to figure out something like chronic absenteeism, and they'll have all these assumptions, but I'll say, "Well, why aren't they coming to school?" And they said, "Well, how would we figure that out?" I'm like, "Have you asked them?" It could be something really as simple as the idea of that, but then with much more planning and specificity about the protocol, and the way that you do it. So I've done a lot of work myself supporting schools and districts, and implementing social and emotional learning, and empathy interviews seem like a way to collect data on a much deeper level than where we see a lot of times like people do with surveys. You kind of touched on that a little bit. Now, what are some of the success stories where you've seen educators use data from empathy interviews to make positive changes?

Julie Smith:
Yeah. Well-

Kari Nelsestuen:
Maybe... Oh, go ahead Julie.

Julie Smith:
No, go, go. Do you want to [inaudible 00:09:43]-

Kari Nelsestuen:
I was going to wrap up that story.

Julie Smith:
Yeah.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah. I was going to wrap up that attendance story-

Julie Smith:
Yeah.

Kari Nelsestuen:
In that this was a district that, before they went to do empathy interviews, they'd done a fishbone diagram, which is a root cause analysis tool. And it felt, I guess, safe to start with a root cause like transportation. But when they really went out and talked to families and students, they realized while that is something they need to attend to, the things they were hearing from community really pushed them to look at inclusion and belonging in their system, especially for students of color, students from poverty. And so it really changed their understanding of the root causes, and where they were going to start.
Because you can't start everywhere. You can't start by solving every single root cause. And so they started by designing some change ideas around exactly that. And another thing that emerged, things you don't think about, when they were talking to students about what it feels like to come back to school when you've been absent for a long time, and the systems that are not designed to really welcome you back, and catch you up, and make you feel comfortable. So it was really eye-opening and they were really able to have a lot of success by using that strategy. And I think Julie has a super exciting story that's totally different from attendance.

Julie Smith:
Yeah, and I will share that, but I do want to name what Kari just walked us through in that example intersects with another place we geek out, and that's around the conditions of a system. And schools are historically really good, I mean, I think most organizations are really good at moving around the conditions that are tangible, or super explicit, like the policies, the practices, the resource allocation, the flow of resources. But what empathy interviews tend to help us do is see the more implicit conditions of a system and the strengths or the opportunities for change that happens there. And those are around the quality of relationships or the distribution of power, specifically decision making power, and then ultimately, what are the mental models or belief systems within this organization?
And so the story that I would offer really quickly is we supported ninth grade on track network where students are working in partnership with their adults to understand the ninth grade experience. And the theory of change or the driver diagram had a lot of policies and practices and resource flows on it. But when these students went to talk to the ninth graders at their school, they really started to highlight the importance of the quality of relationships between peers, and between adults and youth in the building. They really started to be able to show the power of shared power with youth in designing the structures and the way the day flows. One of them brought recess back to high school, and it was the best thing for everybody involved. And it helped them understand the mental models, especially around what is success for students, and do students or youth families and educators all share the same beliefs around what success for ninth graders are? So I think that's one of my favorite stories for sure.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, you're getting at something really interesting there. My work is mostly around continuous improvement, but I do touch on things like universal design for learning, and social-emotional learning, and some different things that get into that experience of it. It's great to have a system, and it's great to have plans, and we need to have all of those things, but if the people don't feel, all of the people, the people providing the education, the people receiving the education, and the families, feel safe and welcomed, it doesn't matter how good your system is. You're not ever going to get where you're trying to go.

Julie Smith:
Exactly.

Eric Neal:
Yeah. So I saw a project on your website called Leadership for Improvement Academy, and in the description I saw the phrase human-centered continuous improvement, which is what we were just talking about. And I hadn't seen that before, but I really liked it. What does that mean to you, Kari?

Kari Nelsestuen:
First of all, I love that you're digging through our website and finding that level of detail and that academy is one of our favorite things, working over time to really focus on problems that are of interest to leaders, and do continuous improvement in action. Not just learn about it, but be working on a project. So that was fun that you found that. We started calling it human-centered continuous improvement. Because first of all, I'll just say we don't do a solid, exactly fidelity to such and such model of improvement. We've taken starting with improvement science, but just adding from all the things we've learned from design thinking, and laboratory design. And we see the first principle of continuous improvement is traditionally said as be user-centered and see the system. We just think that's not quite enough attention to the importance of that be user-centered.
And actually it's more important to call it human-centered for lots of reasons. So focusing on, it's not just part of one of the principles. If you're doing continuous improvement well, you're being human centered at all stages. Wherever you are in your continuous improvement cycles, or in your understanding of problem, or it's root causes, that is a thing that is common across. And so that we can really emphasize that this is a methodology of with not for, right? If we're just out there traditionally doing the for, I'm doing this for you and not with you, we're probably going to perpetuate a lot of the same things in our systems.

Julie Smith:
And I would add that being human-centered necessarily just centering the humans that you are hopefully partnering with in continuous improvement, but there's a need to center your own humanness. So Kari and I as two white women who co-founded Community Design Partners, as an example, need to constantly check what we're bringing to process. Because we've had lived experiences, we've got to walk through the world in the skin that we're in. And because we're human, that's going to lead us to have assumptions, and bias, and privilege in conversations that we need to acknowledge that the humanness just goes both ways. And so you're on the hook for your own humanness too, in this work, not as maybe the leader or the facilitator of change, not just constantly centering the humanness of those partnering with you.

Eric Neal:
That's very well said. It leads me into what I want to talk about next. And equity has become one of the biggest buzzwords in education at the moment, and I feel like it often becomes a checkoff item rather than something that people have really taken to heart. Is this human-centered approach a way to get beyond that check off, and build ownership with everybody in continuous improvement efforts?

Julie Smith:
Yeah, I think that being human-centered in your improvement efforts is definitely a way to operationalize your commitment to equity, especially if you're taking time to understand those more implicit parts of your system, like the quality of relationships, the power dynamics, the beliefs and mental models that influence your decision making. And so empathy interviews can help you understand all those conditions to help you do a more just and continuous improvement process. But it is mostly about who you interview, who is doing the interviews, who is seeing the data, who has the power to make decisions, who's involved, right? Going back to that recognizing the skin you are in, and who's making the decisions, and that they're influenced by their experiences, they're influenced by their education, they're influenced by the research that that organization deems as most important. And so hearing those stories and partnering with those... Experiencing the system that you want to improve, I guess.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Can I add one thing, Eric?

Eric Neal:
No, jump in.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yeah. I think one of the things we're really careful. Some people say, "Oh, it's an interview. It's really easy. We'll just go do interviews." There's actually a lot to empathy interviews that is related to equity. It's about checking on power dynamics, and really being aware of those and addressing power dynamics of all kinds in an empathy interview, and really in all stages of continuous improvement. And it's about the protocols and rules and guardrails you put around a room as they're looking at the data and the stories.
So first of all, you want lots of voices there, lots of people with different experiences to look at the story data, but you also want to have rules where we believe people's stories. We're not explaining them away. We are not blaming individuals. We are embracing the information and the stories that they have told us, and not making inferences from our own perceptions about it. So it's not just about the what you do that's related to equity, but it's really the how you do it, and who is there to do it then. And all those things have to be present so that it isn't just a checkbox, like, "Oh, I went and talked to five of these people that needed to be talked to. I've attended to equity." That's not it at all.

Julie Smith:
And I would just say to that, we really help people be intentional about recognizing truth, right, and that's the truth of the individual, that's the historical truth of the community, and then that's the organizational truth. And to do continuous improvement that really centers equity, we need to be transparent about these truths and accepting of these truths in order to attend to healing, and to move forward in our efforts with those we're hopefully designing with.

Eric Neal:
I think that's so important. What you both have gotten to is that the process itself needs to be well attended to and well thought out, but not just that it's the follow-up. And not just the discussion follow up, but to actually, you'd almost be better off not doing them than doing them and then not doing anything about what you find out.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Yes, yes.

Eric Neal:
You have to have that commitment to move forward, or it really is going to make people feel even worse. Like, wait, I've laid everything out here for you and you still aren't doing anything.

Julie Smith:
Yeah, yeah, they're not going to come back, right? You're re-harming.

Eric Neal:
Yeah, definitely. So what is something each of you have coming up that you're excited about? We'll start with you, Kari.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Well, my daughter's graduating from high school, on a personal level.

Eric Neal:
That is exciting.

Kari Nelsestuen:
I don't know if you wanted a personal story, that is huge for me, but on a professional level, we've been working on something called Student Powered Improvement, and you can learn all about what that is at studentpoweredimprovement.com. But it's been the most rewarding work I've been doing, and we have an opportunity to expand further to look at what student powered improvement classrooms look like. Because a lot of the work to date has been about what happens when you truly empathize with students to change systems at a school or district level, or organizational level, to share power with students, to involve them in change, rather than, again, it's that with not for. So I'm really excited about taking that resource to the next level, and I'd love to hear from folks who are engaged in Student Powered Improvement classrooms without that label. It's not called that yet, but I'd love to hear from anyone who has some thoughts on it. Julie?

Julie Smith:
Yeah. I think the most exciting thing right now for me is thinking about teams as systems themselves, because I'm really interested in this human aspect of the system. I mean, the system has always seemed, or maybe this was just me, but it's always seemed outside, somewhere out here. And when we start to say, well, wait, I am part of this system with my colleagues, with my teammates, maybe with my students, and how do we apply some of this, the conditions of a system and what we know about human-centered continuous improvement, to enhance the culture on teams and the culture of improvement? But also just the quality of relationships, and how can we make work and teams be a place where you get to just thrive, because all those things are attended to? So we're working in a couple spaces where we're helping teams develop. It's our take on strategic planning, maybe, for a team, but it's really rooted in the conditions of the team.

Eric Neal:
That sounds great. So if people would like to know more about you, where should they go?

Julie Smith:
They should call us because we love to talk, but if they go to communitydesignpartners.com or to studentpoweredimprovement.com, we're all open source with what we do. So we have lots of resources on those sites. We have lots of articles we've published, especially Student Powered Improvement, has a lot of self-paced courses, including one on empathy interviews. But both of those websites do give you the ability to sign up just to consult on whatever you're doing with us. And so I think that's the best way.

Eric Neal:
Great. Well, I want to thank you both for joining me again. It's been a real pleasure.

Julie Smith:
Yeah.

Kari Nelsestuen:
Thank you, Eric. This was really fun. We're podcast famous now.

Eric Neal:
Yep.

Julie Smith:
In Ohio.

Eric Neal:
In Ohio. We've actually had listeners all over the world. So you're worldwide now.

Julie Smith:
Oh, my goodness-

Kari Nelsestuen:
Excellent.

Julie Smith:
Global!

Kari Nelsestuen:
It's an honor to be here.

Eric Neal:
Thank you so much. That wraps up this episode of the State Support Team 11 Podcast. If you'd like to know more about us and the work that we do here at SST 11, go to our website, SST11.org. Give us a call at [phone], or hit us up on Twitter. We're @SSTRegion11. If you'd like to get a hold of me, I'm at [e-mail]. Until next time, I'm Eric Neal. Thanks for listening.