It is interesting that Temple Grandin naturally sympathizes with animals, and through this sympathy has been able to design better experiences for them, while remaining unable to sympathize with “neurotypical” human beings.

With great effort, she has been able to derive rules to help her interact with other people and make sense of their behavior in a highly exteriorized way, resembling a physicist’s understanding of the behavior of matter under different conditions. But for all her diligent observing, pattern-finding and rule formulation, she cannot empathize. She has said that when she is in the presence of “neurotypicals” she feels like “an anthropologist on Mars”.

This offers some clues on the precise difference between empathy and sympathy. It is not that Grandin lacks all capacity for sympathy and intersubjective relationship. She easily sympathizes with animals, in a way many others find nearly miraculous. It is that she is sympathetic only to forms of subjectivity that resemble her own.

“Neurotypical” subjectivity on the other hand has greater capacity to acquire a degree of intuitive intersubjective relationship with people unlike themselves. But this is built on a foundation of sympathy. Neurotypicals intuitively sympathize with the empathic intuition of other neurotypicals. Both parties understand — or assume — that a mutual intuitive understanding is being sought — that each is attempting to intuit the other’s intuition. This assumption is false in the case of Grandin, who has no experience of this kind of mutual coming to understanding, and so she seems strange and can be misinterpreted as rude, and all sympathy is withheld.

*

In my experience, organizations tend to be oblivious to all perspectives other than that of its industry. Some fortunate organizations serve customers like themselves, who already share their perspective. Here, the organization naturally sympathizes with its customers in the way Grandin sympathizes with cattle. Other organizations are in industries so powerful, with so few real alternatives, (such as insurance, medicine, and government) that customers are forced to learn their perspective in order to deal with them. This kind of organization doesn’t have to sympathize.

But other companies differ from their customers and suffer from it. Though they are blind to the fact that perspectival differences exist at all (let alone differ) — they usually become aware of the material consequences of the difference. For instance, they may start to lose market share to more sensitive, responsive organizations, despite having an equivalent offering.

If such companies attempt to acquire an understanding of customers, more often than not they acquire an externalized, rule-based, explicit understanding similar to that of a high-functioning autistic person. That is, acquire only the kind of objective data that Grandin would seek.  Indeed most organizations work very hard to function as autistically as possible. Or to put a more positive spin on it, they strive to be scientific. To the greatest possible extent, they execute according to defined formal processes, guided all the way by validated objective facts. Whatever is “merely” intuitive, whatever cannot be operationalized, quantified and measured, is rejected on principle. Implicit, language-resistant understandings, like tacit know-how, feelings, aesthetic sensibilities and values — precisely the stuff empathy needs  — are filtered out by the processes, or distorted into facts for easier comprehension and handling.

And as a consequence, many organizations begin to take on the personality characteristics of the stereotypical physicist. Their movements are stiff, calculated and unnatural — simultaneously excessively self-conscious and self-unaware. And they also have the same rule-fixations, the same overpowering need for repetition, regularity and predictability that autistic people tend to display. These are not qualities normally associated with charm and charisma.

But no problem. At the last minute, the marketing department comes in and dresses the physicist up in a Hawaiian shirt, slathers his head with hair gel, teaches him teenage hipster slang, and gives him a crash course in pick-up artistry. Off he goes into the world, to acquire customers.

*

If companies wish to learn to empathize with customers, they will have to unlearn a lot of 17th and 18th century philosophical prejudices, and learn the new art of organizational dialogue.