Michael Ventura & Justin Bokmeyer on Perspective-Taking in the Armed Forces

Michael Ventura is the CEO of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design studio which he founded in 2009. He is the author of Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

September 5, 2019

MARK HANNAH: I'm Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast dedicated to seeking new answers to America's foreign policy questions. In that spirit, we are doing something a little different with this episode. Today we have two guests who come from radically different backgrounds. The first is Justin Bokmeyer, a West Point graduate who served in Iraq before returning to West Point. The second is Michael Ventura, the founder of the strategy and design firm Sub Rosa. They are a bit of an odd couple that was brought together by a common idea, applied empathy.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: In the morally complex battlefields of modern conflicts, being able to take on diverse perspectives has proven to be a skill almost as important as tactical wherewithal. As important as it is, it has not been viewed as something that should or even can be taught. Thanks to Michael and Justin, in part, this is beginning to change. Let's start with Justin.

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JUSTIN BOKMEYER: I was a field artillery officer, and I served in all different locations. I was deployed to Iraq and then finally, through different jobs and different experiences, got back to West Point as my final job before leaving active duty.

HANNAH: And when you were there during that period, and you looked around, were there ways in which your experience in a war zone—it kind of dawned on you that empathy might be something that could well serve the people under your command?

BOKMEYER: Yeah, absolutely. Just understanding your unit better, understanding your people. I was a platoon leader, and your right hand, enlisted soldiers, have so much more experience and have been around and are leaders. And you lean on them a lot to make decisions. Part of the process to understand them better—I wish I would have learned or knew some of the things I've learned over the past couple of years—is around empathy.

HANNAH: Empathy is a sort of a muscle you're working that would have helped, I imagine, your relationship with your platoon as well as, probably, the relationship with the locals and the host country. Is it fair to say?

BOKMEYER: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

HANNAH: Can you give us an example of that or talk about that for a minute?

BOKMEYER: Yes. We were responsible for an area, keeping the route safe. We lived on an Iraqi army base for a while. And so that partnership with them was crucial to understanding the locals. And if we're able to understand ourselves, our team, and our unit, then everybody's on the same page about what we need to do and learn in order to understand the local population and what they actually need, instead of coming through it with a lens of, “This is what's best for us,” which at times, for safety, has to be done. But there are things that if we think through different lenses, different ideas, and go through different thought processes, we overcome our own bias, and we can see what's best for the local population instead of just building all these schools or putting all this money out. We start to think strategically about what's best, and I think at a lower level, learning empathy is a skill that a lot of soldiers could benefit from.

HANNAH: When you went back to West Point as an employee and were trying to give these students, these cadets, the education you wish you had had, what was the end game? What was the goal for you?

BOKMEYER: What I wanted to give back was, how do we create more dynamic thinkers and problem solvers?

HANNAH: This brings us to Michael Ventura. His firm specializes in using empathy to achieve all kinds of goals in both government and business. He literally wrote the book on the subject. It's entitled Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership.

MICHAEL VENTURA: The United States Military Academy at West Point had reached out because they had seen the work we were doing with applied empathy, and they said, “This is an interesting platform that we think could be valuable in leadership development and skills development. And we'd like you to come up and do a couple of lectures.”

Interlude featuring archival audio

VENTURA: When I got there, I was able to sit across the table from faculty and administration and cadets and have these conversations. I started to discover I had my own bias pointing me in a different direction when I got there. I expected this to be an eye rolling type of thing—like when I sit across from these people, they're like, “Oh, my God, who's this guy here to talk to us about empathy?”

HANNAH: For anybody who's just listening, because we can't see Michael—He's got a big shaggy beard. He's unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt. He's not somebody you would expect to bump into on the campus of West Point.

For Justin, it was exactly this difference that made Michael so valuable.

BOKMEYER: I mean, people ask questions. The typical instructor or faculty member is clean shaven, for males. And you bring him in and pass his bio around, and he talks about Burning Man. And half of the faculty doesn’t even know what Burning Man is because it's such a foreign thing. But that's why I loved it. And that's why I knew he needed to be at West Point, because he had such a diverse thought process about leadership and developing as individuals. And I wanted him there.

VENTURA: And so I go through these training sessions, and I am pleasantly surprised in every instance with the voracious consumption of the material, with how curious people are, with how valuable they think it is. And we end up going a little further down the curriculum for the day. I get invited to sit down with the superintendent of the school, and he's a three-star general career military guy.

And I asked him, “Why am I here? What is it this does that's valuable?”

And he said, “Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, we're a military governed by civilians. And if we can't perspective-take on Congress, on our commander-in-chief, and understand the rationale and the inputs to their decision making, we're just blindly following orders. We're a leadership development academy, and leaders need to understand why, because sometimes they need to communicate why to the folks in their ranks.”

HANNAH: Right. Because West Point is training the next generation of military officers who will be commanding in overseeing groups of enlisted service members.

VENTURA: When you graduate, you are, within a few months, often deployed and responsible for up to forty lives as a 21-year-old. Well, I remember what I was like at 21. I was lucky I made it out alive on my own. So it's amazing to think these young men and women are preparing for such a significant life shift. Part one that he said was, “We are governed by the civilian population, and we need to understand them if we're to do our job well. And also, sometimes we might need to know that kind of understanding because we might need to push back, or we might need to challenge an opinion because we have a different view. And we might have to debate that a little bit. And if we don't understand the other side, we're at a disadvantage to have that type of discourse.” The second reason he said it's important is because he said most military cadets who graduate from here will go do a couple tours at most. And then they will probably go into the private sector. He said, “One of the things I've learned in my experience is that the best leaders I've ever worked with, either in the military or outside of the military, were leaders who modeled empathy in their leadership style.” And particularly for these young cadets at 21 years old, with forty people in their command, those forty people are going to have come to them from very different walks of life. You might have some folks who have a GED-level education and have enlisted. You may have some folks who have a four year degree and have enlisted. You may have some folks who come from very different socioeconomic statuses. And while, yes, there is a command and control environment that exists in any military structure, and of course, in combat, there isn't a lot of time for debate and perspective-taking, per say, there's also a lot of planning and a lot of leadership and a lot of preparation that occurs before and during and after when empathy does have a role to play.

HANNAH: And a lot of downtime during deployments where, presumably, having a rapport with the people under your command is as valuable.

VENTURA: There was an example someone gave about that. They said most of our battles now don't happen in some far-flung field away from civilian populations. They often happen in towns and cities and more rural settings. And we still have that downtime. And so, are we training the type of soldiers who, on downtime, are just blindly walking down a street in a city in a far-flung part of the world in their fatigues and their hulking gear and all of that, looking very different and very foreign? Or are we training the type of officers that when they walk in, they might see a teenage kid in front of their parents’ market looking at them in a strange way, and they'll stop and say, “Do you know why we're here? Do you know what we're here to do? What do you do? What's your life like?”

And maybe they get invited in for tea. And maybe they have a conversation with the parents. And maybe they actually get to know the landscape in a different way that saves someone's life down the line. That perspective really shifted the way I thought about empathy in the military, too.

HANNAH: So, Justin, what is empathy to you?

BOKMEYER: I think Michael has helped me understand what empathy is. At first, I thought it was just understanding others through their eyes. But it's a lot deeper than that. And it brings in understanding of the environment and the context around other people and why they're making the decisions, acting, and behaving the way they do.

HANNAH: And this isn't something people do naturally, right? Or is it?

BOKMEYER: I think some people can. Very few. Michael being one of them, probably. But it can also definitely be learned and taught just like leadership.

VENTURA: I think it is an inherent trait of all humans. I think some have more of it than others, for sure, and the thing I like to reference is that if you go back to the earliest stage of civilization and look at some of the artifacts left behind, you almost always see cave drawings. Right? And what are cave drawings, if not a want to understand and be understood, to tell a story? This is us. This is where we were. This is what we learn. This is how we see the world. How do you see the world? Right? Let's leave this behind for someone else. Let's share our perspective. To me, that's an indicator that we're wired to share, but we don't train that muscle often enough.

And so it atrophies for many people. And they think it's some special gift and that they don't have it and other people do. Well, if you practice it like we practice piano every day, you know, you're going to get better at it.

HANNAH: And your book Applied Empathy actually has a lot of actionable instructions for how one can practice empathy. Can you give us some examples from your book of ways people can hone these skills?

VENTURA: It's important to frame this a little bit in the type of empathy we talk about, because there are three general types, psychologically speaking, of empathy. There's what's called affective empathy, with an A, and that is what I sometimes refer to as golden rule empathy. It's, “You’re sad. I've been sad before. When I am sad, I want people to treat me this way; so I treat you that way, right?” There's a folly in that because it comes with my bias. What if when you're sad, you want to be left alone? When I'm sad, I want to be consoled. Therein, I will have treated you the wrong way because I brought myself too much into it. And that's why I think empathy sometimes gets a bad rap in the zeitgeist, because people hear empathy and equate it to being nice, being sympathetic, being compassionate. Empathy is none of those things. Those are side effects of perspective-taking. But when you think about affective empathy, of course, it gets co-mingled with those sorts of things because nobody would want to be treated poorly. So we always kind of assumed it must mean something about being nice to each other. That's affective. We don't really work in that space as much in the leadership and corporate world. The second is somatic empathy. This is where you physically feel the emotions or the experience of someone else—for example, a spouse who's going through sympathy pains for their pregnant wife.

HANNAH: Some of that sounds really hardwired—somatic empathy.

VENTURA: That's not a trainable thing necessarily. I mean, perhaps it is to some degree, but it doesn't have a big place in business, in leadership. And it's hard to train. And so really the third type is where we begin, which is cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is about perspective-taking. It is about training the muscle of the mind to step out of your own perspective, your own set of biases, stand in someone else's shoes, and understand their world better. But in order to do that, you have to actually ask questions. You can't just project—if you project, it's actually your bias. Again, you're playing it out. You're saying, “Oh, I could imagine what it's like to live in rural Africa.” And then you paint a picture. But have you spoken to people from sub-Saharan Africa? Have you really understood what it's like to live there, what the troubles are, what the things they think about are, and what life is like every day? And if you haven't, you're just guessing.

HANNAH: And that sounds like it requires a lot of patience.

VENTURA: I always tell people it takes time. This is the sort of thing that slows down before it speeds up. Right? The first times you start practicing this, everything's going to grind to a halt a little bit because you're going to have to take that extra fifteen minutes. You're going to have to ask that uncomfortable question. You're going to have to sit through more responses and sift through information. But eventually you get there.

HANNAH: And so were these some of the things you were teaching these cadets to do?

VENTURA: Yes. I look at applied empathy less like a process and more like a tool kit. Within the tool kit, there are different things you can draw upon at different times. There are ways you can practice empathy for yourself. We've got a couple of techniques and tools and frameworks and stuff like that you can use. There are different ways you can practice empathy with other people, different ways you can elicit senses, a sense of understanding, from people.

We were going through some of the different tools in the tool kit and letting them try them. It was a lecture plus a workshop. At one point I had fifty administrative and faculty members who are all very accredited military officers, sitting in a room working with archetypes and having conversations about different ways of perspective-taking on each other and laughing and gesticulating and getting upset and hugging each other—like the conversations were charged emotionally. And afterwards I said, “How often do you have those types of conversations?” And they said, “Rarely with large groups, but we certainly do in an intimate setting with our people in our command, because that's sort of the nature of leadership.” But this felt very new for them.

HANNAH: So you ended up teaching, getting in the classroom with the cadets. You mentioned you were kind of skeptical of the experience when you started. What was your impression of the cadets, and what was their impression of you? Because like I said, yeah, you probably didn't resemble many of the people—

VENTURA: No. I mean, my I.D. was checked every ten paces on campus. “Excuse me, sir, can we see your I.D. again?”

My perspective on them was that they were some of the most skilled learners I have ever come across. We taught this course—we actually taught a full twelve-week course of this material for three semesters at Princeton. And when you juxtapose the Princeton students and the West Point students, the biggest differentiation between the two was that Princeton, I think to some degree—whether this is an administrative byproduct, the byproduct of the type of student that goes there, or whatever it is—perhaps they become prematurely vertical at the detriment to breadth of knowledge. I'm going to learn my specialty deeply, quickly. And what I noticed at West Point was what has become known as T-shaped approach. There is a vertical skill set—I'm a bio engineer, or I'm a strategic planner.

But then there’s also a horizontal width of skills that are a mix of soft and hard but are much more well-rounded in terms of building a leadership skill set. Because ultimately, yes, they will need to know engineering, but they might also need to have that wide range of people skills and communication skills at the top that are going to allow them to be versatile.

HANNAH: So, Justin, from your experience on the ground in Iraq and talking to people there, I know you're not a foreign policy expert, but can you imagine a Middle East that is truly democratic? Or is that kind of an American ignorance that isn't sensitive to political and cultural differences?

BOKMEYER: Yeah, I think from my perspective, and the idea of tribalism, it'd be very difficult for a long-term success because of those. It's going to take a long time. I think, like you said, I'm not a foreign policy expert, but I have seen the relationships families have. You have families who are Iraqi police, some who have ties to terrorism and some who just want to do their job and go home. But they're all families, so they all love each other and are loyal to each other.

HANNAH: And that's all within the same family.

BOKMEYER: That's all within the same family. And so that can really complicate things. We've seen that in all parts of the world—ties are stronger than their beliefs in any unified country, and their personal ties become their bias to how they act and their policies that they make for their country. So I think it would be very difficult to see democracy succeed in every part of the world. It will take a long time, and there's got to be a lot of small steps to see that succeed. But, once again, I am not the foreign policy expert, but I do know the importance of tribalism, especially in that part of the world.

HANNAH: Yeah, you saw it firsthand.

BOKMEYER: And of relationships, and that's hard to break.

HANNAH: Did you notice any values the Iraqis held that you thought, this is something we in the United States should do more of? Obviously, we talk about the things we do that they should do more of. Are there any kinds of behaviors or rituals or values that are more common there which we could learn from?

BOKMEYER: You know, I always go back to the interpreters. If you talk to a lot of people who had interpreters there, they were so special to a lot of troops because of their passion for seeing a better place.

Interlude featuring archival audio

BOKMEYER: Many went against their family's wishes, went against their friends’ wishes, to help the U.S. soldiers and to be interpreters and to help with diplomacy because they were the ones who could speak and break the ice.

HANNAH: They weren’t just translating language; they were translating culture and actions to everything.

BOKMEYER: Absolutely. And so I go back to them as being very special. And then go back to their family. I mean, just huge meals, huge meals. You know, you have to talk a lot about how everything's going before you get into business or to anything. And I think in this world of cell phones and technology and everything, you can skip over that very quickly.

HANNAH: Michael, I read in a Forbes interview you gave that you said the world needs empathy as never before. What did you mean by that?

VENTURA: Well, I think that we are becoming more and more divided culturally and politically—even though we're more and more connected digitally. And empathy is the practice of perspective-taking, about getting to know each other and seeing the other side. I don't think empathy is the panacea. I think it's going to cure everything. But it is the first step to building bridges, not walls.

HANNAH: I want to talk about this president for just one or two questions. This president has been criticized for lacking empathy, for being particularly holding forth rather than holding back. And he's insistent on his own perspective rather than taking others’ perspectives. Yet at the same time, he's advocated for diplomacy with adversaries. North Korea comes to mind. He says he's open to talking without preconditions with the Ayatollah in Iran. Do you think this is a particularly skillful president when it comes to empathy?

VENTURA: What a question. I would say that it's important to remember with cognitive empathy, particularly, the perspective-taking is neutral. So you can perspective-take and then use that perspective for positive or nefarious gains. I often cite the work that was done during the last election cycle with Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica performed a deep-dive in user empathy. They went out and cognitively understood certain audiences segments, how they consume information and what channels, at what frequency, through what tones of voice. All of that sort of stuff. And they were able to deliver certain information in order to effect behavior change. In my opinion, that is an unethical form of the application of empathy.

HANNAH: Why? Just because you don't agree with the objectives or the campaign that was being launched?

VENTURA: No—

HANNAH: Don't you do that to some extent on behalf of your clients?

VENTURA: Well, I think what we do is more transparent. I think when we do this sort of work, people know their information is being used. And I think the big gap there was that people didn't know their information was being surveilled to such a degree, that they were being influenced unbeknownst to them. Someone walks into a Nike store, they know they're walking into a commercial setting. They know sales are going to occur. They know if they've signed up for the newsletter, they've availed certain information about themselves—their birthday, their location, things like that Nike may use to help market to them better.

HANNAH: These guys are more voyeuristic and more or more peeping Tom-ish.

VENTURA: Exactly. I think that’s why when we work with our organizations, we often bring up that empathy requires a code of ethics. And what are we going to do with this information, and how will we make sure people know we are obtaining it? And if we're not doing that, I think that surreptitious behavior begets a different type of spirit to the work.

HANNAH: Interesting. So you talked about Cambridge Analytica, which worked on behalf of the Trump campaign, infamously, but what about Trump himself? I mean, doesn't populism to some extent require a kind of empathetic instinct?

VENTURA: Yeah. And that's why I say I think you can be an empathetic actor and use that insight, that perspective, for a whole host of things. Sociopaths are great empaths because in many ways they have to understand you in order to manipulate you, right? That's it. They take that understanding and apply their sociopathic behavior to it and then get what they want.

HANNAH: And you wrote a book on empathy. You're not a sociopath, are you, Michael?

VENTURA: I don't think so. I mean, my wife doesn't say I am, and she's a pretty good judge of character.

HANNAH: That's something a sociopath might say.

Well, a big thank you to Michael Ventura and Justin Bokmeyer. Michael's book, Applied Empathy, is out now and available wherever you buy books. His firm Sub Rosa continues to apply these principles across business and government clients. Justin has left the military and now works for the NBA developing talent around the world. If you'd like to hear more stories like this, you can find them on None of the Above’s website: noneoftheabovepodcast.org, or on Apple podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts. This is Mark Hannah with Eurasia Group Foundation, and this has been an episode of None of the Above. Catch you next time.

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