The Digital Project Manager

How Empathetic Communication Unlocks Innovation at Speed

• Galen Low

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Empathy isn't just a feel-good buzzword; it's infrastructure. In this episode, Galen Low chats with Andrea Goulet, communication systems architect and long-time software entrepreneur, about how empathy can act as a technical tool for collaboration, innovation, and high-performance in the age of AI.

Drawing from her experience building a $4M consultancy and translating complex human dynamics into actionable frameworks, Andrea breaks down the mechanics of empathy, why it matters more than ever, and how we can cultivate it in our teams to drive better outcomes. This isn't about being soft—it's about being strategic.

Resources from this episode:

Andrea Goulet:

When we have a high empathy environment where it is optimized, what we observe is less friction in our conversations. I send it in a high enough fidelity way that you understand what I'm talking about.

Galen Low:

Empathy can be the missing piece of the puzzle when building innovative, high performing teams in the age of AI.

Andrea Goulet:

They had a chance to assess the helpful model before the other aspects had been added to it. It was 30% more likely to cause harm and to lie or be disingenuous.

Galen Low:

Tell me how empathy fits into the world of AI.

Andrea Goulet:

Where in your organization can you leverage this as a tool to help you run experiments? The purpose of AI is to help humans human better.

Galen Low:

Welcome to The Digital Project Manager Podcast — the show that helps delivery leaders work smarter, deliver faster, and lead better in the age of AI. I'm Galen, and every week we dive into real world strategies, new tools, proven frameworks, and the occasional war story from the project front lines. Whether you're steering massive transformation projects, wrangling AI workflows, or just trying to keep the chaos under control, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Today we're talking about the idea of empathy as a core part of an organization's communication infrastructure, and how cultivating and measuring empathy can be the missing piece of the puzzle when building innovative, high performing teams in the age of AI. My guest today is Andrea Goulet, a communication systems architect who is on a mission to translate the complexities of human dynamics into practical tools and frameworks, so smart people can collaborate more effectively. Andrea has over 25 years of professional experience that includes building a $4 million software consultancy from the ground up, teaching over a hundred thousand students, and growing a massive global audience as an in-demand keynote speaker. Andrea, thanks for being here with me today.

Andrea Goulet:

You are so welcome. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Galen Low:

I am really excited for this conversation because you and I, we met at the Agile 2025 conference. You filled my brain with so many thoughts around empathy, and I'm really excited to get into it. I know from experience now that you and I are the kind of people who can probably zig and zag into some pretty interesting tangents, but just in case, here's the roadmap that I've sketched out for us today. To start us off, I wanted to just follow my tradition and just get one big burning question outta the way. It's that uncomfortable, but maybe pressing question that everyone wants to know the answer to in my opinion. And then I'd like to zoom out and maybe just talk about three things like, first I wanted to talk about what empathy actually is a measure of and what it indicates about a team or an organization. Then I thought maybe we can get into a few examples of how empathy can be used to create and reinforce a culture of adaptability to facilitate knowledge transfer and ultimately change the way a business measures. Performance. And then lastly, I'd like to maybe just talk about the role of empathy and the age of AI and whether human intelligence and empathy will fall by the wayside, or maybe will it become more important than ever. How does that sound to you?

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah, that sounds great.

Galen Low:

So as I was mentioning up top, you gave a keynote speech at Agile 2025 in Denver, a few months back. The title of your talk was Empathy as Infrastructure, and I had the distinct pleasure of missing it completely, but you gave me the Kohl's note version over breakfast. Could you just tell us what you mean when you say empathy as infrastructure and why is it maybe more than just a sort of woke snake oil buzzword?

Andrea Goulet:

Yes, I love that. The highest compliment I ever got, one of my most popular keynotes is called Empathy is a Technical Skill. I give it a lot of software engineering conferences. The highest compliment I ever received was somebody came to the talk, came up to me afterwards and said, the only reason I came here was to tell you how wrong you were afterwards, and I can't do that now. You've changed the way I think. And I was like, yes, because that's crazy high praise from that type of audience. To answer your question, I'm gonna give a little bit of context into kind of how I got into this topic. So I started my career in sales and strategic communications where essentially you like part of the training is how to understand people. You know, there's consumer psychology, like you get a pretty technical understanding of essentially what empathy is like, how to predict another person's perspective and how to respond. So my business partner, who I built the software company with, he and I went to high school together. We grow the company together. A few years later we get married, which is fun. And so what that ended up doing was create a really deep motivation to understand each other in a way that kind of, you don't typically get. There were many times where we had the very traditional sales slash engineering dynamic, and I felt like I wanted to rage quip truly, but I didn't because there was an extra incentive. And so just like he had told me, like, no, you're actually good with people. Like, why are you calling yourself non-technical? You can understand this stuff. Like you pick up on, you might not know it now and you might not have a computer science degree, but you are absolutely learning it. But I, it was like an identity thing, and I noticed that he had one on the opposite. Which was, I'm good with machines, but I'm not good with people. And that was something that he had been told. And honestly, a lot of the reasons that I wanted to rage quit were miscommunications. And I was expecting him to respond in a certain way. He didn't respond in a way that I had seen in the general population. And it was frustrating to me. And at the time I had taken on this. Identity of like, oh, I'm non-technical. I'm good with people, I'm an empath. But what I was really doing was hubris because I had the false belief that I could walk into a room and I knew what people thought better than they did. And it's only been after about like decade or so of diving deep into the research that I've had that realization, and now I'm like, I just want to go back to my past self and apologize profusely. I think this is a dynamic that is very common, right? We have people who identify as people, and it's like, oh, I'm an empath, right? I understand what people are doing. But then what I wasn't doing when I would misunderstand Scott, was I didn't take the time to listen to his perspective. I was very judgy and I was like, why can't you blah, blah, blah, right? That's a horrible way to treat somebody, but I was frustrated. So an example to make it a little bit more concrete. An example, I would say, here's my big idea, here's my big strategy, blah, blah, blah. And you know, halfway through he would interrupt and he would pick one specific thing. He's like, that's not gonna work. I'm like, and he was like, I know I've been called like a professional balloon popper my whole life. So there's real frustration there, and it's like, why can't you see, like, I'm excited not to interrupt me and stuff. But when we dug into it. Because we had that level of compassion, like we truly cared about each other in a way where we wanted to stick it out, and we didn't want to make each other's lives more miserable. So that was the extra incentive to really figure it out. And so he told me, he's like, well, I have a lot of compassion for what you're building, and I don't want you to go down a direction that I know is going to hurt. And so it was like, well, okay, when you do that, it takes me outta this flow and then I can't remember. And so this is the great thing is that when you can have empathic conversations like this, instead of just these friction points where people pull away, especially when you have different perspectives, this is where innovation comes from. So the innovative thing that we developed a lot of communication frameworks, and some of them, honestly, we poured over from couples counseling and just directly implemented them into the business.

Galen Low:

Amazing.

Andrea Goulet:

But the framework that came out of this specific interaction was essentially like Scott, when you have a detail that you want to tell me about, do a find and replace and say, may I pause for a clarification, right?

Galen Low:

Before you pop before in.

Andrea Goulet:

'Cause that gives me a little sense. And then if I'm on a roll, I'm like, no, hold on. Right. Like, let finish my thought. So then I'm like, okay, what's up? And then I said, the next step is what kind of feedback would you like? Macro feedback, micro feedback, or no feedback? Sometimes it's like I just want you to listen to the big picture and like hear the whole thing and think is this the right strategic direction to start putting some resources towards the details, towards doing more research or towards more implementation. There are absolutely times where I'm like, okay, this is close to ready to ship. I want you to use your genius and I want you to tear it apart. And those teeny tiny things that we co-created together changed the way we work together because then it made it frictionless even though we had completely different perspectives. And Scott Page has some really great work on this. He has a book called The Diversity Bonus, and for those of you who are just like, wow, that's woke. This is based in math. When people who have really different perspectives can find ways to influence each other and work together to create something, you literally get, in an organizational sense, one plus one equals three. That was our experience, and so to me, having the background of empathy, having the. Background of working in software and learning about how complex software systems work, and it's like, whoa. This is the same as social systems. Like there's math behind this. There's infrastructure, there's architecture here, there are principles that we can lean on. Then I got really excited and so my purpose was to basically help Scott understand what empathy was in a way that made sense to him. Because when I would try to describe why this was important or how to do things, he was like, yeah, you're just telling me to like have empathy. So in the effort to try to explain things to him where it made sense, that ended up being kind of, you know, blogging about it in public and just saying, here's what I'm finding and thinking, and it really resonated. So that's where it's like all these different things come from, and I mean, it's transformed the way we work together, the way we live together, the way we parent together. We did sell our business last year, so there's a little bit of a different dynamic now. So the reason it's not just woke BS is two reasons. The biggest overlying region is that there is a difference between culturally understood empathy and computationally understood empathy. And so, you know, me describing myself as an empath, right? And saying, oh, I know what it means. Or like thinking that it's only being kind all the time and never setting boundaries or thinking that it is letting people walk all over you or thinking that it's like, oh, I'm this psychic superhero, right? Like there are a lot of different kind of cultural signals and identity things that play into this, which I think is what people are responding to. So my goal is to really understand the computational side and the analytical side and the neurological side, and just what does the science say around what this is and how can we just really understand it as a mechanism, as infrastructure so that we can architect and design organizational systems. So the last point in terms of like what is empathy going all the way, like if we're abstracting all the way up to what it is, empathy is the evolutionary mechanism and there are a lot of different systems in our brains and our bodies that contribute in a dynamic way to what gets expressed as empathy. And I think a little bit later I'll go into like the four components that Neurobiologists has figured out. But the reason that we have this is that we are a hyper social species. And so empathy enables us to communicate, collaborate, and solve complex problems more effectively for species survival, literally. And when we look at it from that perspective, it's like, why would we work against our nature? And when we understand that what's at play, then we notice that there's a lot of different kind of levers we can pull. We can change our environment, we can change our own perspectives, we can change the way we communicate. Like there's a lot of different things that we can do to optimize empathy. So I think of empathy much more in a systemic way than in, you know, there's definitely interpersonal dynamics. Not in a, I am an empath because that's like saying I am a circulatory system.

Galen Low:

Okay. Yes. I'm really glad you took it there because that resonates with me. Right. We are a social species and evolutionarily we have the survival skill called empathy, which is about predicting somebody else's perspective. It's not about reading mind, it's not about knowing people's thoughts better than they know their own thoughts. It's not about not communicating. Where we kind of think, oh yeah, you're empathetic, you understand. You don't even have to say the thing because you know the thing. So we don't communicate. It's actually the opposite. It's not making assumptions about how people are feeling or what they're thinking and their POV. It's developing the infrastructural language to communicate around that because it's like core to our being as humans and how we've evolved. And I think, like you said, I would love to trace it back to figure out where this word went wrong. I'm paraphrasing, but that's how I interpreted. I'm like, that is fascinating because language fascinates me. That specifically is, you know, one of those words that I think is imbued with so much meaning that was never really intended. And we've used it in certain ways, and you and I, we've talked about the superhero empath and like how that character is, you know, what character traits and what superhero skill that would be. It's mind reading. It's like, well, feeling reading, but it's not actually what empathy is or was. It's just the social fabric that helps us collaborate. And when you put it like that, I can't argue with that. I'm that person that you said, right, like came to your keynote speech to be like a naysayer to shoot you down, to tell you're wrong. But actually when you break it down that way, that makes tons of sense and that's what teams need to do. Like that's something we've been saying all along, but for whatever reason, the word empathy gets painted with a certain brush. Whereas what we mean is let's have some kind of computational empathy. Let's have the infrastructure, let's have the sort of framework to communicate effectively knowing that we don't all think the same things and see things the same way.

Andrea Goulet:

And that's a good thing.

Galen Low:

Well, I mean at the top, he's Scott. He just, even we, Scott, he Scott likes to fix bugs and refactor code. He is not among the general population.

Andrea Goulet:

No, he's not.

Galen Low:

That is a different, it's a different human.

Andrea Goulet:

And what ended up like the way that we built our culture, my number one thing was like, okay, I've seen empathy work in all these other industries. We're building our entire culture around empathy and people, literally, this is like 2009, 2010, we had consultants and they literally said, you can't do that. If you say the words empathy and software in the same sentence, you'll be laughed out of the industry quote. And I'm the type of person I'm like, oh, hold my teeth. That's actually where I'm gonna double down.

Galen Low:

Yes, challenge accepted.

Andrea Goulet:

But what we ended up doing was by learning about Scott's frustration and just, you know, he kept describing me. He kind of felt like. I'm probably dating myself, but Milton from Office Space where he's like sent into the basement and it's like he's got his little stapler and like no one sees his value. I think there are a lot of people in organizations who contribute a lot of value, but it's not always visible, and so they get overlooked. So Scott was sharing kind of how he felt, and we were in a Barnes and Noble and they had a table for books and it was like, maker Fest make. And he was like, where's my table? And like it's that kind of thing that then that generated all the different chemicals and biological things where I all of a sudden understood. So now we'll get into the four different pieces of empathy and I'll share how this experience demonstrates it. So before it was oh, okay. I have an analogy. I kind of on an abstract level understand what you're talking about. But when I who identify as a maker was like, oh my gosh, this is so amazing to see something that's just for me. Like I want to dive in and buy all of those books. I wanna go to all of the hackathons. And then hearing in Scott's voice, just the frustration and the feeling like he couldn't find a place to belong. And like I had a place to belong and he was like excited for that. But just like he had been really struggling to find other people who had the same passion as him. And not only did he struggle numbers wise, he also struggled because people like me at the time were saying, well, you're, you know, why would anybody do that? But in that moment, so there's four different aspects of empathy that kind of go into an empathy system. There's lots of different places in the brain and chemicals that get. Passed around in our bodies that we don't need to necessarily go into. But John Deity is a cognitive neuroscience outta the University of Chicago. I really like his model, which is the functional architecture of human empathy. When I was reading his papers, this was where I was like, oh, there's something really clicked because like I do this in some of my keynotes. If you read his papers and take out the word empathy, you can replace it with software.

Galen Low:

Interesting.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah, so it's things like blank needs to be broken down from a monolith into more discrete concepts. And it's like that's a fundamental principle for like creating a healthy system architecture. So it was like this is interesting. But back to the pieces about empathy. You've got compassion, which is sensing, suffering, and wanting to do something about it and wanting to alleviate it. Self-compassion is doing that to yourself. Super important. Kristin Neff has a bunch of great work on self-compassion, but also somebody else. So I care about Scott, right? We're doing this. When I sensed his suffering, compassion kicked in, and when compassion kicked in, that's when a lot of other things happened too. The other one that was like really surprising for me, but once I heard it, it made a ton of sense, is regulation.

Galen Low:

Right. Yes.

Andrea Goulet:

So being able to identify our own bodily state emotions and intentionally shift them. Which is why like if I wanna rage quit, I can't listen to somebody else's perspective because I'm self-centered at that moment. And not because I'm an egotistical maniac, but because I'm human. It's just the way humans work when we're, we've got really heightened emotions, we can't listen. So in that moment, I was regulated, like we were hanging out at Barnes and Noble. I wasn't like super angry. I was in a joyful state, but able to shift that. The next is affect, which is emotion sharing. This is what we tend to think of as empathy alone, necessary, not sufficient. So being able to attune to somebody like, okay, I sense you're frustrated. I have been frustrated. I know what frustration feels like, and it doesn't have to be forever. It's like a pang of like, okay, you're feeling this. You don't even have to name it. Scientists essentially now plot emotions on a grid. Where you've got it impacts you positively or negatively, like the sensation and its intensity. So it's either calm or like really intense, right? So something like joy is like a really intense emotion and we would label it as positive, you know? So I just need to plot that somewhere and feel it. And a lot of times it's like this is a reflex not for everybody. Some people have to like put a live intention to it, and that's okay. The last one is cognitive empathy, and this one gets talked a lot about in product design and user experience and things like that. What this is being able to apply rational thinking and reasoning so that we can understand another person's perspective and predict how we should respond. And this one is critical because if we only rely on the other ones, then we don't take in the information, we're not able to influence. Also we're not able to consider the costs and benefits. So a big one is when compassion and affect are really heightened, we can get so drawn into one person's perspective that we can't see the impact of a group. An example here of why this is important is like doctors. They're in an emergency room and there's been a horrible accident they have to triage. If they spend all of their time in one room for an hour, then more people are going to suffer. And there are plenty of examples like this, but so that's just one, one example. This is called Compassion Fade. So if you wanna gee out about the actual literature, and this is the thing, it's like there are very well researched terms to describe these things. And so when we look at those kind of four different aspects, that's how we can break down, oh, Scott was sad, but then the innovation happens when we have different perspectives, how do we fix it? How do we get you that sense? How do we build that table? So that's what we ended up doing was we went back to like, there were lots and lots of conversations and a lot of 'em revolved around identity and, you know, we were modeling things out about how we did our business. I mean, it was a lot of deep dives, which was fun because we're learning about each other. It helped us do our business better because I'm learning more about legacy code less from a, just like a book and like why truly these are important. What we ended up coming up with is kind of a counter where you've got makers. Yay. If you're a maker, celebrate. Scott's a Mender.

Galen Low:

Okay.

Andrea Goulet:

So it's like they're complimentary because sometimes like if you're operating in white space and you need to do something really quick, you want rapid prototypers. If you are working on a mission or safety critical system and you need to change out like replatform it because the hardware is now out of date. You want somebody who is like super diligent and isn't gonna just like rush through the job. What Scott was saying is like the second type of project is the one where he's like, give me, it's like candy. And so when you can operate with empathy, when you can interact with different perspectives, when you can appreciate the strengths that people bring. And that's what enabled us to build the company too.

Galen Low:

I love that. I wonder, could we transpose that onto another business? Because I love these four things, right? I'd love to be able to take that. The last one I think is super interesting to me. The sort of cognitive empathy obviously affect you know, we're talking about the sort of popular understanding of what empathy is. Plotting something on the magic quadrant of emotional intensity and then using that to guide your conversation. We have the compassion bit. Including self-compassion, the regulation bit. I wanna tie all these things together because I'm glad you brought in community. I'm glad you brought in the sort of like evolutionary social behavior and then this framework of these four elements of empathy. How does a business then take that and benefit from it? And then how do they know if it's working?'cause it seems like there's a lot of conversation, you know, like deep dives. This is groundwork. A lot of organizations in growth mode are just like go fast fast. Produce. How can they use this?

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah. Which is great. If you have more empathy, then you can grow, go. Go and produce better.

Galen Low:

Tell me more about this. Yes.

Andrea Goulet:

So, okay. Empathy is the engine, communication is the car. Okay. If you have just a shell of a car with no engine, you're not going anywhere. I mean, I guess you can push it. You can get a tow truck or something, but it's like you're not gonna go very fast. If you have a high performance engine, you can go really fast. So that's the way you think about it. An engine that's just sitting there in a yard, like that's not gonna help you get where you wanna go either. So you need both of these things. So communication is the external expression of empathy. And when we have a high empathy environment where it is optimized, what we observe is less friction in our conversations. Because it's a predictive measure, I can predict with a relatively high accuracy, and I understand the message that I'm trying to say, and the first time that I send it in a high enough fidelity way that you understand what I'm talking about. So think about this as the three-way handshake that operates the internet. So the three-way handshake, on the internet this is the HTTP protocol. The S we bring in security. So I'm the server. I wanna send information, right? I'm like, Hey, here are my packets. This is what I want and I wanna send 'em in this order. Galen, you know you're the computer, right? And you're like, oh yeah, okay. I got these packets and I got them in this order. He sending that back to me. I'm like, yep, those are the packets that I sent, and they're in that order. We're good. That takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of resources, but. It's accurate. So there are, this is like active listening. A lot of times you need that back and forth, especially like if you don't have a lot of overlap in terms of your perspectives or if emotions are heightened right. When there's added complexity or uncertainty in the system, you need to slow down and double check this accuracy. But there is not, like, this doesn't apply to every situation. So there's another type of internet protocol called UDP, which is for streaming. So like UDP is what you're using to, like, we're not checking with every person who's listening to this and verifying that the packets of our audio and video are coming in. We're just going, here's our content. Andrea's just spewing conversations. Right? And we're trusting that it will get where it needs to go, but we don't need to spend the resources on that. So the, in a human world, this is playing charades. This is in an agile situation, throwing sticky notes up against the wall. Just get them on the wall. We'll observe later. Because if I pause every time somebody says something in a game of parades, I'm like, what do you really mean by that? What we're trying to do in the UDP protocol is get as many pieces of information out as we can, but at the same time, why are there so many miscommunications.

Galen Low:

Right. Yes.

Andrea Goulet:

And I think that it's like we're understanding the car, but we are not understanding the engine. And so if we start getting good, you need both. Because if you just have empathy, but never say anything and never interact with anybody that doesn't generate innovation.

Galen Low:

Here's what I thought you were going to say, and I'm glad you didn't go there. I thought you're like, oh, UDP, like that's broadcast. Don't do that. That's just like sending the memo, the corporate memo that says, come back to the office. Do AI, do two people's jobs. Thanks, bye. Don't come to me. And, but this is not a dialogue. But also where you took it was sometimes you need it to get the ideas out and coming back to the conversations. That you shared with me, that you had with Scott, right? About like, let's communicate about like what protocol are we using? And I know that for a lot of people, that sounds very like wooden in a social context, but it's like, listen, is our goal to get a whole bunch of stickies on the board and then talk about it? Or is our goal to put a sticky on the board and talk about it, make sure we're on the same page, and have that fidelity, like what fidelity are we going for? And that is something that then you can like, it translates into more efficient communication. Like if you were to look at it from that business lens. In a slightly more, I guess, data oriented way. I was gonna say sterile, but that's just not quite what I mean. But I mean is like, okay, why am I doing this? Why am I gonna invest in people having empathy and having an empathetic communication framework? Oh, because there will be fewer miscommunications. That's great. Because that happens all the time. We've just accepted that communication is imperfect, so we just bake it in and now, okay, we can have higher fidelity in our communications and we can be more efficient. Then there should be less communications. And where my head goes is like, okay, that makes sense. How do I measure that as a business? How do I go, you know what? All that time we spent figuring out what our protocols are, what our infrastructure is, and it's an ongoing thing. It's not just a, you know, start and finish and we're good. This is ongoing time where we're investing. How do I know if it's paying off?

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah. Looking at two different things, lagging indicators and leading indicators. Leading indicators are what we want. These are what the levers that we can pull. So these are things like psychological safety. You might think it's woke, there's math. It backs it up. Like when people and I think too, it's like, let's take the virtue signaling out of it. What is it like Amy Edmondson coined the term in 1999 and it's that people in a group feel comfortable in a social setting speaking up without the fear of being seen as ignorant, irresponsible, shamed. So we need this. Especially to catch bugs or to say, oh no, that's not that, but what if we did this to be able to build on each other's ideas? So it's things like that. So there are leading indicators that we can measure, like do we have engagement? So one is how effective are meetings? We did this where it was like, so in the Agile manifesto, the one principle that I'm like, eh, not quite. Is, you know, it talks about communication. It says that face-to-face communication is always the best. It's not. That's okay. They're not communication experts. Get it. Standups. How many people have been in like a standup or a sprint planning meeting that's supposed to last for 15 minutes and it consistently is an hour? That's because it's a mismatch, a status update. So what we did were, you know, was like, oh, this is a mismatch. So we're gonna have a Slack channel that says standups. And everybody's just gonna post it asynchronously and say, here's what I'm working on. Tag somebody if you're blocked, read what people are doing. And then it takes everybody five minutes instead of 15. But then it's like, okay, save that for the prioritization meeting, save that for the retrospective, because that's where we want to, again, have that more three way handshake type of dialogue, especially in a retrospective. So are your meetings running effectively as an example? Like is there spite on your team? Are people like getting along? I could go into spite.

Galen Low:

That's fascinating. I love that.

Andrea Goulet:

It's incredibly contagious and one of the biggest factors that will take down a team dynamic incredibly quickly. Exponentially quickly.

Galen Low:

I believe that.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah. So there are metrics that we can do and levers that we can pull. You know, it's like how many miscommunications, like you can measure it quantitatively. This is like a survey qualitatively kind of thing? If you do that, people tend to be a little burnt out on surveys. So, you know, there are other ways to do that. But then there's also the lagging indicators, which is what's our throughput? How many new ideas are we coming up with? What's our retention rate? Are people quitting?

Galen Low:

Interesting. Yes. Fair.

Andrea Goulet:

So I think the challenge is that pretty much any metric when it comes to organizational health, I think could come back to empathy in some way, shape, or form. So because it's so foundational, if we spend time optimizing that, I just feel like it's a huge leverage point because we get exponential benefits from a lower investment. But if we want to get those benefits, we have to be very clear about what it is, and instead of telling people, oh, have more empathy, or doing the virtue signaling where it's like, I'm an empath and you're not. No, that actually makes things worse. Right. So getting really discreet and really technical around empathy. Thinking about it as infrastructure, thinking about it as a communication system. This is just where the math and where the science points. So to me, I am like, is just a fun, interesting rabbit warren that I wanna keep exploring for the rest of my career. And yeah, I mean, when we do this, then we can do what humans do best we can. Solve problems together, we can communicate effectively. We can create a sense of belonging and community. Which are things that we need to survive.

Galen Low:

I wonder if I can kind of bring you back because there is something you said, well, there's several things you said that I know my listeners can relate to. Standups and meetings that just aren't efficient or effective. Miscommunications, spite on the team morale, you know, a lack of safety in the sense of being able to sort of voice concerns. If I was going to like take this practically, and someone listening has a team where they're like, yes, there's a lot of spite on my team. Andrea, what do I do? What do they do? What are some things they can do?

Andrea Goulet:

Run small experiments. So the reason that we ended up doing the status meetings, right, and if you listen to all of the stories of breakthrough innovations and how we used empathy, the reason that we did that was because we paused and said, this thing isn't working. So we observed something, what's going on here? And then it was like, what if we blah, blah, blah? So then it's like, well, okay, well let's test that for a couple weeks. And there were plenty of things where it was like, whoa, that doesn't work at all. Right? So when you run a test, it's like, keep it modified or discard it. So the standups one. It was like, okay, y'all, this is like annoying. Does anybody like having a 15 minute meeting? And then it constantly runs over an hour and we all feel like it's a waste of time. Raise your hand if that brings you joy. Right? Crickets. So it's like, okay, we're all unhappy. How do we make ourselves happy so it's not going out and looking for this perfect thing that somebody else has created? Because nobody can create the perfect thing for your context. In your present moment with your complexities and your team dynamics. And this is what empathy allows us to do. It allows us to collect data on different perspectives and then innovate and say, well, what if we did this? So the standups on it was like, well, what if we just posted it in a slack meeting? I was like, that sounds good. I could do that. We ran it and then we kept it for over a decade 'cause it was like, this is great. Then we experimented and was like, well, what if we do this with the retrospectives? And it was like, ooh, no. We're actually losing a lot of important information. Let's actually instead, like, let's take the time that we were spending in the standup and let's add that to the retrospective. So both meetings were like 30 minutes. So we deleted the, essentially the standup meeting and then we extended the retrospective meeting. Now computationally like we can understand why.

Galen Low:

Right. It's like we needed a different protocol for this. Standup is a different protocol than retrospectives. We ran some experiments and yes, this is more effective.

Andrea Goulet:

But that was not because I went out and read like, this is the perfect thing you should do. In fact, all of the things that said you should do this, said, I shouldn't. And I was like, I think you're wrong.

Galen Low:

Hold my tea.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah, and has some, I think this is where people. Yeah. Another thing to look for is how much slack and redundancy do you have in your system? Is your calendar so full that you have no time to just have these kind of more spontaneous and asynchronous sessions to dive into a problem? And there's some more here if people wanna nerd out. Eleanor Ostrom, she's a economist. She did work on the tragedy of the commons. And so how do people best manage a fixed resource?

Galen Low:

Interesting. Okay.

Andrea Goulet:

So they don't all deplete it. So it's things like, okay, you've got a bunch of fishermen, there's a limited amount of fish stock.

Galen Low:

Right.

Andrea Goulet:

Self-interest will kick in and then everybody loses because the, all the fish are gone, right? So how do we coordinate our activities when everything's really high and we all have to sacrifice? So she, that's her thing. So she came up with a bunch of different stuff. One of the most important things was the opportunity for chitchat.

Galen Low:

Okay. Interesting.

Andrea Goulet:

Yep. What this is hyperlocal knowledge transfer and coordinating.

Galen Low:

Ah.

Andrea Goulet:

So if I say that, then you're like, oh yeah, that's really important. But if I say you need to have time to let people chit chat, it's like. No. We need to get things done. We need to be productive here.

Galen Low:

Yes, but chitchat is productive. It is coordinating.

Andrea Goulet:

Right. It's not forced fun. It's not like you need to come to this team bowling thing. It's act throw. Yeah. And you don't eat the chicken fingers and have fun then you are not. It's not that, and you can do things as easy as like one of the policies that we ended up experimenting with, it worked really well, was we gave a five minute grace period to every internal meeting.

Galen Low:

Yes. Okay, I see. For chitchat or just We left it open?

Andrea Goulet:

Left it open. If you need a bio break because your last meeting ran over, get yourself a acoustic like use the loo, do what you need to do because it's important. You should be taking care of your body. We need healthy people to create healthy systems. Most people showed up and it was like, and the purpose was chitchat. Okay. And so a lot of people showed up. It's like it's unstructured, just, and that was where a lot of exchange happens. Like, Hey, what are you working on? It's like, oh, I'm doing this thing. Oh, I actually did some research on that for my other client. I can share what I learned. That's a hyperlocal thing.'cause it's a highly specific problem. Those two people probably wouldn't have had the opportunity if we had only stuck to the agenda the entire time. And I'm not saying don't. Build these opportunities for effective slack in your system and let the team experiment. You need a little bit of sense of autonomy. That's really healthy for a team too. That doesn't mean letting go of accountability. But create the culture of having these experiments. So that's what I dive into a lot in the remote teams course.

Galen Low:

I love that. You know what I like about it is it sometimes just all comes back to something a lot more innate in our humanity than business stuff. We're like, oh, chitchat. That sounds unproductive. Guess what? We built our entire species on chitchat look like hyper localized coordination, cross training, information sharing, not because it said so on the agenda. That's how we innovated. We're like, oh, you're working on that thing? That reminds me of this other thing that has nothing to do with that. Let's chitchat about that, and you're gonna get an idea. Maybe that is going to take you further than we would if we followed the agenda and used the full 30 minutes for the meeting.

Andrea Goulet:

So here's another way to think about it. Humans aren't the only hyper social species. Ants. It starts raining. Ants all send pheromones out. They send chemical signals from one ant to another, and then the entire colony can relocate. But not necessarily from like the queen saying, okay, I'm going to dictate, I'm gonna create a hierarchy. Here's the business plan. Here are all the KPIs, which can be important, especially if you're thinking about long-term things. But it's like everybody interacts, like all the ants and chemical signals to the people like to the other ants around them. This is what's called a complex dynamic adaptive system. So again, term that you can go research, but there's interesting math behind it. Another example is bees. Bees go out, they're scouts, they look for flowers. When they have like, whoa, y'all, there is this like amazing field over here. We can get some pollen. They come back and then they do a dance. They wiggle their butts and say, and there's different specific dances to say like what direction and how much and stuff. So ants send chemical signals. Bees do a butt dance. Humans use language and empathy. It is that like mechanism, and this is where the system infrastructure comes in because we can then use those infrastructure patterns and knowledge to do that better because. This is how we interact. This is how we transfer knowledge. And so if we do things like cut off chitchat completely, and I'm not saying the organization should be only chitchat. Nobody gets anything done that way like you. It's about having the right balance of all of these different things.

Galen Low:

It's these protocols, right? That's what makes the infrastructure. It's interesting 'cause it ties it all the way back to something you said at the beginning, right? This idea of self, this idea of community, and this idea of otherness, right? If you don't think you're an, then you're not gonna send the pheromones. If you don't think you're a bee, you're not gonna wiggle your butt when you come back from a great flower and it's not gonna benefit the whole.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah. This is not a term, at least that I have seen or researched. I think of it in terms as we have miscommunication and we have discommunication. So we have like, okay, I attempted to interact with you, but it didn't quite go as we wanted to. Like the information wasn't exchanged effectively. That's a miscommunication. Discommunication is, I am isolated and I'm not interacting with anyone. That's how I think of it. And so we've got a lot of discommunication. These are echo chambers, right? These are social media algorithm islands, right. That we're getting split into.

Galen Low:

Even the conference we're at, you know, I noticed there was a movement of, no, I'm not gonna be going to this conference 'cause actually I'm better working in isolation. Like, I'd rather not sit and talk about values. I'd rather just get my work done. Thank you very much. Bye. I've been thinking about that the whole time we've been talking.'cause I'm like. We are social creatures. Not to say that people who prefer to be isolated are doing anything wrong, but it just, the more we talk about it, the less sort of natural it seems. We've evolved as social creatures. It's a hard one for me.

Andrea Goulet:

Well, and it's difficult if you don't have the right environmental factors and the right resources internally. Like if I can't regulate, if I'm so emotional about a particular policy or injustice that I feel, or if I feel like I've been wronged in some way. I'm naturally going to disconnect myself from people that I feel angry with. So it takes a lot of wherewithal, you know, I think this is, sometimes empathy is described as a muscle. This is where it is like going out and being like, I'm not comfortable talking to somebody who doesn't say yes all the time getting to your thing on AI. I think that might be a good segue.

Galen Low:

Yeah, let's round out there because. AI is a big elephant in the room. I think some people would argue that AI means we don't need to focus as much on empathy and being social and humans, and some might argue that actually it brought us all to the same table, the vendors, the makers, and everyone in between. Now, feeling like we can collaborate, should collaborate, but not necessarily being on the same page yet. Tell me how empathy fits into the world of AI in your mind.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah, so I think some of this is like I can't give answers that are as confident as I can with others because this is just a very new field, and so a huge caveat. These are my instincts, not facts. So take everything I say here with a grain of salt. This is my futurist best knowledge self. I think there are fields like artificial empathy, like we're trying to train models to be more empathic. The challenge there, I think is again, understanding what is empathy and what looks like an empathic response. Because in AI, what sometimes looks like an empathic response, the technical term for it in the field is sycophancy. So the AI is acting like a sycophant and just saying everything you wanted to say, and then you're like, oh my God, I'm this brilliant person right in the world. Thank you. And it's even hard to temper it down. Like I've got process files and stuff where I'm like, do not tell me that I'm amazing. And even that it's hard. And a lot of that I think is because we're trained. My hypo, there was a great article in the New York Times today about prompts and like how different AI tools and the way that we use AI. You know, there was one study that was cited. It was from a team that studies harm that comes from AI, and so again, lagging indicator. So what they found was that the people who are building the models, they want it to be truthful, honest, and doesn't cause harm. So the challenge, like this is a programming human thing. The programmers who are creating these large models, they want to be helpful. They have really good intentions, so they're focusing on the helpful parts of the model first. And so the earliest seeds of it are to train it to be helpful and then to be harmless and you know. Later in the process. So it's kinda like qa, I mean, but this is like, this is how we have developed software and we wanna make sure that the feature meets its requirements and then we'll check for bugs later down the line. Right? Very natural. And I don't think anybody would fault somebody. I think we would actually say, look at that really compassionate developer. Like they want to be helpful. They are putting in the work. Right. But here's the problem. This research team found that. They had a chance to assess the helpful model before the other aspects had been added to it. It was 30% more likely to cause harm.

Galen Low:

Wow.

Andrea Goulet:

And to lie or be disingenuous like, and that is incredibly problematic. So I think when we're talking about empathy in the age of AI, there's just, there's so much that goes into it. Because they're the humans who are creating the models. There is the training data that the models are used, you know, they're being used. There is the policy and the governance and the regulations. There is the existential dread or utopia. So the same article, it cited like the two like. Most cited researchers, like in AI, one of them is a total, like we are all going to kill ourselves. The other is like, no, this is gonna bring in the best. So essentially, when you're trying to predict, you're just playing a big game of Plinko when you've got such a big discrepancy, like, I have no idea where this is gonna land. But I do know that to me, understanding the mechanisms that enable effective communication, collaboration on a human level, can't make things worse. I don't think so. To me, I think that's the best defense that I have against trying to skew the system towards a more positive outcome. And if that's not clear, it's the age of prosperity instead of we all kill ourselves.

Galen Low:

Right, right.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah. So I think then if you understand empathy on a more technical level, here's the other thing, a lot of it is counterintuitive, right? We follow the science, then we follow the science. If we say, oh no we need to have these people do this helpful thing first. What we're doing then is actually like doing something that is a vanity metric, and we're doing it because it feels good. It feels like we're putting people first, but we are actually causing systemic harm. So that's where it's like, okay, having that cognitive empathy is important because we need to be able to evaluate like, okay, how do these measures work? And yeah, I think that's the biggest thing is that there has been so much around this stuff that has literally just like broken my brain in the best way. And I think that is kind of what we need a little bit right now. So, yeah, if, and the other thing I think that is really important is to remember that AI is a tool, not a teammate. It can talk to you and it very clearly passes the touring test. It sounds like human, like, you know, when I use it sometimes, like when I've trained a model to sound like me it can write better than I can sometimes. And I'm a professional communicator and I've written professionally for 25 years. Like it's scary, right? How do we use that as a tool? You know, now it's like I'm using it to capture more nuance and I'm actually like having more dialogue to refine my thinking rather than just trying to focus at speed. So I'm actually using tools to go deeper. Like, help me think about this in a more skeptical way. I do tend to be a little bit more of a, I have an optimism bias, so by asking it, like ask me critical questions to help me refine my thinking, changing the way I'm prompting it. So then that way I'm focusing on depth more than just like generating a bunch of gibberish.

Galen Low:

Speaking of AI as a tool, something you said to me as we were prepping for this, you said the purpose of AI is to help humans human better.

Andrea Goulet:

I did say that. Yeah. I think that's the mission. I think like. And I think like for the developers who are building these models, like, okay, I wanna be helpful. Why do I wanna be helpful? It's 'cause I want humans to human better. And so on a team, this can look like, you know, Genworth is I'm in Richmond, Virginia. They're a company that specialize in insurance and stuff and finance. The CIO is on a panel. I really liked the way that he shared things. He's like, you know, AI is an empathy enabler. Because the worst thing we wanna do is have a chat bot interact with somebody at like a major crisis in their life. That is the opposite of everything we stand for. And it's like organizationally, and I like, that's gonna lose us money. How can we use AI to eliminate the things that are getting in the way of having our agents be there and extend even more time and more compassion with each of our customers?

Galen Low:

I love that. And that translates into teamwork.

Andrea Goulet:

Yep. That is a great example of using AI to help humans human better. And so I think that where you can use this is, you know, AI very much is the wild west. A lot of it is like, oh, it's used for vibe coding, it's used for this and that. Where in your organization can you leverage this as a tool to help you run experiments or to help you brainstorm or to help you like, and so I think AI literacy in terms of what is it and thinking about as a tool and not replacing an agent as just gonna have an army of chat bots run our company. There are some use cases, I guess where that can be the most efficient, but. I would argue that most business models or organizations don't fall under that bucket. So that's the way I think about it is the purpose of AI is to help humans human better. And the way that we do that isn't necessarily by following our instincts. Like that can be a really good place to start, but it's by following the science around how do we effectively communicate with each other. And again, going that layer deeper and that ends up becoming a question of how do we effectively empathize with each other?

Galen Low:

I love that. It actually makes space for empathy.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah. Well, I mean, empathy exists. It's like, that's like saying make space for your heart beating.

Galen Low:

I mean, and that's the kind of the thing that like. That is the sort of business argument, I guess, in a way, right? It's actually, it's like we didn't have enough time for empathy to have these conversations about values and the way we're communicating and whether we're communicating effectively. And yet that is the equivalency of not leaving enough space for your heart to be.

Andrea Goulet:

I would actually argue, so that made me think about, you've got different functions like breathing your respiratory system. It's both voluntary, involuntary, so for the majority of the day I'm going around, I'm not thinking about like air going in and out my nostrils, right? But when I sit down and I regulate, like meditation, creating a condition where my heart rate is going to slow, or going on a run, like knowing how to have these different physical systems and how to optimize those, I think there is then the case of like, no, you do need to make space to listen to your heartbeat and to regulate that. You do need to make space to listen to your breath. Calm yourself down or get more air in, or whatever it is. And so, you know, empathy in a similar way, like we have it, it's a predictive tool. We're using it, we're using it in different ways. It gets expressed in different ways, but it's there. But are we taking the time to really observe it and to think about how we can do it better for our organizations or for whatever mission that we want to get a group of people together and achieve something.

Galen Low:

I like it. Andrea, thank you so much for spending the time with you today. It's been so much fun. I love the ideas you bring to the table. I will try and gather some of the names and some of the research and put them in the show notes because I find talking to you is almost like you're this hub and the spokes just shoot out from it. I'm like, okay, now I need to go and look at this and this and this. This has been really great. Thank you again.

Andrea Goulet:

There's also, you had mentioned the history of the word empathy. I have the very first article that I put up on my LinkedIn newsletter. It was defining empathy as like nailing jello to the wall.

Galen Low:

Yeah.

Andrea Goulet:

Because that I was like, okay, I'm interested in learning about how to describe empathy. I should probably just start with like, what is empathy? And it's like the literature is there's not a lot of consensus and we're getting all this new data just in the past decade or so because the neuroscience has gotten better. So before we were only operating on behavioral outputs of people saying how We didn't even get into like all the stuff we talked about empathic accuracy and stuff like that. But yeah, there's so much here that I think it's endlessly fascinating. We have something that's endlessly fascinating and can also have a positive impact. I just, that sounds very exciting to me.

Galen Low:

I love that. I love that. Andrea, where can people learn more about you?

Andrea Goulet:

So you can go to my website, andreagoulet.com. I got a contact form on there. So I'm a independent, I call myself a communications systems architect, so I work with organizations to help humans human better so that they can achieve their business goals or organizational mission. And then I'm on LinkedIn, so you can follow me there. I've got a newsletter there as well. I am not on any other social platform. I have a Bluesky account, and I think you'll see like six hosts on there. So LinkedIn and my website are definitely the best places to follow me and get in touch with me.

Galen Low:

I'll include those links in the show notes. Andrea, thank you again. I really appreciate it.

Andrea Goulet:

Yeah, thank you.

Galen Low:

That's it for today's episode of The Digital Project Manager Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you want more tactical insights, case studies and playbooks, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.