2. Sessions
Empathy: Content Strategy's Hidden
Deliverable
Corey Vilhauer, Blend Interactive
Embracing Your Role as a Change Agent
Jonathan Kahn, Together London
3. Common Themes
• Soft skills—less focus on tactics, strategy,
deliverables as the starting point
• Listening and reframing
• Being advocates
• Change requires changing organizations
• Overcoming fear, uncertainty
• Failure is okay
4. Empathy
Definition: “The act of understanding, being aware of, being
sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings,
thoughts, and experiences of another…”
“The trend towards greater and greater customer
empowerment requires a deeper and deeper understanding
of customer needs.”
--Gerry McGovern
5. How to do it
• Replace Content Strategy with People Strategy
• Practice empathy not just with the people
who are the consumers of the content, but
with the client (or team, co-worker, boss,
editor…)
6. How to do it
• Be curious
– Ask questions
• Be clear and deliberate
– Get to a shared understanding of terms
– Consistency promotes trust
• Be conniving
– Identify strengths and play to them
– Use politics as leverage
• Be a teacher
– Provide tools
7. “Your job isn’t to make the change happen –
only your client can do that. Your job is to
present the change, understand the issues that
will serve as barriers to that change, and walk a
bit in their shoes.”
--Corey Vilhauer
8. Change
• Change is hard
• Failure is certain, unavoidable, necessary
• Content strategy work involves systemic
change
• You can’t solve problems without changing
organizations
9. Traditional organizational models
• Top-down
• Hierarchical
“…the idea of limiting communications, so that
they flow only from one layer of the hierarchy to
the next, was part of the very design of the
system at the dawn of managerial culture.”
Here Comes Everybody, 2008 CLAY SHIRKY
10. Mind shifts and power shifts
• Moving from product to service
• From consumer to customer
To bring about systemic change we combat:
• Denial about change
• Org-centric thinking
11. The arguments against change
• My organization is too complex
• It’s different in a large company
• It’s different in a small company
• It’s different in non-profits
• It’s different in higher ed
• We can’t do this agency-side
• This is impossible in government
12. Areas of focus
• Service design
• Cross-channel UX and CS
• Web and digital governance
• Learning lessons from the lean startup and
agile movements
13. How to be an agent of change
1. Let yourself be vulnerable (make mistakes)
2. Fight the culture of shame
3. Embrace failure
4. Get out of the building
14. “Denial about change, silo-centric thinking, and
poor governance and strategy lead to
disappointing user experience outcomes and
substantial business risk. As web
professionals, we can’t be effective until we
become agents of change.”
--Jonathan Kahn