Go and Be Empathy
Experience the system from inside every role that matters
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 98%
Move beyond going to see how people live or work; go and be the person inside the experience. Begin with observation, then identify the roles whose incentives, constraints, and emotions shape the system. Participate directly where it is safe and legitimate: handle the frontline work, wear the headset, or contact your own company as a customer. Record friction, workarounds, uncertainty, and emotional moments that dashboards and interviews may miss. Compare what each role experiences, then convert the clearest discrepancy into a concrete change. The mechanism deepens empathy through embodied evidence. Observation shows what happened from outside, while participation reveals effort, confusion, and pressure from inside, opening the team’s eyes to improvements that conventional market research can overlook.
Origin
Asked for actionable advice, Kawasaki contrasted seeing a customer-service centre with working the headset and calling the company as a customer.
Core principles
- 01Observation reveals behaviour but participation reveals friction
- 02Empathy goes beyond conventional market research
- 03Both employee and customer roles contain unique evidence
- 04Direct experience can expose assumptions that reports conceal
How to run it
- 1
Select the experience
Choose one customer or employee journey whose reality matters to a current decision.
Pro tip Start with a journey already producing complaints, delay, or abandonment.
Watch out Do not run immersion without a decision it can inform.
- 2
Map the roles
List the people who deliver, receive, supervise, or support the experience.
Watch out A customer-only view can miss constraints imposed on frontline staff.
- 3
Go and see
Observe the journey in its real environment before participating.
Pro tip Note behaviour and workarounds rather than only asking for opinions.
- 4
Go and be
Perform the role or use the service yourself under conditions close to the real experience.
Pro tip Experience both sides when possible, such as agent and caller.
Watch out Do not deceive staff or violate consent, privacy, or safety rules.
- 5
Convert insight into change
Compare role-level evidence and implement one improvement tied to the observed friction.
Pro tip Re-enter the experience after the change to verify that it feels better in practice.
Watch out An empathy exercise without an operational response becomes theatre.
In the wild
A manager first watches calls in a customer-service centre, then puts on the headset and handles the work. The manager also calls the company as a customer. Switching roles exposes both the customer’s confusion and the agent’s system constraints.
→ The manager gains direct evidence for changes that improve the experience on both sides.
Common mistakes
Stopping at observation
Watching a role reveals less about effort and emotion than legitimately performing it.
Immersion theatre
The exercise creates no value if its evidence never changes a decision or experience.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for product, service, and operations teams trying to understand real customer or frontline experience.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when impersonation, safety, privacy, or employment rules prohibit participating in a role.
From the transcript
“you can learn how to truly empathize.”
“I would say if you want to do it even better, you go and be which means you go and be the person”
“Empathy is a great skill and it'll just open your eyes to so many things.”
From the episode
Guy Kawasaki: Win Every Pitch Using These Timeless Sales Principles
Guy Kawasaki