#7: Expanding our empathy with Abadesi Osunsade Here Right Now

Today our special guest, my colleague and Forbes ‘25 Black Business Leaders To Follow’ Abadesi Osunsade, directs our attention towards an amazingly powerful, personal and precious capacity - our empathy.
‘What are the limits of empathy and compassion, and can we overcome them?’
Aba is VP of Global Community & Belonging at Brandwatch, host of the highly brilliant Techish podcast and CEO of Hustle Crew. Sourced from her hard work and bitter lived experiences having to fight for fairness and equity in the tech community, Aba’s framing question for our discussion gets to the very heart of a whole world of pain we’re experiencing today. It also opens the door to considering perhaps our largest scale opportunity as a species: greater empathy.
In 2020, I can’t think of a more timely and important topic.
When you look at the headlines, when you doom-scroll your social media, perhaps when you walk around your neighborhood or city center, what could the world look like if expanded our individual and collective empathy? Would we need to fight so hard for Black Lives Matter and #metoo? Would the onus be so squarely on those oppressed? Would there be a need for drug policy reform or gender pay gap measures? Would we be treating the planet and its living creatures in the way that we do?
And in the workplace too how can we find the capacity and tools to better empathize? Amongst pandemic, with frontline working in PPE and office jobs now Zoom-meetings-only, with trying to be a good citizen, family member, partner, worker, and stay healthy while the economy judders and everything is disrupted. With a global recalibration happening, a climate crisis burning?
Tune in - I promise you that the breadth of Aba’s knowledge and reading, the clarity of her point of view and the energy of her delivery will command your attention.
Links
* Abadesi on Twitter
* Hustle Crew - a career advancement community for the underrepresented in tech
* Techish podcast with Michael Berhane
Credits
* Lee Rosevere for music
Automated transcriptWill McInnes 00:01Aba Hello. Abadesi Osunsade 00:03Hey, how's it going? Will McInnes 00:05Good. How are you? Abadesi Osunsade 00:06Yeah, I'm really good. Thanks. Looking forward to our convo. Will McInnes 00:10Absolutely. So we've recently started working together. Abadesi Osunsade 00:14Yeah, colleagues Will McInnes 00:16colleagues. So good to say Good to have you on board and to be working together. I'm love your energy and everything you're about. Abadesi Osunsade 00:23Thank you. Yeah, it's also think I'm in like week, nine now or 10. It's going going very quickly. But it's awesome. Will McInnes 00:30And for those that don't yet follow you on Twitter, you're kind of chronicling the journey.Abadesi Osunsade 00:37Even filming offendWill McInnes 00:39me see, me too. So on Twitter, you are, I haven't got your Twitter handle here.Abadesi Osunsade 00:48@abadesi. My first name lastWill McInnes 00:51name. That's like getting the domain name. That's like, you've gotAbadesi Osunsade 00:56I do also have Abadesi.com. So yeah, IWill McInnes 00:59yeah. So @ ABADESI, and I, before you joined brandwatch. But when we were talking about it, I started listening to your amazing Techish podcast. And was just inspired by how you and your co host, Michael, just the energy I was I was doing. At the time, I'd be pedalling away on a bike or an indoor bike, like going up a hill or something. And it was just funny, lively, and caustic moments at times appropriately. So just capturing like, the, the tech news of the day or the week, and there's been, there's been so much isn't there?Abadesi Osunsade 01:49Yeah, there has been too much. I think it's really interesting, like reflecting on tech news, when might you yourself have been a victim of the negative trends that are sort of like playing out in the industry, whether that's, you know, the fact that Michael and I chose to bootstrap partly because we wanted to build