Giant Cargo, Small Gestures: What Breakbulk Taught Me About Empathy
This was my second year at Breakbulk Europe, and that changes what you take away from the experience. Year one in Rotterdam I was a trucking and brokerage person, with 23 years of experience in North America, who had never touched project cargo (and I still haven't). I will be honest, I spent most of that first experience in awe of the sheer scale of literally everything. Breakbulk is genuinely cool. The cargo is enormous, the vessels are diverse, and the logistics behind moving something that can't go on a truck or fit in a box are the kind of challenge that makes your brain itch in the best way. When it's all new, the spectacle is most of what you take away, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Year two, I felt more comfortable, I actually knew a few people, and I was not as easily captivated. Not because it got less impressive, but because I wasn't distracted by how impressive everything is anymore, which meant I could actually watch the room instead of awkwardly gawking at it. And once I stopped staring at the surface, I started seeing the thing that was quietly making the whole event worthwhile, and it had nothing to do with the engineering.
From my perspective, the people getting the most out of those three days weren't the ones with the most technical knowledge or the coolest booth (although getting my face on a coffee at DHL was so fun). They were the ones crossing lines. The ones explaining their corner of the industry to someone from a completely different corner, treating questions from outside their lane as worthy of their time and attention. I felt this in year one too, but only because it was pointed at me. People answered my questions and walked me through things I had no business understanding yet, and I took it as a kindness extended to the new person, which it was. But it was also people practising empathy, probably without ever clocking it as that. They noticed I was lost and decided that was worth their attention, and that small thing, multiplied across the whole floor, is what actually moved knowledge around the room.
We love to talk about breaking down silos. It's brought up as a challenge in many companies when they strategize. There are conference panels about it, and everyone genuinely believes that it is needed. Silos tend to happen because under pressure the most natural thing in the world is to pull tight around your own lane and the work that's clearly yours. When you're struggling to keep yourself above water, it's hard to slow down and recognize that others around you may be struggling too, and even figure out a way to alleviate each other's stress rather than adding to it.
Empathy is what breaks this pattern. In logistics, empathy is concrete and it shows up in things you can actually measure. It's whether you pick up the phone when the carrier calls instead of letting it go to voicemail because it's not technically your problem. It's whether the planner understands what the dispatcher is up against at 4 p.m. on a Friday. It's whether you explain the thing instead of gatekeeping it. None of that is soft. All of it directly affects whether freight moves, whether relationships hold, and whether the client you worked hard to land sticks around or quietly starts looking for a better option.
The leaders who are going to matter over the next decade are not the ones with the most technical knowledge. Technical knowledge is teachable. The ones who will matter are the ones who can read what their people and their partners are actually dealing with and adjust accordingly, because that's the skill that moves information across the lines we keep drawing around our corners of the industry.
So if you want to break a silo, you don't need another framework. You need one person to decide that sharing information and knowledge is vital. It took me getting past the spectacle to see it clearly, and I came home convinced that the most underrated leadership trait in supply chain isn't strategy or vision or confidence. It's whether you bother to find out what the people around you need, and then act like that matters.
