Empathy has long been touted as a critical component for business success and positive employee and customer outcomes. As designers, we frequently discuss the value of empathy in our industry. But the word has become almost meaningless through its regurgitative over use, frequent misuse, and under implementation.

Often this is a result of a mismatch between positive intentions, like “Let’s have more empathy!” and implementation like “How?” and Where?” In addition to understanding and practicing empathy, organizations also need the capacity to scale empathy, translating intention into reality and sustaining it.

As a strategist, I partner with universities, Microsoft teams, and companies around the world hoping to bring the value of empathy into their culture and processes.

We tend to start with similar questions:

How can we go beyond interviewing customers, finding problems, and fixing things to truly building innovative experiences that amplify, augment, and unleash human potential?
How can we teach the importance and nuance of empathy at scale? For example, how do we take the one-on-one experience and ensure that thousands of employees can feel, think, and act empathetically?

We explored these questions through different lenses. For one project, we took cues from ethics, marriage therapy, zoology, and community management to understand components of empathetic experiences and identify ways to scale them. This article features what we learned in-depth. Here’s a short film about it as well: