Would your team benefit from deeper communication and collaboration skills?
OTHERS Empathy Training is a curriculum of common sense, and uncommon spirit.
Empathy isn’t magic. It isn’t a sixth sense, or a tender feeling, and may or may not inspire you to be kind. Empathy is the skill of seeing things from another point of view, even and especially those you can’t stand or fathom. Simply shifting your perspective is the practice. And we believe that practice is the key to every relationship, whether between colleagues or communities, companies and consumers, neighbors or nations.
Developed over 20 years of practice in observational research, this curriculum offers accessible tools for individuals and teams to better understand, connect, and respond to those around them.
Whether applied interpersonally among teammates, or at scale between brands and audiences, these skills provide measurable value to the communication, design, collaboration, innovation, and strategy.
The Empathy Skill Set
Ideal for teams in transition, this series of workshops offers groups the opportunity to connect as people while developing a shared vocabulary for the skills that will keep them connected.
Empathy is a Practice, Not a Feeling
The Listening Class
Asking Better Questions
Feedback and Tough Conversations
Knowing Yourself
Neutrality and Unconditional Welcome
Putting Empathy To Work
Once you’ve experienced skillful empathy with your colleagues, apply it to your whole ecosystem with this series of trainings designed to introduce tactical frameworks and tools to your work.
Whole Person Leadership
Facilitation and Group Dynamics
Journey Mapping
Strategic Interviewing
Reframing and Insight Generation
Designing for Mutual Wins
OTHERS facilitators examine familiar concepts like listening and asking questions through a series of interactive experiences designed for groups.
Whether virtual or in person, these sessions address misunderstandings about the nature of empathy and clarify the role it can play in our work. Participants come away with shared understanding, as well as a set of tools with immediate impact.
After just 90 days practicing the Others curriculum, this cross-disciplinary team reported meaningful improvements in every aspect of empathy practice.
SNEAK PEEK
During our signature workshop, "Empathy and Listening," participants practice listening to one another using techniques designed to engage different parts of the mind. One focuses on story-agnostic listening, and another on open-ended narrative, while a third requires listeners to diagram the empathy challenges they hear on pen and paper. Here are some of our favorites.
In the listening workshop, participants diagram each other’s empathy challenges.
-
Empathy is the skill of seeing things from another point of view. It’s not compassion or kindness. It isn’t moral, religious, partisan, or even polite. It is the practice of non-judgmental curiosity, and absolutely anyone can learn to do it. We offer empathy training to creative teams, collaborators, research groups, and all kinds of professionals who want to gain perspective.
-
Teams that need to work better together: leadership teams, creative and marketing teams, researchers, and whole organizations, especially teams in transition. It’s for teams in conflict and teams wanting to grow. It's also for brands that need to understand their customers more deeply. Past clients include Google, Amazon, the NBA, the ACLU and The Federal Reserve Bank.
-
There are two series. The Empathy Skill Set builds the foundations: listening, asking better questions, feedback and tough conversations, knowing yourself, and neutrality. Putting Empathy to Work applies those skills to leadership, facilitation, journey mapping, interviewing and insight generation. Each program is designed around your team's goals. We can also develop a custom training based on your needs.
-
That depends on your goals. Anything from a 90 minute session to a full week in residence. Teams often start with a single workshop, like our signature "Empathy and Listening," and continue with a series over several weeks or months. We'll recommend a format once we know where your team wants to go.
-
It can be either, but we do not recommend hybrid sessions. They just don’t work. Sessions are designed to be interactive, with real practice, and we need a shared experience for that. Most commonly, the sessions take place at your place, whether on location or at your company offsite.
-
Empathy training builds a core communication skill, perspective-taking, that makes every kind of collaboration work better, including inclusion and workplace safety efforts. If your team is also pursuing specific anti-bias work, we work with several expert partners on combined offerings.
-
Your outcomes will depend on your aims and investment, and can be potent. After 90 days practicing the OTHERS curriculum, one team reported a 4x increase in collaboration skills and a 46% increase in personal connection, and 8 out of 10 team members said they were performing better at work. Most teams notice a shift right away: shared language, more honest conversations, and more trust.
-
Costs are calculated by the size of the team, the length of the engagement, and the desired outcomes. A typical 2-3 hour workshop for a team of 20-50 start at $5k, though we offer special rates for special groups.
-
We have offered programs to up to 1000 people at a time, but find the most impactful experiences for one room happen in smaller groups. For very large groups, we would recommend doing several sessions with 250 or fewer at a time.
