Empathy can suck.  

There are different forms of empathy, but the uniting definition is the process of understanding and feeling what others are feeling.

Have you ever tried empathizing with everything all the time? Ask any empath - and they will tell you that it sucks the energy right out of you, it’s completely overwhelming, and the quickest road to burnout. 

The word has been getting thrown around a lot over the last 10 years. 

“We need more empathy in work spaces.”  ”Leaders need to empathize more.” “Empathy will create more inclusive environments.” 

There seems to be an unspoken agreement that the more we empathize the better things will become.

I would love for this to be true, but it’s not.

See, empathy takes a lot of energy. Why do you think doing customer or employee interviews all day is so tiring? For interviews to be useful, we must empathize.

Thus if we are not deliberate about where we put our energy, bad things like burnout happen. 

This is where Strategic Empathy comes in. 

Strategic empathy is the ability to focus one’s empathetic attention on someone’s, or a group of people’s reality within a defined context.

When we concentrate our empathic energy the impact we are able to create increases because we have positioned ourselves to gain more valuable insights by placing constraints.

For instance, we talk about improving tooling for DAOs. One might say, “we need to empathize with DAOs in order to understand what tools they need.” However, when we lean into what it means to “empathize with DAOs” a monumental task lies ahead of us. 

We want to empathize with every single DAO? Damn. Good luck.

Then we might say, “ok, not every single one, just a few.” And this is the critical question. 

Which few? The few that focus on NFTs, or DeFi, or social clubs, or impact, or…?

I guarantee we’ll be able to gain different insights from each of these verticals. 

This approach feels very different than setting the expectation that we must empathize with everyone all the time.

The average empathic person might only have enough empathic energy to effectively focus on the real experience for contributors who want to join impact DAOs for one month and gain valuable insights from this concentration.

We can use these insights to build out the nuances in the different jobs people are seeking to get done at different touch points of their web3 journey - and we can use those to design truly wonderfilled experiences for them. I write about designing for wonder in web3 here. 

Let's stop spraying and praying empathy without understanding what the implications are.

When deploying strategic empathy for those you seek to empower, you are more likely to realize the positive change you seek to make. 

Empathy can suck.  

There are different forms of empathy, but the uniting definition is the process of understanding and feeling what others are feeling.

Have you ever tried empathizing with everything all the time? Ask any empath - and they will tell you that it sucks the energy right out of you, it’s completely overwhelming, and the quickest road to burnout. 

The word has been getting thrown around a lot over the last 10 years. 

“We need more empathy in work spaces.”  ”Leaders need to empathize more.” “Empathy will create more inclusive environments.” 

There seems to be an unspoken agreement that the more we empathize the better things will become.

I would love for this to be true, but it’s not.

See, empathy takes a lot of energy. Why do you think doing customer or employee interviews all day is so tiring? For interviews to be useful, we must empathize.

Thus if we are not deliberate about where we put our energy, bad things like burnout happen. 

This is where Strategic Empathy comes in. 

Strategic empathy is the ability to focus one’s empathetic attention on someone’s, or a group of people’s reality within a defined context.

When we concentrate our empathic energy the impact we are able to create increases because we have positioned ourselves to gain more valuable insights by placing constraints.

For instance, we talk about improving tooling for DAOs. One might say, “we need to empathize with DAOs in order to understand what tools they need.” However, when we lean into what it means to “empathize with DAOs” a monumental task lies ahead of us. 

We want to empathize with every single DAO? Damn. Good luck.

Then we might say, “ok, not every single one, just a few.” And this is the critical question. 

Which few? The few that focus on NFTs, or DeFi, or social clubs, or impact, or…?

I guarantee we’ll be able to gain different insights from each of these verticals. 

This approach feels very different than setting the expectation that we must empathize with everyone all the time.

The average empathic person might only have enough empathic energy to effectively focus on the real experience for contributors who want to join impact DAOs for one month and gain valuable insights from this concentration.

We can use these insights to build out the nuances in the different jobs people are seeking to get done at different touch points of their web3 journey - and we can use those to design truly wonderfilled experiences for them. I write about designing for wonder in web3 here. 

Let's stop spraying and praying empathy without understanding what the implications are.

When deploying strategic empathy for those you seek to empower, you are more likely to realize the positive change you seek to make.