Consulting with Integrative Empathy tunes your empathy skills to provide expert advice in the language and customs of your specific setting. After getting hands on practice with the five Integrative Empathy skills in Practising Integrative Empathy, you will now learn how to intervene with them in your own context.

Having the ability to understand the complex situation and needs of customers, employees and other stakeholders enables us to offer adapted solutions and decision making aligned with people and objectives. But there is more. What if we are able to tap into existing empathy in organisations? What if we can apply our own empathic capacities to uncover, highlight and work with the empathic abilities of our clients?

In Consulting with Integrative Empathy you will consult in your professional setting on an empathy-related issue. You will use qualitative research to map empathy-related attitudes, thoughts and behaviours, helping you to adapt your language to the organisational culture you work in. You will design your own research project, devise an integrative empathy intervention and trial your intervention in that setting. To round the course off, you’ll evaluate your intervention and deepen your ability to generalise the acquired skills to different problems.

• Date: 27 October 2022
• Durations: 12 weeks
• Format: 3-4 hours a week of research and practice and 3 hours bi-weekly of online training and coaching on Zoom
• Group size: 4 to 8 participants

• You have completed the Practising Empathy Course within the past two years
• You have a professional setting in which you can carry out your project. The group/organisation needs to be on board and willing to let you interview, try out your intervention and present your results to them.
• You need to have a global idea of the issue you will be consulting on in your setting. Your course facilitators will help you to narrow this down to ensure it is feasible and adapted to the course.

The self-paced bi-weekly modules guide you through a project within your organisation. The online training is dedicated to practice, co-creation with your fellow students, group discussion, coaching and reflection. 

Module 1: How to recognize and gather empathy indicators

If we want to promote empathic processes at work, we need to know what we’re looking for. In this first module you will design your research (qualitative), find your population and learn how to conduct phenomenological interviews to map empathy indicators in your context.

Module 2: Empathic interviews

This second module is a foundation for the rest of your project. You will carry out the research and have a first exploration of the outcomes. You will present these outcomes for feedback to your fellow course participants and teachers.

Module 3: Making sense of empathy in your own work setting

You will now deep dive into your data and analyse your outcomes. This leads you to conclusions about what is already commonplace and what is missing. You’ll compare your conclusions with your fellow course participants and see if there is any overlap with others which offers the opportunity to design the next phase together.

Module 4: Adapting empathy skills and designing your intervention

Coming back to the five integrative empathy skills you are familiar with, you will now have to design your intervention. The intervention needs to be adapted to the context and therefore, questions around needs, possibilities, feasibility and acceptability will be answered here. You get to bring all your creativity to adapt the skills to your setting.

Module 5: Prototyping and fine tuning adapted skills

Time to try and see! In this module you will try out your intervention and evaluate it with your participants, your fellow students and your course teachers. What worked as it is? What was not acceptable? What needs finetuning? These are the types of questions you will ask yourself.

Module 6: Integrating and looking back

So you did your research, you designed your intervention, you carried it out and evaluated it. Now what? In this last module we’ll reflect on the past five modules and look ahead to how you can work with your results in the future.

• Consultants 
• Organisational Change Practitioners
• Organisational Development Managers
• Professional Facilitators
• Community Leaders
• NGO Advisors
• Communication Professionals