exercise · all tools
Empathy Walk
Choose a person significantly different from you — across a boundary of politics, faith, class, life experience — invite them for a walk, and practice holding space across that difference: listening for their world without debating it. Preparation (contemplating the difference), the walk itself (1–2 hours), and structured reflection afterwards.
Prerequisites
- The other person consents to a real conversation, not a study of themselves — honesty about the exercise is part of the ethics
- Crossing a live boundary can stir defensiveness in both directions; the practice is staying in contact, not winning or converting
- Choose a difference that stretches you, not one that endangers anyone
Practical
- Time
- 60-120 min + 30 landing
- Group
- 2–2 · pairs
- Settings
- in-person, outdoors
- Materials
- A genuine invitation; walking route
- Mechanisms
- dialogic-encounter, perspective-taking, life-embedding
- Change scope
- state → skill · repeatable
Instructions
- Where
- u-school.org/empathywalk — u-school for Transformation — Theory U tools, open
- Availability
- Open online — published at the link, free to read
- Licence
- CC BY (Presencing Institute)
Source link checked 29 Aug 2026 — unchanged since we recorded it on 28 Aug 2026
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Otto Scharmer / Presencing Institute (rooted in Ed Schein's exercise) — Theory U (co-initiating practice)
In this directory via u-school for Transformation — Theory U tools
Depth 3 with holding 1: the container is the walking format itself — side-by-side, in motion, in the world — one of the oldest regulation technologies for hard conversations.
status: checked · added 2026-08-25