The Empathy Set

About John Ford

I came to this work the long way around.

I grew up in South Africa and began my career as a human rights attorney in Namibia, in a country emerging from a long and painful history. In 1996 I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my work shifted toward what it is now: workplace mediation, negotiation instruction, and training, including teaching mediation at UC Law San Francisco. Along the way I wrote Peace at Work, on the practice of workplace mediation, and created The Empathy Set®.

The through line across all of it has been one question: what allows people to turn toward each other rather than away?

How The Empathy Set® Began

The answer I kept arriving at, in mediation after mediation, was language. The people across the table from each other weren't short on feeling. They were short on words precise enough to be understood, and without the words, the conflict had nowhere to go.

I found the beginning of a tool for that at a retreat at Mount Madonna, led by my friend and colleague John Kinyon. He used a simple deck of cards, drawn from Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, that named feelings and needs and let people find the ones that fit. I watched how quickly the cards did what hours of talking often couldn't. They gave people language.

I wanted a version for the work I do, the meetings and disputes and quiet resentments of professional life, where the cost of not having the words is high and the permission to name a feeling is often low. That became The Empathy Set®, a deck built for the workplace and for anyone learning to say what actually matters to them.

Where the Thinking Comes From

Long before any of this, I spent years in relationship with the Ju/'hoansi San of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, and for a time served as chairperson of the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation. The San carry one of the oldest and most refined tracking traditions in the world, and their way of reading the world changed how I understand my own.

A tracker does two things at once. They read what is actually on the ground, a print, a bent stem, a shift in the sand. And when the trail fades, they imagine where the animal has gone, from everything they know of its habits and its condition. I came to see that empathy works the same way. We read what is actually present in another person, and we imagine our way into the experience the signs point to, holding the guess lightly until they tell us whether we are close.

That insight runs underneath everything I make. It shaped The Empathy Set®, and it became the spine of my book, Tracking Triggers: From Reactivity to Responsiveness.

Beyond the Cards

The cards were a start. The more I worked with them, the more I wanted to give people the full vocabulary behind them, so I spent several years writing A Dictionary of Feelings and Needs, which defines 108 feelings and 108 needs, each with its own entry and synonyms. It's a way of practicing what I think of as naming it to tame it, the well-documented fact that putting an accurate word to a feeling loosens its grip on us.

The Empathy Set® became an app as well, so the cards and the dictionary could travel in a pocket. It's now free, supported by voluntary donations, so the vocabulary is available to anyone who wants it.

There are also the talking sticks, which serve an older and simpler discipline: whoever holds the stick speaks, and everyone else listens. I offer two, one beaded in the Zulu tradition and one carrying the giraffe Marshall Rosenberg used as the emblem of speaking from the heart. Where the cards help you find the words, the stick makes room for them to be heard.

An Invitation

However you come to this work, through the cards, the app, the essays, or the book, what I hope you find is the same thing the people in my mediations find when the right words finally arrive. The conversation opens. The distance shrinks. Something that felt stuck begins to move.

You're welcome to start anywhere.

Warm regards,

John Ford

Oakland, California