About the Structure Empathy Framework

The gensis of the Structured Empathy Framework traces to a working relationship between two senior leaders in the UK, who worked together to drive a large team to purse and ultimately win a major UK public sector contract. They had a meeting of minds and a shared passion that to achieve a successful outcome that it required a high-performance team, and the way to do that was not to apply pressure, but to focus on building a team that thrived on constructive challenge, mutual trust, challenging deadlines, and a healthy respect failures from which we can learn in pursuit of the bigger goal.

Building on an extensive existing careers, they began intially developing a mutual trust between them - focused on a level of safety between them that they could be open about anything; in fact more than that, they actively explore failures to reflect, learn and change how they did things. Growing this, and with the generous support of their own leaders, they developed an extended team that was built on this concept - using opennes, sharing, embracing of failures, and unwavering mutual trust to create an environmet where they could deliver an excellent (and winning!) outcome.

At the time they didn't understand the theory, but later grew to understand more about wider experiences of Compassion, Empathy, and Systems in organisations - including influential books such as those described on the Reading Material. Ultimately they went on to form a IT, Digital and Engineering Consultancy - Forty Two Fold - that is founded on the principle of delivering exponenital improment to outcomes (pursits, programmes, or service delivery) through a foundation of psychlogical safety. The Structured Empathy Framework was born, as an open source project - sponsored by Forty Two Fold - to create a framework that enables organisations to develop and nurture a psychologically safe environment that delivers high performnace within and across teams.

Some have argued that by setting up the Structured Empathy Framework as open source we are giving away our company 'special sauce'. This is not our view, rather an open‑source model makes the Structured Empathy Framework more credible and (hopefully) widely adopted, because people can see exactly how it works and contribute to its evolution rather than taking it on trust. It puts the focus on finding the right guides, implementers, and accelerators… the people whom organisations turn to when they want the framework applied with depth, nuance, and real‑world impact.

The framework is very much a work in progress, and actively encourage input, change and challenge via the Open Source project on Github. For more information on how to contribute and develop the framework, please have a look at the Contributing page

Thank you, and we appreciate your use, development and input to the Structured Empathy Framework.

The next page describes how to contribute to the framework.

You can always return to the contents page by clicking the 'Structured Empathy Framework' title at the top of the page.