After writing about empathy last month, I heard back from more people than I expected. Almost none of them disagreed with the idea. What they wanted to know instead was more practical, and honestly more interesting: if empathy needs space, time, and patience to develop, how do you actually protect those things once the pressure to move faster inevitably returns?
That question has stayed with me, mostly because I don't think it has an easy answer. Everyone I've ever worked with claims to value understanding people deeply. Very few of them have built anything into their process that actually protects the conditions understanding requires.
The Illusion of Prioritization
There's a difference between saying empathy matters and actually living it when deadlines are looming. Most teams intend for the latter, but fall short. Research timelines shrink the moment a roadmap tightens. Interviews get cut from twelve to six. Synthesis, once a slow process of sitting with contradictions, becomes something closer to a request: summarize this by tomorrow.
None of this happens maliciously. It happens because nothing in the system is designed to resist it. Speed comes from calendars, deadlines, and expectations built around it. Depth rarely does, which means depth loses by default, not by decision.
What Protecting Space Actually Looks Like
The teams I've seen do this well don't talk about empathy more than anyone else. They just build small, specific guardrails around it. This could mean protecting a fixed number of unrushed interviews before any synthesis begins, even when early patterns seem obvious. Successful teams separate the act of listening from the act of concluding, so that AI tools are used to organize what was heard, not to decide what it meant. They treat contradictory data as something worth sitting with instead of something to resolve on the way to a clean takeaway.
This requires a conscious, collective agreement that arriving smarter is more valuable than arriving faster. In practice, it looks like the admission that deadlines matter less when the direction is off-target. Some I’ve worked with, like the teams at Chick-fil-A, enjoy astronomical success because they aim three times before pulling the trigger. They understand the value of thoroughly and completely assessing things before taking action. It takes time and discipline, but the on-target decision-making pays dividends in the long run.
These small acts of discipline, when repeated consistently, preserve the conditions understanding needs to develop into empathy.
The Trade-off
None of this is free. Protecting space for developing empathy usually means moving slower than the organization around you would prefer, and defending that pace when someone asks why the readout isn't ready yet. It means resisting the very tools that make it easiest to arrive at an answer quickly, even when those tools are sitting right there, capable of producing something that looks finished.
That trade-off is exactly why so few teams sustain it. It's easy to protect empathy in principle. It's much harder to protect it in a quarter where everything is measured by velocity.
I don't think there's an exact template for getting this right. But we have seen that the organizations who eventually build something people genuinely love are rarely the ones who moved fastest. They're the ones who found small, deliberate ways to keep protecting the space empathy needs, long after it became inconvenient to do so.
That, more than any framework, may be the real discipline worth practicing.
JUSTIN SUTTON
CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS
Justin Sutton has led qualitative and mixed-method research programs for brands including retail, QSR, CPG, financial services, and durable goods organizations. His work focuses on behavioral drivers, innovation, Moments of Truth, and the intersection of System 1 and System 2 decision-making.
