# Positional Empathy · Jose Romero

In enterprise work, the empathy that moves projects forward is positional: mapping what each person sees, optimises for and fears.

Source: https://www.joseromerodesign.com/thinking/positions/positional-empathy/

Positional Empathy

# In enterprise work, the empathy that moves projects forward is positional.

Published June 2026 · Updated October 2026

There's a version of empathy that's emotional: you put yourself in someone's position and feel what they might feel. That has real value: it's the foundation of personal connection and deep user trust. But in design work, especially inside large organisations, what's more useful day-to-day is a different kind: the ability to map how another person understands the situation, what they're optimising for, what they're afraid of, and what they need to be true in order to move forward.

I've started calling this positional empathy. It sits alongside compassion rather than standing in for it, and it's turned out to be one of the more useful skills I've picked up in enterprise work. Most of the genuinely hard problems in these environments have nothing to do with visuals or technical execution. People show up misaligned, working from different mental models of the same problem, carrying incentives the brief never mentions.

Map that out accurately, without losing your own read on it, and you can usually work through it. The goal is to understand the situation well enough that people stop arguing about the wrong things.

_You map stakeholder alignment the same way you'd map any other system._

## Other positions

- Behavioural Economics Most design decisions are really behavioural decisions wearing a visual disguise.

- Resilient Systems The best process is one that doesn't depend on any single person to remember it.

- AI & Design Practice AI has changed how much of a design job is thinking versus doing, more than most people have noticed.

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