The Unlearning Room: The near enemies in servant leadership

The difference between designing at people and designing with them. One is faster, more flattering, & removes the agency it meant to restore
Pity and empathy look almost identical from the inside. Both feel like care. Knowing which one we are leaning into could be the difference between designing at people and not with them.
This is the final session of The Unlearning Room | Season One, a series of eight sessions running fortnightly on Friday mornings.

You are welcome whether or not you came to the earlier ones.
In this session, Sandra Gonzalez, founder of UX for Change, tells the story of unlearning how her commitment to become a servant leader during her early UX for Change work, showed up as pity hiding under the disguise of empathy, despite her best intentions.
The format of this session is unchanged for our first one. You come ready to be present for the full hour, with no checking email or doing other work during the session. Sandra opens with a ten-minute story. No fancy slides, just a human sharing a story with other humans. She then frames it from an unlearning angle, and opens it to the group for first impressions, questions and observations. To close, she asks a single question, with the intention of giving you an unlearning device to take to work that very same day.
There are only 8 seats. We keep the groups small and intimate, nothing is recorded, and nothing leaves the room, because we want this experience to be unique and to honour the intentionality it deserves.

Friday 2 October, 08:00–09:00 UK time. The early start is deliberate: an hour of thinking before the day kicks in, because this is the kind of activity that gets squeezed out if you leave it until later.
This closes Season One. Season Two runs from 16 October to 27 November: two sessions on power, then strategy, gratitude and reciprocity.We hope to see you in the room.