Practise More Empathy

The story: The retrospective produced a clear action: practise more empathy. Everyone nodded. It went on the board. Then one person expressed concern about a colleague's setback and was told it felt like pity, not empathy. They had committed to the same word and built two completely different behaviours around it.

What it means for organisations: Action items without definitions are just deferred disagreements. When a team commits to a behaviour and doesn't discuss what it looks like in their specific context, they haven't made a commitment. They've made a placeholder. The real conversation hasn't happened yet.