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Einfühlung: Reclaiming the Radical Power of Empathy in Leadership, Work, and a World That’s Lost Its Feel
Empathy has become a technique. It began as a way of making contact.
Einfühlung is German for "feeling into." Somewhere in the crossing into English, something was lost. What had been a way of coming into contact with what is actually present became a private trait that could be scored on a scale, taught in a workshop, and performed in a meeting. This book recovers the older meaning and puts it to work where it matters in how leaders and organizations know what is really happening.
The claim at its center is that an organization can lose access to reality before it loses access to information. The dashboards fill up, the reports arrive on time, and contact with the work quietly thins. David S. Morgan follows a single signal from the edge of an organization to the person who could act on it, and shows the three places it no one perceives it, no one passes it on, or it arrives and is explained away.
The remedy is a practice, not a personality. The Human Engine names five capacities that keep a leader reachable by what is actually Sense, Discern, Imagine, Respond, and Replenish.
Inside you will
What changed when Einfühlung became "empathy" in 1909, and what it costThe signal path, and how to tell where in your own organization it is failingThe five capacities of the Human Engine, each with a practice you can useCases from the public record, including Columbia and Challenger, alongside constructed scenes that are always labeled as constructedSixteen short tools, one at the end of each chapter, for use in ordinary workA guide for teams and reading groupsThis book is for leaders who are told they are approachable and suspect the news is being filtered, people whose empathy training taught them a script, and anyone who has said "this is probably nothing" and meant something else.
It is not an argument against data, analysis, or artificial intelligence. It is an argument against letting a representation stand in for contact.
Einfühlung is German for "feeling into." Somewhere in the crossing into English, something was lost. What had been a way of coming into contact with what is actually present became a private trait that could be scored on a scale, taught in a workshop, and performed in a meeting. This book recovers the older meaning and puts it to work where it matters in how leaders and organizations know what is really happening.
The claim at its center is that an organization can lose access to reality before it loses access to information. The dashboards fill up, the reports arrive on time, and contact with the work quietly thins. David S. Morgan follows a single signal from the edge of an organization to the person who could act on it, and shows the three places it no one perceives it, no one passes it on, or it arrives and is explained away.
The remedy is a practice, not a personality. The Human Engine names five capacities that keep a leader reachable by what is actually Sense, Discern, Imagine, Respond, and Replenish.
Inside you will
What changed when Einfühlung became "empathy" in 1909, and what it costThe signal path, and how to tell where in your own organization it is failingThe five capacities of the Human Engine, each with a practice you can useCases from the public record, including Columbia and Challenger, alongside constructed scenes that are always labeled as constructedSixteen short tools, one at the end of each chapter, for use in ordinary workA guide for teams and reading groupsThis book is for leaders who are told they are approachable and suspect the news is being filtered, people whose empathy training taught them a script, and anyone who has said "this is probably nothing" and meant something else.
It is not an argument against data, analysis, or artificial intelligence. It is an argument against letting a representation stand in for contact.
287 pages, Paperback
Published July 4, 2025
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