Are you technical or non-technical? Good with people or good with machines? Do you have soft skills or hard skills? These binaries are everywhere, and they can limit our ability to collaborate effectively with people who don't think like we do.

In this presentation, we'll look at how the myth of empathy as intuition often gets in the way of healthy interdepartmental communication. People in marketing, recruiting, finance, and operations will learn to appreciate the detail-oriented, analytical, and often skeptical mindset many engineers bring to their work. Engineers and other deep-thinking specialists will learn specific research methods to understand business-minded people who tend to think more broadly. By looking at empathy as a system instead of a binary, participants will walk away with specific practices to help them:

* Build rapport and trust with colleagues from different departments

* Appreciate the value of different perspectives and skills

* Communicate domain expertise clearly without dumbing things down

* Reduce defensiveness, stereotyping, and backchanneling

* Use conflict to drive innovation instead of disconnection

This presentation can be adapted to be a keynote or a workshop.