9
DESIGNING FOR COMPASSION COMPETENCE
NOW THAT WE HAVE a framework for understanding how an organization’s social architecture awakens compassion competence, we can actively design organizations in ways that will enhance people’s capacity to notice suffering, evoke generous interpretations, increase empathy, and amplify patterns of compassionate action. We highlight a set of design principles that have evolved from our research and inform the work of compassion architects who want to change their organizations.
Trusting in these design principles can help you to develop the courage required to step into the heart of suffering at work and try new things that will provoke your system to respond. Working with these design principles also helps awaken our curiosity, because emergent patterns rarely feature simple cause-and-effect relationships. And ultimately, using these design principles changes compassion architects themselves, evoking their skill, creativity, patience, and graceful transformation right alongside the organizations they transform.
ARCHITECTURES THAT ENHANCE ATTENTION TO SUFFERING
It may seem paradoxical at first, but organizations that are filled with compassion are also filled with pain. Once we understand the compassion process, we understand this paradox, because we see that all compassion begins with expressions of suffering. In organizations where suffering is routinely ignored, compassion is also ignored. To design architectures that create compassion competence, we have to prepare the ground for more suffering to surface.
MEET MIDWEST BILLING
When we walked into Midwest Billing, we knew we’d discovered another of what organizational scholars Gretchen Spreitzer and Scott Sonenshein have called a “positive deviant” workplace.1 As we described with TechCo, this idea refers to an organization that deviates from the norm by being far above it on some dimension. At Midwest Billing we found a very high-performing organization that was also off the charts in terms of compassion competence.2 This simultaneous combination of excellence in terms of measurable results and human responsiveness to suffering offers a model for design principles to enhance attention to pain and ways to alleviate it.
On our first morning at Midwest Billing, we arrived early at the secured floor of this hospital billing unit, which was located within a community health care system. We were there as organizational researchers, ready to observe the unit’s work. Escorted in, we took our seats in the back of their conference room space, large enough to seat all staff members around rectangular tables. We watched as thirty employees, all women, arrived for their workday. We knew in advance that Midwest Billing was what scholars would label a “pink-collar ghetto,” featuring service-sector work that offered little opportunity for advancement.3 Jobs like these have been labeled “pink collar” because they are largely populated by women, just as in this unit. Each day these billers handled the preparation and submission of hundreds of insurance claims on behalf of the physicians and clinics. But sociological facts about the industry did not begin to describe the social architecture we discovered that morning.
One table was almost invisible under a huge pile of envelopes. Behind this mountain of paper, her head barely visible, Dorothy sat with a letter opener in her hand. She told us that the envelopes contained notifications about the status of insurance claims. The unit received hundreds of envelopes every day that had to be opened and sorted, and their contents stamped and processed. She told us that this Monday, as with many Monday mornings, was a particularly heavy mail day.
Members of the unit came into the conference room chatting, notebooks tucked under one arm and carrying mugs of coffee or tea. Each one saw Dorothy behind her mountain of envelopes, set down her things, and turned around and left the room. We watched this happen again and again. One after another, members of the unit came back with letter openers in hand, grabbed envelopes from the pile, and began to open them. No one had to be asked. The meeting kicked off and everyone continued to help Dorothy. In an utterly silent and easy choreography of lending a hand, at the end of the half-hour meeting, tidy stacks of cleanly opened envelopes sat in front of each seat. What would otherwise have been a half day of dull work was done.
We had just witnessed an organization whose members were keenly attuned to one another and practiced at paying attention and responding to the need for help. This is an important point because our research has shown that regular, consistent, normalized help giving is a condition that supports high-quality ties and connections between people—something that we know sets the stage for compassion competence. We quickly discovered that their attention, attunement to one another, and quick responsiveness to one another’s need for help did not stop with work tasks. They had a wide variety of ways to help and support each other with suffering that came in from outside the unit as well. We knew that pink-collar work is usually also low-wage work, and this kind of labor is statistically correlated with many kinds of suffering that flow from sources such as poverty, divorce, and domestic violence. When we got there, we found that a majority of the members of Midwest Billing were single mothers striving to care for their children on modest wages. Many were also caring for an elderly family member or other extended family members in their households, stretching their paychecks even further. Looking at the unit through a sociological and statistical window, we expected to see a lot of suffering that corresponded predictably with financial and social strain. But looking through the window of workplace community, we saw an exquisite social architecture designed to draw attention to these prevalent forms of suffering, offer generous interpretations of them, increase empathy and concern, and amplify patterns of compassionate action, all with the same kind of easy choreography that we witnessed with Dorothy and the envelopes.
DESIGNING TO CONNECT THROUGH CARE
In network terms, Midwest Billing was a small group of people who were strongly connected by being members of the same organizational unit. They occupied a secured space, which made the unit physically separate from other units within the organization. This separation further emphasized the members’ sense that they were interconnected within a special subnetwork that was different from the larger organization. The structure of these network ties helped them feel seen and known at work. And as we saw in chapter 5, the identification that comes from doing similar work and being in a similar work environment fosters feelings of empathy and concern for each other. So our first design principle for compassion architects involves looking for ways to create subnetworks within larger organizations or systems where people can identify with each other and feel more fully and authentically known. These subnetwork structures and the feelings that flow through the ties help direct attention and empathy when suffering surfaces, and they evoke more generous interpretations and customized actions. When people do not feel that they are just a number in a large system or a cog in a big machine, we’ve begun to design for compassion.
Design principle
Create subnetworks within larger organizations or systems where people can identify with each other and feel more fully and authentically known.
Members of Midwest Billing emphasized the quality of connections with coworkers as a primary focus of their working lives. They built high-quality connections through trusting each other to get things done, playing together in ways that kept work positive, helping each other when things got hard, and respecting each other no matter what happened.4 They designed recruitment and hiring routines that emphasized fit with the group as well as billing knowledge and skills. They knew that corrosive connections were deadly to the subculture they had created, and they worked to keep them from forming. These routines reinforced the value of high-quality connections at work for newcomers and longtime members alike. This informs another design principle for compassion architects:
Revamp selection and hiring routines to emphasize high-quality connections, empathy, and fit with the cultural assumptions and values of shared humanity at work.
In several ways, Midwest Billing was more like a high-performance manufacturing unit than a billing department. The unit met every day at 8 a.m. to discuss data and make decisions about rapid performance improvements. This daily meeting also became a place for sharing relational information and surfacing suffering. One member described this dual focus supported by the routine: “The morning meetings kind of bring us all together as a whole, so we can kind of touch base that way. It’s not always business oriented. We do talk business, as you know, but we also have the occasional sharing of other things if we need to. I think that keeps us informed, like a person’s sick or they’re having surgery or whatever—that’s the time that those type of things come out.” In fact, the unit regularly adjusted the collective workload based on information shared at the morning meeting about members who were sick or absent or just not feeling like themselves and in need of help. Task loads could be quickly calibrated to available help, ensuring that both empathy and effort flowed to where it was most needed. This informs our next design principle:
Design principle
Create meeting or gathering routines that bring people into regular, consistent contact with each other, and make space to discuss both work performance and relational needs for help or support.
Over time, as Midwest Billing grew and took on more demands, the unit discovered that they could increase their overall efficiency if they worked in teams rather than individually. These smaller team structures served as sub-subnetworks, connecting people even more strongly to a few coworkers, so that they worked together closely and knew each other well. During this move into a team structure, the unit also gained efficiency by centralizing some tasks that took time each day, like opening the huge stacks of mail or double-checking claim numbers. While this “shared service” model in the unit could have created suffering by making some members feel less valuable, Midwest Billing guarded against this by highlighting its core value of support and tying these jobs directly to that core value. Naming this team the “support pod” reinforced the tie to the cultural value of support that pervaded the unit.
Midwest Billing adapted its onboarding and training routines to incorporate the support pod. Any newcomer, regardless of the role she was hired to fill, began by working in the support pod for a period of time. The billing department’s new team structure, combined with the core values and the routines, placed the support pod at the unit’s heart. Plentiful appreciation and regularly expressed gratitude for the support pod elevated members from a role that could have been denigrated as second-class citizen to what many billers said was “the most important role here.” With the support pod visibly central and valued in the unit, this web of care paid off in more ways than one.5 Midwest Billing climbed to industry-leading results by increasing efficiency in its time to collect money. At the same time it brought its turnover to under 5 percent in an industry that regularly sees turnover rates of 50 percent or more. This amalgam of elements of the social architecture highlights our next design principle:
Design principle
Regard organizational change that improves efficiency as an opportunity to simultaneously increase compassion. In any change process, tie change to core assumptions and values of shared humanity, and redesign roles and routines to elevate people’s sense of responsibility for others’ well-being.
DESIGNING TO LOWER THE COST OF EMPATHY
Sociologist Candace Clark, in a broadscale examination of compassion in American life, noted that we participate in an invisible “sympathy economy,” in which sympathy is seen like any other good, to be spent or saved or used depending on individual circumstances.6 Her work echoes what we saw in chapter 5: when sympathy or empathy seems costly in terms of time, effort, or reputation, we reduce our concern and compassion correspondingly. And in organizations where receiving compassion is perceived to go along with being indebted to others, people sometimes withhold revealing suffering in an attempt to avoid this sympathy debt. Some forms of a sympathy economy can make suffering harder to see and empathy harder to feel.
The idea of a sympathy economy is useful for compassion architects, because they can also design to increase what Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller describe as the “psychological subsidies” of compassion.7 Cultural or subcultural values of care and support, like those we see at Midwest Billing, reduce the perceived costs of empathy. Norms that foster helping on a regular basis decrease the sense of obligation or debt that comes with asking for and receiving help. Coupled with informal recognition, such as praise or appreciation, cultural assumptions and values can change the sympathy economy so that compassion becomes rewarding. This shift was evident at Midwest Billing, where one member actually described the unit in terms of an economy of care: “I think as far as getting the group to be a caring group, I think they learn by example. Caring isn’t necessarily a reward for the person receiving the care; it’s a reward for the person doing the caring—the feeling that you have that you’ve done some good and you’ve gone out of your way to help your fellow human. That’s the reward.” More formal rewards for care and support were also abundant. For instance, a stack of gold-star awards sat in the unit conference room, available to all members at any time. People wrote stories of help, support, excellent performance, and care on the back of gold stars that were shared at the daily meetings. All gold-star awards hung above the cubicles of the recipients, so a visitor walking into the unit was greeted with constellations of care and support spread across the workplace. These formal reward routines, combined with culture and informal practices, helped shift the sympathy economy dramatically toward rewarding compassion rather than undermining it.
Design principle
Emphasize informal recognition and formal social recognition of compassionate actions in line with cultural values and assumptions to shift the sympathy economy in ways that make compassion rewarding rather than costly.
Members of Midwest Billing participated in practices and routines that discouraged or punished violating their shared workplace cultural values. For example, all members maintained a strict no-gossip communication practice with each other. They would gently refuse to participate in a conversation if they perceived it as gossip. Members insisted that if someone’s work or attitude was going to be the subject of a conversation, she had to be present in the conversation. They engaged in direct conversations about workplace conflicts, facilitated by coworkers or leaders, to ensure that they did not fester. These norms, practices, and routines highlight the link between courage and compassion. They also shift the sympathy economy because violating the cultural values becomes costly.
Design principle
Tip the sympathy economy toward making violations of cultural assumptions and values costly to lessen behaviors that undermine compassion.
Sarah, the manager of Midwest Billing, reinforced the cultural assumptions about shared humanity and the shared values of care and support. She modeled support by giving the unit fifteen-minute sunshine breaks at random times when the sun broke through the winter clouds, staying behind to answer the phones while everyone else went outside. She crafted her role in the unit so that concern for employees’ well-being was a significant priority in her work. When difficulties or disagreements erupted, she would often emphasize a message of common humanity. She described how she would articulate this assumption: “Every employee who works with you is the same as you . . . human. There may be different levels of hierarchy within your corporation, but when all the layers are peeled back, we are all the same. So treat every one of the employees you work with as you expect to be treated.”8 These values in action inform two design principles for compassion architects:
Design principle
Coach leaders to model cultural values that support shared humanity, and model them yourself.
Design principle
Articulate the way you would state the cultural assumptions of shared humanity in your organization. Use this statement to guide how you and others engage when conflicts or disagreements erupt.
DESIGNING TO MITIGATE PERSISTENT SOURCES OF SUFFERING
One defining feature of a pink-collar ghetto, as we said, is limited opportunity for advancement or growth. As Midwest Billing continued to improve its performance and reduce its turnover rates, the lack of opportunity for career growth or advancement exacerbated suffering. Some members left the unit to pursue other forms of work. One member reduced her hours to part-time and began to work toward a nursing degree. For most members, though, additional schooling or a career change was too expensive or too taxing. Recognizing that boredom or stagnation could be a persistent source of suffering, the group began to develop a more elaborate cross-training routine, not only to help newcomers learn the ropes but also to allow billers to move across teams. This routine enhanced the opportunity for people to build new skills and began to address this form of suffering.
Looking for growth potential in the unit, Sarah asked the teams to name informal leaders. Initially, these team leaders helped by fielding questions that didn’t require the manager’s input. As the informal leaders became used to the new designation, they took initiative to meet as a group to build their leadership skills. They developed greater ability to facilitate dialogues about workplace conflict, which freed up Sarah’s time. They took on responsibility for tracking data. Team members came to rely on the team leaders for guidance. After these roles had developed so well, Sarah approached the human resources division of the hospital system to have the team-leader positions formally recognized. She lobbied for additional compensation for their added responsibilities, which was approved. This creative approach to unit development reveals another design principle:
Design principle
Invent roles and training routines that address persistent sources of suffering in work, such as boredom or lack of opportunity for advancement.
The day when approval came for these new roles to be formally recognized and compensated, the unit held a ceremony naming each leader queen for a day, decorating them with symbolic crowns, and celebrating their success. The imaginative creation of these roles served as an antidote to the suffering that comes from stagnation and hopelessness in work environments where people perceive that they have no opportunity for growth. Celebrating this success at changing the social architecture further enhanced people’s belief in the compassion of the organization and their capacity for growth and change. While it might seem modest in some ways, the fact that Midwest Billing created multiple paths for career advancement out of what started as a single-level, single-service job designation is a triumph of opportunity in the face of suffering.
Design principle
Celebrate compassionate action regularly to strengthen relationships and reinforce people’s belief in their capacity to increase compassion in the organization.
ARCHITECTURES THAT EVOKE GENEROUS INTERPRETATIONS OF SUFFERING
Organizations can make generous interpretations of suffering difficult, particularly when they involve someone’s failures at work, as we saw in chapter 4. Sometimes work distracts us with time and performance pressures or focuses us on financial goals that limit our view of others’ humanity. In those situations, we need a social architecture that reawakens our capacity for generous interpretations of the challenges, difficulties, and failures that cause suffering at work. How can we design workplaces that evoke these generous interpretations, especially in times of great pressure when they are most likely to break down?
DESIGNING GOALS THAT REINFORCE COMMUNITY ASPIRATIONS
Research emphasizes that when we see ourselves as part of an interconnected community at work, a human family or an ecosystem, we interpret people’s plights differently than when we think we are only in it for ourselves. As we’ve shown, self-interested egosystem views lead us to interpret people’s suffering as irrelevant to our own success. An egosystem pushes us toward goals that involve our own gain and ignore our impact on others. On the other hand, when we see ourselves as part of a community that succeeds or fails together, we interpret people’s suffering as important and worthy of compassion. An ecosystem pushes us toward goals that involve collective gain and investment in the common good.
We see an example of ecosystem goals in the story of Julie Morath, who is now president and CEO of the California Hospital Quality Institute. When she served as the chief operating officer (COO) at Children’s Hospital and Clinics of Minnesota, beginning in 1999, Julie set an impossible-to-achieve community aspirational goal of 100 percent patient safety.9 As scholar Amy Edmondson notes in her book Teaming, where she describes Julie’s work, this goal was years ahead of the mainstream of her field. At the time, physicians and nurses were unfamiliar with or unwilling to acknowledge the widespread harm caused by medical errors. But Julie recognized that this issue was prevalent and could be addressed only by a professional community that was willing to embrace its interdependence and use it to aspire to greater compassion.
Design principle
Set aspirational community goals that help people see that their success is tied to their interdependence in a human ecosystem where everyone is striving for compassion and common good.
This aspirational community goal mattered to Julie because she knew the harm of medical errors in an immediate way. When asked to explain why she was on a mission for 100 percent patient safety, she told the story of an event that had haunted her for thirty years. Working as a nurse at another hospital early in her career, she saw a four-year-old patient die from an anesthesia error. Julie witnessed the devastation that the child’s death caused for the family. But even more devastation followed. In Julie’s words, “The nurse who felt responsible went home that day and never returned, giving up the career she loved due to a profound and crushing feeling of guilt.”10 Julie described an even wider ripple of suffering that spread through the organization: “Doctors and other nurses just shut down and never talked to one another about what happened.”11 Thirty years later, Julie is still using the pain of that intense period of suffering to motivate and lead others in ways that create possibilities for more generous interpretations of failures and the suffering they engender.
Design principle
Share stories of times when a lack of generous interpretations of errors has caused suffering in the organization to show how generous interpretations can alleviate this suffering.
To achieve this aspirational community goal, Julie worked with others to institute a routine called blameless reporting, based on the positive default assumption about colleagues that we discussed in chapter 4. This routine rests on the assumption that everyone in the hospital is acting on good intentions and striving for the best possible care for their patients. The routine invites examination of errors and near misses to foster learning. Even as this routine opens up more visibility about people’s errors, it fuels more generous interpretations of the suffering of patients, doctors, nurses, and staff when errors occur. People throughout the system participate in the routine and make meaning of errors in ways that engender compassion.
Design principle
Institute routines for discussing errors, failures, mistakes, and near misses in your organization in ways that foster generous interpretations of suffering to reduce blame and emphasize learning.
Julie’s example shows us an amalgam of leaders’ actions, stories, cultural assumptions, and routines that evoke generous interpretations of suffering at work.
DESIGNING DECISIONS THAT EVOKE GENEROUS INTERPRETATIONS OF SUFFERING
How people make decisions at work, and the frameworks that are called upon to guide those decisions, greatly shape interpretations of suffering. These can be small-scale decisions about everyday work tasks or large-scale decisions about organizational action. We saw this in our research when Richard, the CEO of a construction firm, recalled an instance of decision-making that steered him away from a generous interpretation of a traumatic safety event:
A young child climbed over a fence and was badly burned by a piece of equipment on the organization’s property. Immediately, as CEO, I began to get advice. “Don’t admit any wrongdoing,” the attorneys told me. The investigators told me that this boy had to go over a fence to get to the equipment, and he had to pry open a door, and that’s how he got hurt. And so we could have taken a legal stance that we were not at fault. But the truth of the matter is that the investigators and attorneys and other staff just got me worried about everything.
When something has gone wrong, the worry about unknown consequences and the impulse to protect the organization can blind us to suffering. Roles such as attorney, risk manager, investigator, or human resources officer can hinder compassion when they are designed to emphasize only the responsibility of protecting the organization, without an eye toward also protecting people’s well-being. Compassion architects can design roles that support more generous interpretations of suffering by emphasizing that everyone in the organization has a responsibility for the well-being of the organization’s stakeholders.
Design principle
Describe roles, especially roles that involve investigation or risk management, with explicit responsibility not only for protecting the organization but also for protecting the well-being of a range of stakeholders.
In Richard’s case, he did not have the benefit of attorneys and investigators whose roles invested them in compassion for all stakeholders. But Richard was not just a CEO; he was also a father. When he looked at what had happened in his role as CEO, he felt “worried about everything.” But when he looked at the situation in his role as a father, the decision seemed more obvious:
I had to hold a press conference, and I had been fully prepped by my legal team. But you know what? I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of that child’s parents. I got up there in front of the press, and I said, “We take 100 percent complete accountability for this event. It’s not a matter of fault, it’s a matter of healing this young child and his family.”
Richard adopted an alternative framework for decision-making that restored a generous interpretation of suffering. A less generous interpretation could have amplified suffering by painting a picture of the hurt child as reckless and irresponsible, engaging the family and the organization in a protracted legal dispute. Instead of shifting the blame toward the boy, Richard decided to offer compassion.
Design principle
When decisions involve responding to suffering, discuss the decision from the point of view of multiple roles within and outside the organization, and actively consider the perspectives of others who are involved to heighten empathy and evoke generous interpretations of suffering.
Richard’s actions provided a model for compassion throughout the organization. In addition, they show us how leading with compassion can require courage, since not everyone in the organization agreed with his choice. Richard smiled ruefully as he concluded: “My staff told me the general counsel looked like he was going to have a cow.” But all ended well for both the organization and the boy’s family. And Richard’s decision became a story that was shared widely in his organization, amplifying compassion in later decisions. Compassion architects can also draw on Richard’s model:
Design principle
Uphold models of leading with compassion and share stories of compassionate decisions. Use them to spark discussions about how everyone’s roles or routines can be recrafted to incorporate more responsibility for the well-being of others.
Richard’s story makes plain that decision-making routines, whether by top leaders like Richard and his staff or by others at all levels, can be oriented around compassion. When decision-making frameworks and guidelines encourage people at work to take human costs into account, along with legal and financial concerns, these routines enable compassion competence. At times, giving consideration of suffering its due improves the organizational outcomes. Compassion scholar Ace Simpson has suggested that in order to design greater compassion competence into decision-making routines, organizations need to build metrics, data-collection measures, and information technologies that track and highlight suffering and compassion as an explicit and valued element of decision-making.12 Imagine how much easier Richard’s decision would have been if the organization’s routines had included measures of suffering from accidents or calculations of the worth of preserving dignity for the boy and his family, instead of data solely about financial risk related to the accident. This highlights one more design principle:
Design principle
Develop frameworks for decision-making, including measures and data tracking that make visible the costs of suffering and the value of human dignity.
ARCHITECTURES FILLED WITH EMPATHY
Increasing empathy and concern in an organization often hinges on the capacity to draw people into dialogue and find forms of engagement that help us to see and feel each other’s passions and fears. We saw in chapter 5 that personal and interpersonal skills such as perceptive engagement, attunement, listening, and mindfulness can increase empathy. Beyond these skills, social architectures can make it easier or harder to take other people’s perspectives, and to feel and express concern, by how they involve us in structures and processes that reward concern and mitigate disdain.
DESIGNING DIALOGUE AND DISCERNMENT ROUTINES TO UNLOCK EMPATHY
Former Executive Vice President Bernita McTernan of Dignity Health, the fifth-largest health care system in the United States, described a values-based discernment process used by the system’s top leadership team when they confront a difficult issue or complex decision. Bernita emphasized that in any major decision with significant implications, the leaders themselves can hold many different opinions about the best way forward, not to mention the variety of perspectives held by other stakeholders. In the values-based discernment process that Bernita described, leaders identify issues that would benefit from significant dialogue. The leadership team sets aside a period of three to five hours and invites as many stakeholders as possible to be present for the session. Each person is expected to come prepared to offer a point of view about the issue, telling the decision-makers at the table what they believe is important and suggesting the best course of action from their point of view. Bernita emphasized the importance of multiple perspectives that come out during this process: “Our discernment process is very formal, and it helps us. We see the pros and the cons, not just should we do this or not. And not just from a business point of view, but where are the values actually in conflict and how do we look at that?”
This process requires inquiry work and empathic listening. As Bernita said,
I’ve learned one of the most important parts of the values-based discernment process is to listen and keep asking, “What’s the right question?” I’ve been through many of these where the learning was to conclude that where we started isn’t really the right question. You’re interpreting, based on the shifting question, and after a couple of rounds of discussion, you hear people differently.
The formality of the process and the discussion that follows allow people to develop a better sense of perspective and concern for the values at stake in the decision. The process ends with a concluding circle in which people have a chance to restate what they now believe to be the correct course of action. Bernita said, “It’s just amazing to me how, in so many cases—not all, of course—but in so many of them, we end up with a consensus on what was a deeply conflictual issue. It’s a beautiful process.”
Design principle
Adopt formal routines for inviting all stakeholders to participate in dialogue regarding important issues to reveal multiple perspectives and foster empathic listening that opens up different points of view.
Organizational scholars Warren Nilsson and Tana Paddock have developed a similar process, which they refer to as inscaping, in which members of an organization regularly engage in dialogue that draws out their experiences and feelings as part of their participation in a workplace. People attend regular meetings where they describe their own experience of work in relation to a shared value or goal. For instance, in a research-and-development or innovation organization with an outward focus on creativity in its market, employees would also have regular dialogues about whether it was safe for them to be creative and learn within the organization. Inscaping takes what seems to be an outer focus and involves people in talking about how that same focus affects them. Warren and Tana emphasize how much empathy develops from this kind of sharing:
The idea that organizations should turn inward may seem paradoxical at first. When we’re trying to wrestle with the large and complex issues “out there,” why would it help to dwell on the relatively small issues “in here”? Part of the answer may be that, in the end, there is no “out there.”. . . As members of an organization speak honestly with each other about their experiences of life and work, they come to understand that the social realities that they seek to change are not purely external. They are in the room.13
We’ve offered the insight that “there’s always pain in the room,” an insight echoed by inscaping research. For organizations that care about creating a compassionate world, inscaping that focuses on compassion as people experience it at work “in here” is another way to build the capacity for compassion “out there” as well.
Design principle
Involve people in sharing their personal experiences of compassion at work in a consistent manner as a way to heighten empathy and reveal new ideas for enhancing the organization’s compassion competence.
DESIGNING FOR PLAYFULNESS
When we focus on creating an organization filled with empathy, a focus on playfulness offers an unexpected but valuable source of attunement, perceptive engagement, and empathic concern. While many people hold a view that work is the opposite of play, this old truism isn’t actually true. When playfulness thrives as both a value and a repeated practice in organizations, it enhances compassion competence. At HopeLab, the Silicon Valley–based technology think-and-do tank we mentioned earlier, the organization adopted a core value that they referred to as “play with purpose.” They tried to infuse play and fun into almost all of their work activities. One of their first endeavors involved developing a video game for children with cancer, in which kids playfully battled against a variety of cancer cells. HopeLab designed the game with the participation of the kids it was designed to serve, with the result that the customers and designers developed deep relationships with one another which heightened the empathy in the game’s design. After it was launched, a scientific, randomized controlled trial that tested the effects of playing the game showed that kids experienced psychological and health benefits. The playful engagement in the game increased their sense of control over their cancer and their understanding of how their treatments worked, leading to greater adherence to their treatment protocols and better mental and physical health outcomes.
Design principle
Involve clients and customers in appropriately playful engagement with the organization or its products as a means of fostering the ability to take their perspective and increase the empathic design capacity.
HopeLab’s leaders and members introduced play with purpose into their own work as well. Each year, the HopeLab staff celebrates a “Fun Day” together. In one of these Fun Day celebrations, a group of HopeLab employees envisioned the Fun Day as a metaphorical gathering around a campfire to reflect on the year. To bring the metaphor to life, the group commissioned an artist, Sheri, to build a ceramic campfire. Sheri created an art piece that, when fully assembled, represented a beautiful campfire, but it could also be disassembled so that all of the staff members could take their flame as a symbolic reminder of their contribution to HopeLab. Sheri described her experience of the HopeLab Fun Day: “There was more laughter and love in that room . . . it felt so full, really full. My face actually hurt from laughing; I just ached from laughing. It wasn’t silly laughter and joking. There were tears; there was a full range of emotion. I thought it was incredibly beautiful.” The HopeLab Fun Day retreats offer playful ways to engage people in what work means, to value connections, and to literally as well as metaphorically restore warmth to work.
Design principle
Host retreats or gatherings that engage people in playful interactions with symbols of compassion and explore how they relate to their work as a means of increasing empathy.
Fun, humor, and play might seem like unexpected additions to an ecology of values that support compassion competence, but playfulness has long been lauded for bringing people into relation with each other in new ways, opening up terrain for exploration, and attuning people to one another in organizations.14 Playing helps create social architectures full of empathy because as we play together, we learn to pay attention to small cues about others’ well-being at work. As one member of Midwest Billing described this, “Because we play, [we] can sense when things aren’t right. Normally I’m a loud, funny-type person, but if there’s a day when I’m sad or I’m not as talkative as normal, or if I’m not as receptive to funny jokes or anything, then they know that there’s something going on.” Like HopeLab, Midwest Billing was a brilliantly playful unit. When one group was particularly behind in work because they had taken on billing for a new clinic that had a lot of rejected claims, the entire unit threw a “claim rejection party,” where they brought in snacks, decorated the office in bright colors, and all set aside their own work for a day to work on the older claims that had been rejected and needed to be resubmitted. This combination of play and work bolstered performance and added horsepower to what otherwise looked like an underperforming team. At the same time, it reinforced connections between members and generous interpretations for falling behind in a heavy workload.
Use play as a response to workplace suffering by drawing people into imagining new ways that they could collectively respond to problems or difficulties that make participating in the response fun and engaging.
These two organizations look very different on the surface. One is highly scientific and based in a global technology capital. The other is administrative and based in a small rural community. Yet each found ways to use play as part of designing architectures filled with empathy.
ARCHITECTURES THAT AMPLIFY COMPASSIONATE ACTION
When suffering surfaces and generous interpretations speed feelings of empathy and spread calls for help, motivated people across an organization want to act with compassion. A social architecture that fails to offer routes for meaningful and coordinated action can lead to the paradoxical result that systems full of compassionate people often do nothing in the face of suffering. At its most competent, however, compassionate action is coordinated across many people, adjusted in relation to emerging needs, and generative in creating a breadth of resources that are highly customized to those who are suffering. Compassion architects need principles that help them draw out, speed up, and coordinate compassionate action across a system.
DESIGNING TO EXPAND FROM SIMPLE TO ELABORATE
When improvisational compassionate actions unfold across an organization, they often exhibit resourcefulness by beginning with whatever is easily and quickly at hand and expanding into more elaborate patterns over time. We saw this resourcefulness and acceleration in a response to the situation of Angela, one of our research participants, who had received devastating personal news just before leading an important strategic planning session. Angela and Rick had married young. They were the sort of couple who always knew they were right for each other. “We were at a college dance, and I saw her across the room,” Rick recounted. “I knew right then that I wanted to marry her.” Within a few years, a beloved son, Jaime, was born. Angela described the time just after Jaime’s birth as one of the happiest of her life. She remembered now that Rick was often tired, but it seemed natural to be tired with busy work demands and a newborn’s schedule. Then came news that changed their lives. In a routine medical screening, a doctor discovered that Rick had a genetic disorder with no cure.
Beyond coping with Rick’s eroding health, each year Angela and Rick had to face what had come to seem like an unbearable burden when they took Jaime to have him tested for the disease. Angela dreaded the possibility that her son might suffer with the same lifelong debilitating illness. After the latest test, just as Angela was to lead her first major strategic planning meeting, the phone rang. When she answered, the voice that crackled back caught her breath in her chest: “Mrs. Parker, this is Dr. Pankow from the children’s hospital. I’m afraid I have some bad news . . .”
Angela hung up the phone quietly and walked out of her office. By the time she reached the conference room, she felt in control and ready to run her meeting. “One foot in front of the other,” she said to herself. Angela welcomed the assembled group, and the meeting moved along well. Her design for engagement was working. People felt energized, and one member of the group commented, “This is the best strategic planning meeting I think we’ve ever had.” Unwittingly, Angela gave a little sigh when she heard that. Vivian, a colleague in a different department, was sitting close enough to Angela to hear her sigh. Thinking she was tired, Vivian asked in front of the assembled group, “Angela, you look a little tired. I’m sure that planning this meeting was a lot of work, and you’ve done a great job. Maybe we should end here and pick it up later?”
Angela looked at Vivian. “Oh, it’s not my job. It’s not because of that.” Unbidden tears streamed down Angela’s cheeks. “I’m sorry. I just got a call, fifteen minutes before this meeting, that my son . . .” Angela told Jaime’s story. Everyone in the meeting listened intently. When she finished, she was suddenly surrounded by words of comfort. The meeting disbanded, but the action expanded.
Design principle
Offer your presence, your willingness to listen, and a simple acknowledgment that you are with the other person in the midst of his or her pain as instantly available actions you can take anytime suffering surfaces. Patterns of compassion expand.
Some of the compassion moves we saw in chapter 6 began to appear. One member of Angela’s team volunteered to check in each morning until Jaime’s situation became clearer. Angela’s manager helped arrange some time off. Other coworkers offered to pick up the follow-up tasks from the meeting. Those who hadn’t been involved in the meeting organized a meal-delivery service for the family. Someone started an errand list to ease the burdens of keeping daily life going while seeking treatment for Jaime and created an emergent role of coordinator for all the family errands. The human resources group organized a vacation-time-donation drive to raise money for Angela and her family, just as Zeke’s organization did in chapter 7. Upon learning that Angela and Rick were spending countless hours in waiting rooms, the administrative assistant for Angela’s team created an emergent role of expeditor for small gifts. She created a gift basket and invited everyone to add something that was fun to do while waiting. Soon it was filled with handwritten cards of encouragement and support as well as crossword books, puzzles, novels, games, magazines, and music. The administrative assistant kept the basket replenished and expedited these small reminders that people cared. To Angela, amazed by this variety of compassionate actions that continued to evolve in relation to her family’s needs, each day seemed to bring a new form of support.
Design principle
Expand patterns of compassion by drawing in more people, and encourage them to engage in compassion moves that make sense to them as well as to coordinate with others.
Design principle
Watch for, support, and reward the emergent roles that people create in elaborate patterns of compassionate action, such as buffers, monitors, coordinators, or expediters. These roles make action more predictable and expand patterns by keeping action coordinated. Recognizing the knowledge and skill involved in creating these roles makes participation in the pattern more rewarding as well.
From immediate to sustained over time, from simple to elaborately coordinated, we see that patterns of compassion can expand. Simple invitations to others to participate nudge a pattern to enlarge in ways no one can predict. In some cases, elaborate patterns of coordinated compassionate action like those offered to Angela and Zeke become a form of collective creativity and fuel organizational stories that continue to inspire members for years to come.
DESIGNING TO SUPPORT IMPROVISATION
We have described how Midwest Billing evolved a number of routines that simultaneously supported its performance and enhanced its compassion competence. More than any other routine, however, the seemingly simple and unheralded routine of the daily morning meeting was central in supporting the kind of improvisational action that is often required when suffering surfaces. You’ll recall that this meeting was where we met Dorothy and watched the mountain of envelopes disappear in a choreography of helping. Lasting less than thirty minutes, the morning meeting was also normally infused with play. When a member of the unit, Kallie, was shot in an episode of domestic violence, however, the morning meeting took on a whole new character and became central in the unit’s improvised compassionate action.
When the group learned of the trauma, they immediately began to organize a response. Compassion moves gathered steam as people felt their way forward together. One member offered to create an emergent role as monitor and report in on Kallie’s status daily. Another member began to collect donations. Another picked up the paperwork for medical leave to make it easy for Kallie to apply once she was out of intensive care. Another started to create a unique gift that would allow everyone to write words of comfort or emotional support. Checking on Kallie’s recovery and weaving together a pattern of many actions became a regular part of the daily meeting.
Design principle
When suffering requires sustained responsiveness, use a short daily meeting or check-in as a way to ensure that improvised actions are woven together and that they continue to remain coordinated over time.
When Kallie came back to work, months later, the daily meeting became a place to coordinate about safety and improvise patterns of compassionate action in the face of threat. Kallie’s first few days back entailed a lockdown of the building because of a threat from her attacker. Managers and safety officers shared information in the meeting about the safety of the entire unit. Members of Midwest Billing used the meeting to discern that Kallie needed additional security in the parking garage and improvised a new parking arrangement for her. After a scare when Kallie was approached by her attacker while walking to the bank alone, members of the unit used the daily meeting to organize a buddy system so that Kallie did not have to go anywhere alone during work time. Others were available to alert police if needed. The fact that members of the unit were practiced at meeting regularly, sharing information with each other, paying attention on a daily basis to the well-being of others, and improvising actions to help each other made it easier for them to adapt to all of these changing security needs. All the while, they kept up daily check-ins on Kallie’s well-being, often just asking, “Do you need a hug today?” And they kept weaving tokens of care into Kallie’s daily work life even as they coordinated to keep her, and themselves, safe. Kallie described it this way: “So we’ve got a buddy system for me. I never go anywhere by myself. If I’m breaking alone, or I’m lunching alone, and I need to leave the building, I tell somebody. I don’t go by myself. There’s a lot of people here that look out for me.”
Design principle
When suffering requires elaborate patterns of improvised action, ensure that those who are suffering are matched with a buddy or someone who can monitor their well-being and help adjust the pattern in a quick, mindful way.
The fact that Midwest Billing could improvise elaborate and constantly changing patterns of compassion in response to Kallie’s circumstances is another tribute to their compassion competence. Members took pride in the fact that their unit was so capable of extending compassion at that scale. As we’ve said, the belief that we work in a compassionate organization is itself a resource for motivating and orchestrating compassionate action.15 Our research has documented significant power in witnessing compassion at work, even if we do not actively participate. Elaborate patterns of coordinated compassionate action elevate us and give us a new vision of what’s possible in our work.16
Design principle
Witnessing or participating in an elaborate pattern of compassionate actions becomes a source of pride, elevation, and motivation that expand people’s views of what is possible in relation to compassion at work.
At its height, whether in TechCo or Midwest Billing or HopeLab, compassion competence inspires and elevates us. In Zeke’s story, or Kallie’s, or Angela’s, we see the majesty of elaborate patterns of compassionate actions and how a sense of awe grows from witnessing this form of beauty and resourcefulness at work. People are called by the rhythm of this dance, finding pride and meaning in participating. While all kinds of things might distract us or derail these fragile improvised patterns, architectures that expand compassionate action make us more capable in the face of pain.
AN INVITATION TO REFLECT ON DESIGNING FOR COMPASSION COMPETENCE
Looking in depth at one organization like Midwest Billing gives us a snapshot of a distinctive social architecture that draws a great deal of attention to people’s state of mind and heart and offers insight into design principles that we can use to awaken compassion competence in our own organizations. There is no one silver bullet to make organizations more compassionate. That is why we must draw on a sophisticated framework and use a number of design principles. We also use our wisdom and intuition, honed by our being a compassion architect in our unique organizational circumstances. Without relying on overly simple cause-and-effect relationships, we have explored a number of design principles that help us to actively design for compassion competence. The tools in Part Four: Blueprints for Awakening Compassion at Work offer a set of strategic and practical questions that build on these design principles. Use the tools to create your own blueprint for compassion competence in your organization, so that when the call for compassion sounds, you can trust that your organization will respond.
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How can you tap into the curiosity and courage involved in becoming a compassion architect?