PART FOUR
BLUEPRINTS FOR AWAKENING COMPASSION AT WORK
Opening space to greet life’s tragedies invites disquiet and despair. Awakening compassion calls on our courage. Allowing deep challenges to be gently heard and seen requires sensitivity and presence. Awakening compassion calls on our skill. And greeting the worst of what life offers in the midst of goals, deadlines, and the buzzing demands of busy workplaces makes it all harder. So awakening compassion calls for grace under pressure.1
Working with the fragility of emergent patterns in organizations adds to the challenge. Awakening compassion competence calls for honed intuition about groups and systems. To become an architect of compassion is to become savvy about organizational transformation. Compassion architects must believe in and insist on the possibility that workplaces can heal.
To advance the work of compassion architects, we conclude with a set of action tools—or blueprints as we call them—that combine the insights and ideas we have touched on throughout this book. Just as a blueprint guides the process of building a structure, our blueprints guide compassion architects to awaken compassion in their own work and awaken compassion competence in their organizations.