EPILOGUE: A CALL TO AWAKEN

COMPASSION TEACHER PEMA CHÖDRÖN calls people to the urgent need for compassion in the world now when she asserts that “awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal.”¹ She is echoing the call from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as quoted in the foreword of this book by Raj Sisodia, who reminds us that the cultivation of compassion is a necessity if our species is to survive.

We too have demonstrated that compassion at work is neither a luxury nor an ideal. Organizations cannot afford the hidden costs to human capability that come from perpetuating suffering. In desperate need of new sources of adaptability, collaboration, innovation, quality, and engagement, workplaces must turn toward making compassion at work a reality. But awakening compassion competence requires breaking out of a prison of self-interest, a point underscored by compassion scientist Emma Seppälä as she shows us that it is compassion that leads toward true happiness.² Albert Einstein called our fascination with self-interest an optical delusion:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.³

In stories and examples from a variety of industries, and in work roles that span from billing clerk to president and chief executive officer, we’ve illustrated the quiet power of compassion at work to widen our circles of concern. We have seen how organizations as human communities are the house of suffering. And we have witnessed that though they are filled with the tragedies, losses, and indignities that beset us, they are also filled with responses to those tragedies that may save us. We have found that studying compassion is an adventure in wonder. We hope that through this book you discover and embark on that adventure as well.

THE QUIET POWER TO ELEVATE PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow wrote of the power of compassion to elevate people and organizations: “Compassion enriches us and ennobles us, even those of us who are neither the caregivers nor the recipients, because it holds forth a vision of what good society can be.”⁴ While words like wonder, beauty, and compassion aren’t usually lauded as part of work or leadership, they should be. Scholars Nancy Adler and André Delbecq, like the leaders we met in chapter 10, point out the power of renewing our belief in the beauty of compassion to find our way in a fractured world where “leadership is not a place where suffering is avoided or courage is unnecessary.”⁵ Being held by the compassion of colleagues renews our hope and belief in the best of what human work and organizations can be.

Compassion at work calls us to remember that suffering is rarely a problem to be solved. Rashid, a consultant we met in our research, became hopeless after the loss of his child: “My daughter died in a stupid, needless car accident, and I thought my life was over. I wanted to keep myself from committing suicide, so I threw myself into my work.” Nothing could resolve the pain of Rashid’s loss. At times like this, our colleague Lloyd Sandelands offers a useful distinction between seeing and beholding.⁶ This distinction reminds us of the danger of seeing people as problems to solve. When we do, we turn people like Rashid into objects to be managed and manipulated. Seeing suffering as something to fix, we rarely rise to the level of compassion. Only when we call upon the human capacity to behold do we find our way to the quiet power of compassion.

To behold Rashid and others like him whose suffering drains hope and purpose from their lives is to literally hold them in the light of our minds and hearts in ways that celebrate and illuminate their intrinsic worth and beauty. Leaders like Bruce Shepard and Pat Christen showed us how to behold the beauty of fragile, complex human beings in the midst of great suffering. To behold another helps us open the door to that mystery of our presence as a salve that can comfort.⁷ At moments when we desperately don’t know what to do for someone like Rashid, or for our own hopelessness and despair, we can turn to the quiet power of compassion. Rashid found unexpected healing in the way his colleagues were able to behold his suffering with compassion: “The people here were incredible. They gave me space when I needed it, but they didn’t let me be alone. This organization saved my life.”

This lifesaving, life-giving power might be why the poet John O’Donohue compared compassion to a window of light in the darkness. It might be why geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon, who discovered the fragility of the Earth’s tectonic plates, sees the same radical discovery at “the heart of humanity.”⁸ It might be why Stanford neurosurgeon James Doty, founder of the groundbreaking Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education there, says, “We are at the beginning of an age of compassion. Right now it’s a ripple in human consciousness fueled by compassion, but it’s a ripple that has the potential to become a tsunami.”⁹

When we regard the quiet power of compassion as a call to a whole new way of being, we change our work in ways that are both tiny and vast. We pick up on small clues when something is amiss. We ask a delicate question with sensitivity. We are willing to close the door, turn off the phone, and create safe space for emotions to emerge. We reject cultures of brutality. We embrace goals of stewardship. We no longer shrink from compassion as part of our work role, whether we clean the floors or fly the planes or lead the troops. The lifesaving, life-giving power of compassion to elevate people and organizations makes it everyone’s job.

Whether it is small and private or immense and public, beholding suffering with compassion sparks a sense of wonder and beauty, renewing our belief in what is possible in organizations. And in the face of obstacles so huge that they threaten to close us down completely, insisting on the transformational potential of compassion in workplaces becomes an act of radical possibility. So the challenge is no longer to find a good reason that compassion matters for business. The challenge now is to heed the call to design work and workplaces that awaken compassion.