Tag: empathy

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Easier to talk about what we don’t want than what we do

This riff is a partner to my one this week on humour and sarcasm. If you’ve read that one you’ll spot the connection. 

I’ve noticed recently that workshop groups tend to find it much easier to talk about their shared pain than their shared hopes. I think this is almost certainly cultural. 

Culture is reinforced by rituals and routines. In the UK, we almost ritualistically complain about weather and transport. Another is control systems. 

Culture is also reinforced through control systems — and social media is one. It is no coincidence that social media algorithms long ago started prioritising negative stories over good — we love them.

There is a method of physical theatre training called via negativa, meaning the negative road. It is a method of teaching that doesn’t tell you how to be funny, but it tells you when you are not funny. The idea is that the teacher keeps telling you something is bad until you find something is good. Handled with sensitivity and care for the student it is a powerful teaching technique. It works because the student has to keep proposing ideas and in that process, discovers something that is uniquely theirs. 

But it requires a lot of the student — they’ve got to have the motivation to keep coming up with something new.

I think we can see a negative culture as a collective via negativa. 

Always finding the flaw, what’s going wrong. If an individual has the motivation to keep on showing up, they can overcome it, but that is a lot of effort. 

An alternative, more generous and easier to deploy method is to be encouraging, and inviting people to give something a try. 

Creative psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed that one the best ways to work on building a creative culture in an organisation is not to work on individual creativity, but rather on our culture of listening and encouraging. 

We can seed this culture by shifting the rituals and routines — asking what went right before asking what went wrong. And by shifting the control system — shifting away from doom-scrolling towards practices that tune is into what is possible.

Then we might find that our culture tilts in the direction of what is possible, of what we want to build together, rather than what we don’t.

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I’m an engineer, I feel your pain and I have a plan

This little refrain is my version of Aristotle’s three artistic truths for making a convincing argument. Aristotle proposed three things were needed to win people over. The first is ethos – or trustworthiness. Is this person someone I trust. The second is pathos – or empathy. Does this person have a shared sense of pain. And the third is logos – or logic. In other words, what’s the plan. 

As engineers we often start with the plan. But the plan won’t work without trust and empathy. Hence the refrain. Showing up as a professional can build trust. Feeling the pain might be the hardest part, because it has to be genuine. Then, we get to the plan, which is probably the part we started off with.

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Machine work

Inputs

Outputs

KPIs

Tools

Models

Performance

Quantitative analysis

Scaling up

Accelerator

Dashboard

Timesheet

Human resources 

Bottom line 

When we think of our work as the work of a machine, then is it any surprise that the incredible machines that we have built will one day starting doing it for us.

But we do ourselves a disservice if we only think of ourselves in machine terms. If we leave out empathy, care, collective knowledge, grounded understanding of place, knowing that is not describable in words, trust, passion, play… then we are not bringing our whole selves to the work we need to do. 

There are so many more ways of knowing than the knowledge we can enter into a computer. Let the computers do the computational part – they will be very good at it – and let us step into our wider intelligence as engineers (and other humans).

This blog post was inspired by Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux. 

This post originally appeared on eiffelover.com in September 2024.

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In the interests of health and safety…

That’s how the sign started its instruction. But health and safety is not a person. It has no interests.

But people do. 

They have interests. They are interested in staying healthy and safe. 

And we are interested in them, because we are empathetic. We want other people to stay healthy and safe.

So why not start with “to help you stay healthy and safe…”?

Or, warmer still, “because we care about you.”

(Or even, because we love you, as fellow human beings?)

What “in the interests of health and safety” really signals is “in the interests of us having discharged our responsibility to tell you’. Which is empty of empathy. 

And love.