Empathy, Integration, Letting Go & Surprise
For the last 35 years, I have focused personally and professionally on how change happens. I’ve devoted the last two decades to social change.
Recently, I’ve been exploring the question: What social change processes and approaches must we use to increase the odds that outcomes will be transformational?
We talk a lot about transformation in the social sector but it rarely happens. Transformation involves something turning into something else—something that’s more mature and more connected. It requires change in ourselves and change in others.
Our quest for transformation in the social sector is typically translated as a search for outsized improvement in outcomes—poverty reduced by 50% for example, or 3rd grade reading scores increased by 75%. But to get that level of numerical change, things won’t look or be done in the same way as before. This is something we often lose sight of.
It seems logical that a significant level of cultural, structural and organizational change would necessarily presage large improvements in outcomes but our current approaches to the work aren’t set up to usher in this magnitude of change. Nowhere is this more true than in the arena of systemic racism. To date, efforts to address systemic racism have relied heavily on such strategies as diversity, inclusion or educational workshops. These are all important but we can’t truly transform systemic racism in our schools, our healthcare system or our neighborhoods unless we are willing to engage in processes that look different than most of what happens today. And that’s where our society —nonprofits, government, communities and business leaders—get stuck.
There’s an almost holy grail-like search in the social sector for best demonstrated practices (BDPs). For example, we’re always on the lookout for better teacher practices, ways to address mental health challenges, or more effective approaches to public safety. BDPs certainly have their place, particularly at the individual level—teacher to student, doctor to patient. But rarely if ever do BDPs lead to transformative change at a collective level.
So where do we go from here? The answer is that we need to get more radical in the processes and approaches we take to bring about collective change. This is doubly and triply true if we hope to transform society in overcoming entrenched historical disorders such as white supremacy, sexism (other “isms,” as well) and patriarchy that have stunted human and collective potential for millennia.
To get radically different outcomes, we need to use radically different containers to hold the work. The good news is that we don’t need to invent something new out of whole cloth. There are a number of approaches that have been around for decades—many reflecting the wisdom of non-dominant cultures—that mainstream society can learn from: peacemaking circles, truth and reconciliation efforts, peace and conflict resolution processes in places like Northern Ireland, restorative justice approaches, and spiritual rituals. These approaches share and integrate a number of conditions that are often left out of mainstream mostly dominant culture-driven social and environmental problem solving such as:
Deep relational work among those involved
A focus on inner change as well as outer change
Cultivating space for healing
Transforming power dynamics
Welcoming serendipity and the sacred into the process
If we want to achieve true transformation we need to allow these conditions to live and breathe in the work. We have reams of research on BDPs. There’s even a web site for “What Works.” But the social sector—education, health, community development, the environment—has not engaged much in researching these more radical containers that help produce conditions for transformation.
If you are reading along here, a logical rejoinder to what I’ve shared so far might be, “Sounds interesting John, and can you show me evidence that this works.” And my response would be, “I can’t, at least not comprehensively.” I can share anecdotes that provide glimmers of the possible. But to date we don’t have enough experience with these approaches in mainstream social and environmental problem solving to point to “proof” that what I am suggesting is essential to transformational change. (Though we do have thousands of years of wisdom lineage spanning East to West, from Confucianism to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity to Hinduism, to Indigenous spirituality around the world that all essentially point to what I’ve described—just sayin’).
In the collective change work I’ve been involved with and researched which has moved in the direction of the transformational, I’ve been attempting to identify stages of collective progress that lead to transformation. Early stage thinking, here are four progressive stages that I’ve observed:
· Empathy: Putting yourself in another’s shoes
· Integration: Recognizing your common humanity with others, even as you also accept and appreciate your differences
· Letting Go: Releasing your ingrained perspective on the problem, and opening yourself up to others, and to the spirit
· Surprise: Taking action against the problem in a way that is entirely different than you ever imagined but also feels more true and authentic than the path you were on before.
Let me give you an example of this.
Several years ago I was working on Staten Island supporting a collective impact effort that addressed teen substance abuse. At the table were the some of the following stakeholders: health and mental health care providers, schools, parents, pediatricians, pharmacies, faith based organizations, probation officers, police, and local philanthropy.
At the beginning of our work we spent much time researching teen substance abuse BDPs, the situation on Staten Island, and we shared this work with the group. We also, in the process, led the group through various engagement activities to build empathy and integration. Candidly, we weren’t totally adept at these processes back when we did this work. However, because our work brought together many of these players for the first time, we got some grace points. People who were involved, interacting at a deeper level than they were accustomed to, moved towards empathy and integration with each other to a much greater degree than most anyone had experienced before.
Two of the players involved had limited previous experience interacting. Diane was head of a mental healthcare provider and Ron was chief of police. As their relationship built, Ron was able to “let go” more in front of Diane than he might otherwise have done. At a teen substance abuse meeting, Ron shared with Diane that many of his first responders were devastated to arrive at the scene of a teen overdose and find that, while the teen might still be alive, the overdose was too far along to save a life. The following approximate conversation ensued:
[From Diane] “You know, Ron, there is a drug called nalaxone that reverses the effects of the drug that caused the overdose. It comes in a nasal spray too. You administer it to the overdosed person, and they literally come back from dying.
“You have got to be kidding me. Why aren’t we using it?”
“I don’t know, why aren’t you using it?”
So the Staten Island police piloted this with first responders. Within a year, Staten Island experienced a 37% reduction in overdose related deaths. The other four boroughs of New York City asked themselves, “Why aren’t we using naloxone?” They started using it. New York State asked themselves “Why aren’t we using naloxone?” They started using it. Within a year the Federal Government under President Obama had signed into legislation Federal appropriations of $1.1BB to address the opioid crisis with a large carve out for providing naloxone to communities across the country.
Empathy, Integration, Letting Go, and Surprise.
Hopefully, this whets your appetite for what’s possible if we adopt new practices aimed at transforming our collective potential. Perhaps it may even open the door for you to consider that a goal of our collective change processes should not be achieving certainty, but achieving surprise. And if you don’t think surprise (i.e. bringing about the unimaginable) should be a desirable part of the process, just check out the skies over Delhi.
In subsequent blogs, I’ll be going a bit deeper on each of the phases I’ve laid out: Empathy, Integration, Letting Go and Surprise.