Empathy

When I did my scenario work at Shell and Mont Fleur, I believed that the key to solving complex problems was for people to listen openly and reflectively enough to change their thinking. Then I discovered that I was missing something.

I was leading a workshop in South Africa for the University of the North, a rural, apartheid-era institution with a history of conflict between radical black students and conservative white faculty and administration. The workshop included 100 students, faculty, and administrators. My fellow facilitator was a renowned black community organizer and political leader named Ishmael Mkhabela.

A few hours into the workshop, a shouting match broke out between the students and the staff. One year earlier, a student had been killed , and now the student leaders in the workshop were demanding a moment of silence in memory of their "martyr." The faculty did not want to celebrate a "troublemaker." The temperature in the room was rising , and my attempts to get everyone to be reasonable and cool down weren't working. I knew that I was stuck but did not know what to do, and I started to panic. Then Mkhabela calmly stepped forward to rescue me. "I suggest a moment of silence," he said, "both for this student and for all the others, students and staff, who have been hurt in this conflict ... and for those who will come after us, for whom we are doing this work. Let us close our eyes..." The room fell silent and the fight dissolved.

That evening all the participants got together for a boisterous barbecue that spilled out of the hotel lobby and onto the lawn. I was circulating through the group , drink in hand, talking with the leaders, trying to understand what was going on and what we needed to do in the workshop the next day. I noticed with irritation that Mkhabela was spending the whole time sitting at a small table in the corner talking with one student. At the end of the evening we were walking back to our room, and I asked him what the hell he'd been doing, and why he had not been focusing on the workshop we had been hired to lead. His answer taught me what I had been missing. "Obviously, Adam," he said, "coming from the corporate world, you don't know much about grassroots organizing. This student, like a lot of young activists, has the terrible habit of speaking from his political party's 'we' and spouting their party line. I have just spent four hours with him, trying to connect to, and help him connect to, his authentic 'I.' The Black Consciousness movement taught us to examine the ways in which our mental attitudes contribute to our own oppression. I needed to help this student heighten his consciousness. This conversation was a real 'one-on-one': I talked with him heart to heart about what matters to him and what matters to me. Now tomorrow there will be two of us. This is how we have always done our organizing work in South Africa, and how we have succeeded in changing things: one person at a time."

Mkhabela's community-organizing approach to leading workshops and effecting change did not work from the outside and the top, but from the inside and the bottom. He did not spend the evening, as I had, talking superficially to many people, but deeply with one. He did not focus only on ideas but also on feelings and values and intentions. He did not tell the student what to do, but listened to how he thought and what mattered to him, heart to heart.

During the first months I lived in South Africa, I kept making a particular social gaffe. I would be walking on the street, trying to find an address, and I would stop someone and say, trying to be polite and get to the point, "Excuse me. Can you please tell me how to get to such-and-such a place?" Every time I did this, the person I had stopped would look at me in shock . Eventually, an older black man confronted me. He looked me straight in the eye and said, "Hello! How are you!?"

When I told this story to Dorothy, she explained that most South Africans consider it rude to approach someone and immediately launch into business. First you must greet them and ask after their well-being and the well-being of their family. In Zulu, the conventional greeting is "Sawu bona," which means "I see you." We cannot interact properly with others unless we see them as fellow humans .

Then I got the opportunity to learn more about this dynamic. I started working with a brilliant South African consultant named Louis van der Merwe. He taught me that the job of a facilitator is to help the participants speak up, listen up, and bring all of their personal resources to the work at hand. Our job is not to direct or control the participants. He also taught me that even though we were remaining neutral with respect to the substance of the participants' work, our process was not neutral: it embodied values of openness, inclusion, and collaboration. But van der Merwe and I used to argue a lot, and I came to feel increasingly discounted and unheard by him, which I found deeply distressing. I asked the advice of Betty Sue Flowers. "It is good for you that you have this experience," she said. "Most of the conflicts you are facilitating have their roots in some or all of the actors feeling unheard and unseen. Now you know what that feels like."

Joseph Jaworski is an exceptionally open listener. The core of his professional competence is his ability to listen with total presence, so that the boundary between him and the other person disappears. This quality of attention has a powerful impact on the person being listened to: the person feels heard and supported, becomes clearer about her or his own thoughts and feelings, and more centered and purposeful. The first time Jaworski and I conducted such a dialogue together, I was bored silly. As soon as we left the interviewee's office, I turned to Jaworski and asked him how he could pretend to be so deeply interested in the man's life and struggles. "But Adam," he replied, "I am genuinely interested in him! That's the whole point!"

We cannot develop creative solutions to complex human problems unless we can see, hear, open up to, and include the humanity of all the stakeholders and of ourselves . Creativity requires all of our selves: our thoughts, feelings, personalities, histories, desires, and spirits. It is not sufficient to listen rationally to inert facts and ideas; we also have to listen to people in a way that encourages them to realize their own potential and the potential in their situation. This kind of listening is not sympathy, participating in someone else's feeling from alongside them. It is empathy, participating from within them. This is the kind of listening that enables us not only to consider alternative existing ideas but to generate new ones.

This is not the kind of listening I was taught in my physics and economics courses. I needed to open up and to sense subjectively from the inside phenomena that were real but could not be seen objectively from the outside. Once I was a faculty member in a four-day, dialogic workshop organized by the Society for Organizational Learning and led by Peter Senge. During the whole week I was suffering from a terrible allergy and coughing all the time; so although I attended all the sessions and made a few presentations, I wasn't fully present. At the end of the week, we were all reflecting on what we had gotten out of the workshop. I was surprised to hear how moving and transformational the experience had been for almost everyoneI hadn't noticed anything going on at all. This very real intra-, inter-, and transpersonal phenomenon had been completely invisible to me because I, preoccupied with my illness , had remained outside the experience.

Maria Victoria Giraldo, a Spanish-English interpreter from the Destino Colombia workshops, is an outstandingly empathetic listener. As she interpreted different Spanish-speaking members of that team, she gave each person's words a distinctly different tone. When I spoke with her during the breaks, she always had significant insights into the underlying dynamics in the group. I asked her how she did her work, and she said that she imagined herself speaking from within the person she was interpreting. (I also asked her what her experience was of speaking from within the angry , violent members of the team. "Afterwards," she replied, "I cannot sleep.")

Otto Scharmer talked with me a lot about such distinctions in the location of the listener. He was developing a taxonomy of four different ways of listening. The first is "downloading," or listening from within our own story, but without being conscious that what we are saying and hearing is no more than a story. When we download, we are deaf to other stories; we only hear that which confirms our own story. This is the kind of nonlistening exhibited by fundamentalists, dictators, experts, and people who are arrogant or angry.

The second kind of listening is "debating." When we debate, we listen to each other and to ideas (including our own ideas) from the outside, objectively, like a judge in a debate or a courtroom.

When we are downloading or debating, we are merely exhibiting and reproducing already-existing ideas and realities. We are not producing anything new, and we are not being creative. These first two kinds of listening are therefore insufficient to create new social realities.

Scharmer calls the third kind of listening "reflective dialogue." We engage in such dialogue when we listen to ourselves reflectively and when we listen to others empatheticallylistening from the inside, subjectively.

But Scharmer also referred to a fourth kind of listening, which he calls "generative dialogue." He said that in generative dialogue we listen not only from within ourselves or from within others, but from the whole of the system. But I needed to stretch much further before I could understand what it meant to listen from the whole.