Embracing our Enemies to Stop Climate Change: Mastering the Empathy Aperture

At the center of every decision are humans. If you’ve been following the series or are simply someone who breathes, you may be acutely tuned in to this inescapable truth. Whatever the social contract or personal exploration, denial of this is fool’s gold. It goes without saying then, without concerted attention to this reality, you might as well stop trying to transform. At the risk of being trite and becoming an easy target, there is a reason why the old adage states that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

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Trite sayings, to me, portend widespread understanding. However, experience suggests that impatient leaders tend to quickly deem human-centric activities overkill. ?Even with reasonable attendance to the human story, done poorly, it may only discourage further efforts on this front. Trust that if this describes your situation, you’re in great company. Most of the iconic successful organizations that are household names have a roadside littered with breakthrough transformation failures. Admittedly, Applied Pioneering itself is a byproduct of many stumbles and a willingness to listen and learn.

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It would be wonderful if “humanizing” transformation was about simply flipping a switch. This fallacy is why out-of-box human-centered practices from Behavioral Change Management, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking and other frameworks regularly do not suffice. Earning outcomes, as signaled in the last article, means Applied Pioneering requires the deep investment of Humanitarian Craftsmanship. Forgiving my creative language, this is just a succinct way of saying that tireless devotion to leveraging one’s deepest sensibilities and compassion is the key to unlocking the nuanced path to better and faster outcomes.

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A Primer on Complexity: What type of puzzle are we solving for and why does it matter?

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As we’ve trailed the challenged narrative of Climate Change, we have seen the intricacy of the puzzle we must solve and can infer the hurdles ahead as we work to humanize the required transformation. Before we dive in, we have to look at complexity more carefully because solutions aren’t going to be one-size-fits-all. Understanding and managing complexity has been the subject of much research. It’s even got several names, the most comprehensive of which is sometimes referred to as Complexity Science. Under this umbrella, there are countless models trying to distill its many faces.

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We’ve already discussed at length systems thinking throughout this series, but you may have heard terms like System of Systems and Team of Teams used often. These respectively acknowledge the layered complexity of both natural sciences and behavioral sciences.? One framework worth exploring is the Cynefin Model developed by David Snowden that categorizes systems into four self-explanatory tiers – clear, complicated, complex and chaotic systems. The graphic below details some of its core tenets with an emphasis on the realms related to behavioral coordination. This HBR article also summarizes it well.

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?In all cases, there is an inherent recognition that increasingly complex systems are characterized, and naturally encumbered by, the uncertain and often shifting interactions between nodes in the system. This will get a little academic if we go too deep, but, to avoid at least a partial dive risks glazing over the findings. Distilled to its essence, a key theme in a lot of the research, theories and practices suggests that when complexity reaches a certain threshold, deterministic or linear approaches simply won’t suffice.

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Not to be misled, this does not mean that existing insights from the discipline-specific deterministic analysis should be tossed. In fact, this is what you should expect to leverage in the tabletop exercises we framed in our last article. A critical task of Applied Pioneering is to understand prospectively how the parts interact to influence the whole. Remember, where Applied Pioneering is pertinent is where we need First Principle thinking, so novel intersections are key. Across the research, the prescriptions for managing complex adaptive systems is to leverage a living approach that relies on a shift from control and static design to influence and continuous intervention. If this is already turning on lights, then you likely have a problem well-suited to Applied Pioneering.

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Climate Change has every imaginable tangle, both from a scientific and behavioral perspective. To hone our discussion, we won’t conflate the two, although I perceive this is happening regularly and causing severe tension. It’s worth a brief, yet bold, statement here. You don’t need to “solve” the natural science puzzle, we frankly already know enough about interventions that will move the needle. Our challenge is to motivate the world to intervene more frequently to unlock an accelerated path to Climate Change remediation.

Humanitarian Craftsmanship: Teaching People How to L?I?s?t?e?n? ?t?o? Embrace an Enemy’s Ideas

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Enemy. There is no denying this is a harsh label. Humor me and accept this term for anyone who doesn’t share your views. It may be a shock to apply this extreme label to your colleague since you largely have warm feelings for most of them, Kevin in operations being the exception. Joking aside, the truth is that our brain patterns for those we deem “not like us” effectively work the same way regardless of degree. Thankfully, we are also hard-wired to experience empathy for those we deem “like us.” This 60 mins story and the research underpinning it sheds some light on this.

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If you apply this to all your personal beliefs or preferences, you can imagine how much this effect may be interrupting good opportunities for collaboration. I don’t know about you, but I show up at meetings, conferences and other formal proceedings all the time and it’s clear no one is there to listen, much less to collaborate. It’s actually from this same basis that extreme segregation has rooted itself as told by David Livingston Smith in his book Less than Human. In today’s world, our media obliges in provoking more division among differing views. Unfortunately, extremes sell. This is why I am invoking the term Humanitarian, which is ultimately defined as anyone “having concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people.” We are being driven away from this, and if we can’t overcome this trend towards Polarization we will never conquer the impasses of Climate Change or any other existential challenge.? ??

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You’ve probably already guessed this, but our main goal in Applied Pioneering is to defeat this tendency. We have to stop artificially dividing “us” from “them” and instead, start recognizing that what we have in common far outweighs our differences. Freud described this as the “narcissism of differences”, but I prefer the kinder label “vanity of differences”. Our heavily weighted commonalities start with the fact that we’re all human and by simply reminding ourselves of this, we can make great strides towards inspiring empathy.? Add to this the shared pervasive culture of modern society we all lean into daily and you’ve got a great foundation for future collaborators. Finally, capitalizing on a group’s shared objective and likely beliefs, i.e. “Climate Change” (or insert cause), it won’t be long before deep kindred connections are within arm’s reach. ?

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Sounds simple right?? We all know it isn’t, of course. It’s a journey and it requires curation. I like to describe it as the path to opening the “Empathy Aperture”. This means, in a somewhat oversimplified description, that we must create the disciplined activation of 1) Personal Empathy, followed by 2) Cohort Empathy and eventually 3) Existential Empathy. Through this, we learn to respectively see and value the immediate team, climate activists as a whole, and eventually the existential underpinnings of the cause overall. Starting and evolving this journey will drive true collaboration. ?

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From our article synopsis, we asked “why did non-Jewish people… risk their lives or harsh punishments during the Holocaust to relentlessly aid Jews?”? What they all had in common, it turns out, was they were personally connected to the Jewish community as former neighbors and friends. Accordingly, they refused to accept the prolific propaganda meant to dehumanize Jews and turn them into “other.”

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Upcoming in the series…

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Now that we have finally have a full foundation under us, including the concepts of Complexity Science, Humanitarian Craftsmanship, Intellectual Humility and Empathy Aperture, we can start to curate those detailed real-world scenarios we’ve been promising.? The next article in the series picks up with a cast of team members sitting at a table, rolling up their sleeves with their happy smiling faces. This cast will include all the personas we surfaced in the first article in the series. Join us as we share specifics on how they can find integrated paths to an agreed success path around the specific Divisive Debate of Emissions Management vs Carbon Commercialization.? We will detail how they build decision criteria, join their scorecards for an integrated prioritization, and ultimately devise novel workflows and solutions that maximize collective impact.?

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“Be stronger than your strongest excuses!” – Anonymous

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