Systemic empathy

Organisations are full of decisions that make sense where they're made and create pressure somewhere else. It's just what structure and distance does.

Kenneth was a contracting manager in a major infrastructure company. His job involved negotiating contracts with some of the world's largest technology companies. As he described the commitments he was being asked to make, my first thought was: this is where the risk begins. This is where the commercial trade-offs happen. Where someone decides how much service the customer gets, how quickly it must be delivered, and what the organisation is prepared to promise.

The champagne lefty in me was excited. Commercial interests at the top. Safety consequences at the bottom. But the longer we talked, the less comfortable I became with that explanation.

Kenneth was frustrated. He knew that some of the commitments he agreed to would create pressure for the engineers who had to deliver them. More demand. Probably with the same resources. Tighter expectations. More things to reconcile when the plan met reality.

But he also felt constrained. These were enormously powerful customers. If his organisation wouldn't agree to their terms, there were competitors who would. He wasn't free to make the decision he thought was best. He was burdened too. 

Local rationality, applied upward

In safety, we've become increasingly comfortable with the idea of local rationality. When a frontline worker makes a decision that looks strange from the outside, we ask, 'What made sense to them at the time? What were they trying to achieve? What pressures were they responding to?’

It's a useful way of understanding work. But I wonder whether we apply the same generosity upward.

What made sense to Kenneth? What pressures was he experiencing? What could he see? What couldn't he see?

From the engineer's perspective: they're promising things we don't have the capacity to deliver.

From Kenneth's perspective: if we don't agree to this, we lose one of our biggest customers.

Both perspectives can be locally rational. Understanding that doesn't mean both decisions are necessarily good ones. It simply gives us a better chance of understanding how the system actually works, and where the leverage for change actually sits.

By the time the pressure arrives on site, it has been translated, compressed and reformatted so many times that nobody can easily trace it back to its origin. The engineer absorbing the pressure on a Tuesday morning has no way of knowing what Kenneth agreed to months ago. And Kenneth has no way of knowing what his commitment looks like from inside a busy shift.

The harder question

Kenneth can negotiate differently, flag high-risk commitments, build better relationships with the operational side of the organisation. Those moves matter, but they address the enabler/burden asymmetry at the margins. The structural conditions that produced it sit beyond what Kenneth can address alone.

This is ultimately a structural, relational and epistemic problem, not one that accountability alone can solve. The question is how we create organisations where responsibility can travel in both directions: where decisions can be made with an understanding of their consequences, and where the experience of consequences can travel back to influence future decisions.

Systemic empathy

Before the conversation with Kenneth, I could see the decision. I could see who benefited from it. And I could imagine who would carry the consequences.

After the conversation, I could see Kenneth. He was good at his job. Which was part of the problem. He was navigating a set of constraints I hadn't previously understood, trying to create successful outcomes inside a system that made the full consequences of his decisions largely invisible to him. 

We usually talk about empathy as something we owe to the people carrying the frontline burden. But perhaps we also need empathy for the people making the decisions, to understand the pressures, constraints and trade-offs that shape them. We could call it systemic empathy.

Local rationality has sometimes been used to shift blame rather than remove it, from the person to the system, from the frontline to design or procurement or supervision. That's not what I'm arguing for here. Systemic empathy is about understanding the conditions that shape decisions well enough to change them, wherever in the chain those conditions sit. 

Accountability still matters. But accountability without understanding can produce consequences without addressing the conditions that made the decision make sense. 

If we can't understand why a decision made sense to the person making it, we're unlikely to understand how to change the conditions that produced it. And sometimes understanding is where the leverage begins. 

Daniel

P.S. Ron Gantt and I are hosting a live conversation about safety conversations next week. We'll be sharing stories, reflecting on what works and what hasn't. Feel free to join. It's free. Register here.

P.P.S. An Invitation to Safety Conversations was reviewed in the latest issue of Safeguard magazine by Peter Bateman. Worth a read if you're curious about the book. Also, totally worth checking out Safeguard’s Linkedin page.