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Archive: January, 2013

Christian Bason

Empathy is the new black

By January 23rd 2013

This article previously appeared in Monday Morning Blog.

In her televised New Year’s speech, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt made it clear that the public sector must become more efficient. Yes, but how? In my experience, an important prerequisite is that we grow the ability to put ourselves in other people’s place. We must base the creation of better and more productive welfare on empathy.

In fact, the professional ability to put oneself in the citizen’s place is a central component in several recent successful efforts to modernise the Danish public sector.

In late 2012, the Selsmose School in Høje Taastrup won the Local Government Denmark prize for innovation. The school, where about 95% of pupils are of non-Danish ethnic origin, has achieved impressive educational results, and currently ranks significantly above the national average in a number of subjects.

The key to the school’s success lies in the recognition that pupils’ well-being and happiness come before their scholastic learning, and that it is necessary to involve a broad community of actors in the local area – housing associations, businesses, parents and relatives – to foster support, enthusiasm and energy around and in the school.

Selsmose School’s transformation was thus rooted in a deep empathy for the children’s world and its larger context. Next, the results were supported by a significant administrative effort to involve both personnel and the local community in creating positive change for the pupils.

In the area of employment we see a similar tendency toward thinking far more in terms of empowering the individual citizen, for example in Copenhagen Municipality’s Borgeren ved roret (Citizen at the helm) programme.

After a decade of control and coercion, authorities are beginning to adapt a holistic view of what it takes to bring the individual unemployed person closer to the job market. The new measures make new (and cheaper) digital tools available to the public, so they themselves can tailor the services to their needs. Simultaneously, public employment services can be more personalised to the most vulnerable individuals, i.e., more focused on individual needs and challenges.

This way of working is an expression of the notion that public service – “welfare” – is based on real insight into what is important for the individual person. In the Copenhagen Municipality project there is a clear expectation that an effort will have a greater effect when it is “people-centred”.

Putting oneself in others’ place

What the two cases have in common is that – consciously or unconsciously – they involve empathy, as perhaps best described in American novelist Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird (published in 1960, during the Civil Rights Movement), when lawyer Atticus Finch tells his six-year-old daughter Scout that: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”.

In present day Great Britain, renowned thinker and RSA think-tank director Matthew Taylor says that we in the 21st century need a new Enlightenment, noting that empathy will be a core competence for future citizens.

Can we create a humanistic think tank?

In recent years, economists have been good at telling us about the terrible economic situation, and one economic think tank after another has been founded to provide ever more “hardcore” analyses of what it will take to increase public sector productivity. Yet, paradoxically enough, it is not from economists that we should expect to find the key to getting “more from the same” in the public sector, as the Prime Minister requested in her New Year’s speech.

Empathy and insight into people’s actual experience, motivation, behaviour and needs – which could drive new and more productive public sector business models – requires entirely other kinds of skills. We must become much better at using the knowledge produced by behavioural psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers, cultural analysts and other humanists.

The object of humanistic studies is indeed the same as that of welfare efforts, namely people. So why not start a new humanistic think tank, focused on public sector renewal and productivity, and on how we could create an even better welfare system with the individual person as the defining element.

The time is ripe. For the “soft” is on its way to becoming the “hard”. Empathy will be the next big thing in the welfare debate of 2013.

Christian Bason

The public sector manager’s responsibility

By January 11th 2013

This article was previously published in the Danish weekly Mandag Morgen.

Public sector executives can begin taking greater responsibility for creating real change for Danes. Their tasks include practicing the concept of “systemic contexts”.

“Climate change was the systemic cause of Hurricane Sandy,” wrote researcher George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California at Berkeley, in the introduction of a recent article published in the American online news website, Huffington Post.

In the article, he provokes the many pundits in the United States who claimed in the wake of the devastating hurricane that climate change may have played a role, but that it was not the cause of the devastating hurricane.

Lakoff argues that climate change was the cause – if we understand the kind of cause we are talking about. This requires that we understand the difference between two types of causation: systemic and direct.

Systemic causation may sound rather abstract, but according to Lakoff it is quite familiar: Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Drunk driving is a systemic cause of traffic accidents. And last, but not least, sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.

Direct causation is also well known: Hitting someone in the face is the direct cause of the pain they experience. Throwing a rock through a window is the direct cause of the broken window, etc.

According to Lakoff, the challenge is that direct causation is straightforward to understand and control, but the systemic causes are what really matter. Thus they are important to understand.

A systemic cause can be one of many and can be due to a variety of factors. It is often indirect and works through a chain of relationships. It may reflect a probability or arise through a feedback mechanism.

Public sector managers’ responsibility

Why is all of this interesting to managers of public organisations (or advisors to managers in public organisations)? To quote Lakoff:

“In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled.”

In other words: Public sector managers are responsible for creating change via systemic causation. This has implications for their approach to management and leadership, whether they are responsible for reducing accidents at work, preventing food scandals, improving well-being in day care institutions or creating innovation and growth in the Danish economy.

One of the most common excuses I hear from public sector executives when it comes to creating tangible results for citizens and society is that there are so many other factors in addition to the efforts of the municipality, region, agency, or ministry, all of which impact the success of a desired change. For example, the efforts of other organisations, companies and people, economic trends, etc.

Lakoff would respond that this is precisely the point: Public sector results – results that must be created in a complex and changing reality – are not usually about making a direct impact on the world.

Management and systemic causation

If you want to strengthen your ability to lead through systemic causation, there are three things you should do:

Firstly, you should establish a clear overview of the system or the network of stakeholders that comprises the cause-effect chains in your area of responsibility. My experience is that public sector managers rarely do this formally – but why not do this using graphic or digital mapping, for example?

Secondly, you should work consciously and strategically to influence all of the stakeholders in the area, thereby increasing the systemic impact on the issue you are working to address. For example, by actively seeking to influence all stakeholders that have any sort of connection to the set of relationships that create or diminish a safe working environment at Danish workplaces, the factors that promote or hinder our food safety, the stakeholders and actions that affect the way our children develop and thrive in day care institutions, etc. This may also involve targeting the complex relationships that ultimately form the competitive and innovative power of our universities and businesses.

Yes, this is already being partially done today. But no matter what political area you look at, it is not being done with sufficient clarity or direction.

Thirdly and lastly, an acknowledgement of systemic causes entails taking responsibility for the effects that are ultimately created for citizens, companies and society – despite the fact that they do not occur as a direct result of decisions or actions over which you have control. Taking that kind of responsibility would be fitting for many public sector managers.