Compassion is one of the world’s oldest virtues. But to keep it relevant to the demands of today, it has to change. We need a massive campaign to reimagine and redeploy the power of compassion. Our most vulnerable deserve it. Our overheated planet cries out for it. And all of us will benefit from it.
This is the task of generative compassion. It turns compassion into a supercharged force that redefines the way organizations relate to people and to the world around them.
We are witnessing an epidemic of loneliness that has reached the point in which family doctors are being warned to be alert to its potentially life-ending consequences for their patients. We are seeing stress levels among workers around the world that have reached record highs. Add in the dizzying levels of income inequality that are forcing more and more people to cope with less and less from their earliest days to the last months of life. These examples are but the tip of a compassion-starved global iceberg.
Generative compassion is different because it expands the lens of traditional compassion in the same way that generative Artificial Intelligence lifts the transformative scope of that model to better and higher uses, like faster diagnosis of medical conditions. Crucially, it also looks to equip organizations with early-warning sensors to prevent them from inflicting avoidable harm in the first place. And it elevates compassion practices to a strategic function of the organization, placing responsibility for performance squarely at the door of top management.
Compassion has long been associated with better health-care outcomes. But anyone who has spent time in a hospital recently, as I have, quickly will observe that compassion can be a hit and miss affair. Visits that had evolved to a higher level of patient- and family-friendly flexibility prior to COVID-19 have reverted to a more rigid regimen among many providers. Announcements blast out at 8 p.m. to remind “visitors” – including essential family caregivers – to leave by the nearest exit. Medical errors still happen too often, harming at least one in 17 patients during their hospital stay. And institutions continue to drive a deny-and-defend response to patient allegations of harm instead of a more trauma-informed response that prioritizes a non-adversarial resolution. Physician organizations, like the Ontario Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association, and hospital associations could score big benefits by using a generative compassion approach that includes a fuller range of strategic contact points in which patients, family and health-care professionals interact.
In mental health, long seen by many as an orphan of Canada’s beleaguered health-care system, public health officials still don’t monitor early-warning indicators of general suicide trends and methods, leaving clinicians and others without accurate and timely information critical to prevention efforts when suicide takes at least 12 lives every day in this country. Alarmingly, a recent investigative report by CBC News showed that more than 70 per cent of Canadian universities don’t track deaths by suicide or attempted suicides among students.
A generative compassion approach looks at the bigger picture and proactively asks the question: What more needs to be done to prevent more harm from occurring?
Having spent several years trying to get Canada’s mental health and public policy establishments to accept 988 as the national lifeline for suicide prevention (as it now is), I know how difficult it can be to get even the best ideas accepted. A generative compassion approach looks at the bigger picture and proactively asks the question: What more needs to be done to prevent more harm from occurring?
Compassion in our municipalities – as it is in global corporations and senior levels of government alike – is a hodgepodge of disparate policies, disconnected programs and vague hopes. Look at the epidemics of homelessness and opioid overdose deaths in urban centres and you will quickly see a safety net full of holes that leaves too many to fall into an abyss of despair, isolation and self-harm. Other functions in city administrations, like finance, technology, privacy and human resources are typically well-focused and headed by a top manager. A generative compassion perspective recognizes that the enormity of the caring and healing challenges facing cities demands a system-based approach that also requires a champion at the top. This is the role of a chief compassion officer, a position that is non-existent in most organizations today.
Indeed, all levels of government need to embrace this new paradigm for managing compassion. Compassion deficits are among the most damaging failures governments can inflict on citizens. A generative compassion approach by the federal government, for instance, would require that every department, agency and commission undergo a review of its agenda and develop a set of compassion policies responsive to the needs of stakeholders. Included in that process would be a checklist of issues that must be canvassed before any policy decision is made to prevent unintended harms, especially to the most vulnerable constituencies.
No organization exists in a vacuum. The world’s collective conscience is demanding a giant reset of the compassion agendas of our top private and public institutions. This is the unmissable call of humanity to heal a fractured world and save an endangered planet. It’s time our leaders answered that call.
