Recently I’ve been reading a book called Awakening Compassion at Work by Monica Worline and Jane Dutton. This has set me thinking about the role of compassion in the collaborative processes needed to work across boundaries on wicked problems. The authors define compassion as:

• Noticing that suffering is present
• Making sense of why the suffering is happening
• Feeling empathy and concern about the suffering
• Taking action to address the suffering

Worline and Dutton go on to set out the evidence for how compassion can underpin beneficial workplace capabilities, including successful collaboration across groups with diverse roles and backgrounds. Some of the examples in the book also consider how relational coordination offers a wide range of benefits in organisations. This draws attention to the importance of thinking beyond work tasks to consider the networks of relationships and the extent to which these have shared knowledge, goals, and mutual respect.

I think this adds something important about how to address wicked problems in higher education to complement the notions of hospitality and boundary work that I’ve considered elsewhere in this blog. An ethic of hospitality asks us to welcome whoever comes however they arrive. This is crucial for effective collaboration but we need to go beyond true welcome to extend care and compassion as we work on wicked problems. Conceptually, boundary work needs shared objects and practices to coordinate thinking but coordinated thinking will not be enough if we don’t have compassion and mutual respect for the experiences of the people we are coordinating with.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash