It's Time for Pragmatic Empathy

When David Thomas and Andrew Hunt published the 20th-anniversary edition of their seminal work, The Pragmatic Programmer, I was honored to be asked to provide a review and humbled when my quote was selected for the back cover. That’s because this book, probably more than any other, had an impact on the way that I thought about building and maintaining software systems. Recently, it’s impacted my thinking beyond software and into the world of how we apply empathy, too.

The key insight of Dave and Andy’s book is that you must adapt your approach to your situation. Instead of doubling down on dogma and “one size fits all” approaches, which many other software methodologies do, The Pragmatic Programmer went a different way. They acknowledged the complexity and put it in context.

“There are no easy answers. There is no best solution,” they wrote. “There can only be systems that are more appropriate in a particular set of circumstances.”

The solution that Dave and Andy presented as a means of navigating this complexity was pragmatism.  Be sensible and realistic. Ground your decisions on your situation. Consider the tradeoffs. Don’t focus on what’s easy, focus on what’s needed. Adjust appropriately. Recognize that there are a lot of different factors at play. And commit to continuously adapting and improving.

With pragmatic practices, systems can become more extensible and resilient. This is important for software systems. We want systems that are easy to change and won’t collapse because of something that seems minor. When problems do occur, we want to be able to recover as quickly as possible.

The same pragmatic principles that work on code can be helpful in human systems, too. The theory of graceful extensibility, which was introduced by Dr. David Woods, Professor of Integrated Systems at Ohio State University, maintains that a viable system is an extensible system — a principle that applies to all systems at all scales. According to Woods, a system’s long-term success “requires the ability to gracefully extend or stretch at the boundary where challenges occur.”

So, where are the boundaries within a human system and how should we gracefully extend them? If we’re looking at brittleness, group identity is a good place to explore.

Intergroup conflict can lead to destabilizing activities in human social systems, such as political violence, xenophobia, and genocide. Surprisingly, empathy has a significant role to play in these situations. If we only empathize with the people in our ingroup — the people who are “like us” — this can lead to a significant increase in intergroup conflict. This is outside of our individual capacity for empathy. Even the most empathetic people by nature can inflict harm on others under the guise of good intentions. As Barbara Oakley, a researcher and psychologist who studies this phenomenon of pathological altruism observed, “some of history’s most horrific episodes have risen from people’s well-meaning tendencies.”

If we don’t pay attention to the full range of empathy, we put ourselves at risk. If we choose only to see empathy as a superpower and cloak it in toxic positivity, we can cause significant harm — even when we believe that our actions are attempts to promote the welfare of someone else.

Graceful extensibility is realized through pragmatic empathy. It happens when we dig in and really understand what empathy’s all about. It’s recognizing empathy’s power and potential as a force for both potential benefit and destruction.

Empathy is complex. Even agreeing on a definition is difficult. Empathy can harm just as much as it can heal and it’s important to acknowledge the dangers of dogma. Finding the right balance is part of the work.

When it comes to applying empathy, here are some things to keep in mind so we can maintain a pragmatic approach:

• Empathy is complex and nuanced. It is not one thing, it is many things.
• Empathy requires just as much work within ourselves as it does with our interactions with others.
• Empathy is sometimes expressed in non-obvious places.
• Empathy is not a panacea. It can go wrong just as often as it can go right.
• Perfection is not possible. Making mistakes, and learning from them, is part of developing empathy.
• Empathy does not mean you have to tolerate, accept or endorse another person’s actions.
• Effective empathy is linked to boundaries. Maintaining healthy human systems requires us to gracefully extend empathy to people who may not be in our ingroup.
• Demographics can be misleading. Empathy needs to take place in context.

My friend, Erin White, once told me “binaries are violent.” There are so many things in our world that are false dichotomies, and empathy is certainly one of them. If we polarize empathy and reduce it down to something that is either amazing or awful, we miss the opportunity to apply it effectively. Pragmatism might not be flashy, but these days, especially as I’m researching empathy’s nuances, it’s my anchor.