This is the first of a series on the elements and emotions involved with successful community-based innovation.
A good heart is never enough. Compassion alone changes nothing
I believe there are good people all around us. Sometimes, it doesn’t look that way. We are genetically predisposed to see danger—it helps to keep us alive. We tune in and click on evil, so popular culture shows us a lot of it, so much that heavy users of media are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of their being hurt by bad people, who are not bad but smart.
Popular culture often shows us bad people who are brilliant, who devise elaborate strategies for their evil doing. We watch teams of highly skilled people preparing for bank heists or world domination. Usually, at least in American stories, goodness wins but often by happy coincidence. Luck, or providence, or a sympathetic cabdriver, just happens by.
Goodness is often under strategized on screen and in practice.
Compassion is a necessary pre-condition for community-based partnerships, but compassion alone is not a strategy. I’ve worked with brilliant scientists, engineers, humanists, artists and companies who meant well, who put in 100’s of hours devising an end-product or service that they thought underserved communities needed. Their process was usually to create the innovation and then try to get people to use it. It is heartbreaking to see their disappointment when the community—just as often—rejects it. Rejection takes many forms. Often, folks just politely lean back and move away slowly. I’ve seen community members rope-a-dope like professional boxers. Many “community” innovations are moribund a few years later.
Why do we expect people to adopt anything that doesn’t fit their lives? I worked with a commissioned study to find out why African Americans were not accessing Their cancer prevention materials. We used Black phone surveyors who took notes of the respondents’ side comments. They found that Black respondents knew the warning signs of cancer as well as the White group, but they often added, “but I don’t believe it.” Later we ran separate focus groups of working class and middle class African Americans and found more distrust of Western medicine. (They distrusted not only doctors but the practice of Western medicine.) Working class African Americans had a consistent system of which over the counter or street drugs worked for which ailments. Middle class women were hedging their bets. They had health insurance and were attended by Western health professionals, but they were simultaneously using their grandmothers’ herbal remedies, often without telling their doctors.
We showed them the organization’s brochure that depicted a Black mother, father and two children at the dinner table. The working class family session members immediately rejected it. “Why would we want to be like them? They are poorer than we are.” They explained that the “church” clothes the depicted family wore suggested it was a Sunday. (Black Americans attend church more often than many other demographics.) On the dinner table was one meat, two vegetables and a drink. “They don’t have enough food on the table for a Sunday so they must be really poor.” (African American culture is a “food culture,” and food is an important component of family and social gatherings.)
Very often, innovators assume that other people are just like them. Therein lies the collisions of cultures.
The same is true for work with organizations or the larger public. If we don’t work to fit innovations into longstanding beliefs and behaviors of the community, we can’t expect people to pay attention to them, much less bring them into their lives. Engineer Kevin Apperson and I co-coined and introduced the term, “empathetic engineering” because most engineers know how to make things that work, but not necessarily things that people will use. Empathy is not just a feeling. It is best when evidence based and integrated into a systems analysis of the community and the cultural, political and physical landscapes. Strategy with a heart.
Good intentions are not enough. I asked a high-ranking scientific administrator to estimate how much money was lost creating innovations that nobody would use. He sighed and said there the number was so high as to be inestimable, but that an attempt would have to start in the billions.
And whether you’re working with big or small communities, a false step can be fatal to trust, the golden chalice of community work. But I’ll write about trust another time. Trust is so complex that we must build up to it.
Next Up: The Power and the Pity
