Compassion Lab

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
-- William Faulkner

Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December, 1950

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe… He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us … Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

We are a group of researchers working in business schools who strive to create a new vision of organizations as sites for the development and expression of compassion. We are part of a broader community of scholars who are dedicated to developing a perspective on organizations as sites for human growth and the development of human strengths.

About

Our Members

Jane Dutton
Robert L Kahn Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Psychology, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Peter Frost
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia - In Memoriam

Jason Kanov
Assistant Professor of Management, College of Business and Economics, Western Washington University

Jacoba Lilius
Assistant Professor, School of Policy Studies and School of Business, Queen's University

Sally Maitlis
Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia

Monica Worline
Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Guoizeta School of Business, Emory University

Kristina Workman

Doctoral Student in Management & Organizations, University of Michigan

Our Mission

We do high quality work on compassion in a generative setting, where we can't wait to see what comes next.

Our Principles

• We attempt to live in alignment with what we study, and our research has an inner life as well as an outer life.

• We transform ourselves and our professional practice through the stories that we tell.

• We represent organizations as vibrant and alive, and paint them in their full palette of colors.

• We create a context in which all of our research participants can benefit from their engagement in our work

Our Practices

• We do our work in a spirit of playfulness and joy. We aim to have fun!
  We use our personal experiences of living and learning in organizations as a basis from which to understand the world.

• We treat experience other than our own as a deep and valid reflection of ideas about social and organizational life.

• We acknowledge that our practices are our garden--the more we tend and nourish them, the more we will flourish.

• We learn best through empathy. We are there for each other as research partners while respecting each other's boundaries.

• We honor the physical and emotional aspects of learning as well as the mental ones.

• We create a broad foundation for all of our work, drawing from art, literature, religion, history, culture and social theory.

• We build bridges to other work in our field, attuned to the ways in which we enable people to enter our work and to walk along with us.

• We accommodate the flux in our lives at the same time that we create high impact products.

• We aspire to represent our work in diverse forms so that it increases understanding and inspires people to see new organizational possibilities.