How compassion makes your organisation more robust
An organisation without margin runs on its people until they burn out. Compassion can build the margin instead.
Fragility: Tower of Babel
Imagine a box of building blocks. You want to build the highest tower possible. What will you do? Of course: a straight line up of one block upon another, like a Tower of Babel. And in a world without fluctuations like earthquakes, wind or little children bouncing around, this would indeed be the most efficient way to build a high tower. This is the world we built, a world of efficient organisations, just-in-time management, tight plans… efficient, yes, but also fragile, not robust, and, as I will argue, not connected to the human experience.
Listening to this fantastic podcast with Olivier Hamant made one thing clear: our tower of blocks is too fragile. According to Hamant, every step towards optimisation is a step towards fragility. His work revolves around the term robustness. A robust tower of blocks would perhaps be lower, but would survive the unexpected and last longer. I am struck by this idea, because robustness and compassion start in the same place: both of them pay attention to what is vulnerable. Let's explore!
Robustness, it's the capacity of a system to be stable and viable despite fluctuations. Olivier Hamant
What is robustness: Jazz & Sharks
Playing jazz music myself, I was very happy that Hamant explains robustness with a jazz metaphor. Imagine a talented musician who plays a piece by Mozart in the most beautiful way, perfectly executed. Wonderful, honey for your ears. But what if the wind catches the sheet music? The musician is at a loss.
Hamant, who has played improv jazz himself, says jazz is different. In jazz we embrace mistakes: they are input for new improvisation. Jazz is robust because you can improvise and play with changing circumstances.
Being a biologist, Hamant takes his lessons about robustness from nature. "Evolution does not select the most efficient. Evolution selects the most robust. By definition, because for a species to survive over several millions of years, you have to experience a lot of fluctuations. And so species that have to go through these fluctuations, they have to be robust before they can be efficient."
Darwin, says Hamant, was never about the most adapted species but the most adaptable one. Sharks are not the most efficient animal in the sea, but adaptable enough to have absorbed hundreds of millions of years of fluctuation. Certain orchids, however, are the opposite. Beautiful, but co-evolved with one specific insect: so specialised that they have one route and no plan B.
Burnout culture
But according to Hamant, our current culture is not robust! He sees a system that is not viable: "Our world is starting to be more unpredictable. We're leaving the mean to enter the era of the standard deviation." This is like staffing the hospital ward at average occupancy, which in practice means you are short of staff on half the days!
I believe a lot of burnout is caused by this kind of maximising performance: high pressure, no margins. We've lost the spirit of jazz. Our unconditional preference for performance and efficiency generates "a planetary burnout. So burnout for humans, burnout for public services, burnout for ecosystems."
Compassion: paying attention to what is vulnerable
In twenty years as a trainer, team coach and organisational consultant, I have seen this up close. I have met many people who feel overstimulated, disconnected from purpose and overwhelmed by the rat-race. The work is never finished and the purpose of the work is often uninspiring to begin with. When I ask my clients to complete the sentence "If you really knew me, you would know that…" I hear stories of pain, of insecurity, of being lost in a world full of demands and short on comfort.
Therefore, over the past few years I have started to work on compassionate leadership: bringing the human condition back into the equation. That means listening to these stories, and creating communities of common humanity. In the end we are all alike in our search to relieve suffering and find joy.
And fortunately I am not alone in this quest. Concepts like psychological safety, Deep Democracy and Nonviolent Communication all aim to reconnect us with what makes us human.
Resilience vs robustness
Robustness is when you create the conditions in which you don't fall.Olivier Hamant
I always thought that resilience would be the key ingredient. Resilience means that when you fall, you have the ability to bounce back! You're overwhelmed, stuck, disappointed, burned out… you give yourself and others compassion… and then you bounce back again! So yes, after falling, being compassionate with yourself and others is fantastic. It helps to bring back balance, genuine care and humanity to the ones suffering. I thought that training compassion to help people bounce back when things are tough was enough.
But I missed one key point that Hamant makes very elegantly. According to Hamant: "Robustness is when you create the conditions in which you don't fall." Ah! So there we have it. Resilience is what happens after the fall. Robustness is designing a system that avoids falling in the first place! My question, then: can we use compassion to live and work in ways that don't exhaust and overwhelm us, and that in the end do not rely on resilience?
Compassion and robustness
Let's look at a different kind of compassion. The kind of compassion that happens before the fall. The kind of compassion that understands common humanity has to be built into the system itself, not added afterwards.
How can we do that? In his lecture "Robustness: the inefficient truth?" (McGill International Palliative Care Congress, October 2024), Hamant lists seven components of robustness:
Seven components of robustness
Inefficiency
Run below your peak, so there's margin left when conditions change.
Redundancy
More than one of what works, so no single loss takes out the function.
Heterogeneity
Make your backups different in kind, because identical ones share the same weak spot.
Slowness
Let it take the time it takes, so the result holds on its own.
Randomness
Leave room for the unplanned, so you don't lock onto today's only solution.
Inconsistency
Let opposing forces coexist, so the system counterbalances itself instead of running away.
Incompleteness
Leave it unfinished, because what's still open is what can still adapt.
The seven, in the language of compassion
If we want to build organisations and help professionals to be more robust, how can (self)compassion help? Let me translate Hamant's seven components into the language of compassion:
Inefficiency
Allow yourself and your team some slack. In the slack the magic happens – or the deep rest. Hamant points out a fun fact: our bodies run at 37°C while our enzymes peak at 40°C. We operate three degrees below our own optimum, and that gap is not a bug but a feature. It is what lets the body keep working through fever, cold, hunger and hard days.
Allowing yourself space for "nothing" gives time for the dust to settle, for clarity to come, for healing physically and emotionally from periods of intense work, for soothing. If you plan for 80% you can absorb the unexpected. Practices like mindfulness help us to see clearly and absorb what is.
Redundancy
Having backup for the things that really matter is self-compassion. You make yourself independent of unexpected turbulence. Reconnect to what is truly valuable and make sure that it is still viable if one chain breaks.
Often organisations can't handle one person getting sick. We break down ourselves if our one moment of self-care gets absorbed by an emergency. But it's the backups that keep us viable in unexpected circumstances. Compassion helps you see your purpose clearly, and make sure you have several redundant but meaningful ways of serving it. Find your helpful sources, and create a second one for each of them!
Heterogeneity
Backups work best when they differ in kind. Monoculture attracts pathogens, and cyberattacks focus on dominant software. A second car is more of the same. A bike, plus a neighbour who can drive you, is something else entirely. And with enough plan B, Hamant says, you can stop controlling the car and simply be serene.
That variety makes a life rich rather than merely covered: one friend who makes you laugh, one who tells you the truth, one who just sits with you. Different kinds of rest, different sources of meaning. In teams, this is what it means to compassionately see the human being behind the professional: roles are interchangeable, people are not. Each brings a different perspective and different blind spots, which is where the richer ideas come from, and the real backup.
Slowness
In the long run, going slow is going fast. On a personal level: rushing it is self-criticism in disguise. Trying to force life is like pulling on grass to make it grow faster. On an organisational level, pay a lot of attention to what "wants" to happen instead of what should happen according to plan. Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer call this "Presencing": being present and sensing at the same time what is happening right now. It ties in nicely with the Taoist idea of Wu Wei: effortless effort, following the natural flow instead of forcing your own.
Randomness
Rigid plans are the end of creativity! Spontaneity is randomness in action. And spontaneity is more connected to the here and now than any plan could ever be. Unplanned spontaneous contact with another human being is where you find out you're not the only one struggling. It is compassionate because you follow the trajectory of what wants to happen spontaneously in this moment instead of forcing your way down a closed path. It is compassionate because you connect to what is actually present instead of what you want to be there.
Inconsistency
To me this is the hallmark of compassion, the ability to hold paradoxes. A system that seems fully aligned may in reality hold certain hidden but unwelcome voices. But instead of suppressing those voices, can you hold seemingly opposing parts without stress or a fight? Can you allow for such contradictions?
In yourself it means, for example, holding both your ambitious part and your part that wants rest. It's about the ability to stay with the question instead of rushing towards an answer and suppressing every other thought. The same goes in teams: is there a space in your team for a plurality of opinions? Is there enough psychological safety (Amy Edmondson) to voice an unpopular opinion?
Incompleteness
Kristin Neff says that self-compassion is not the same as self-esteem. Self-esteem is self-love because you have a result. Self-compassion is self-love disconnected from any result. It is more fundamental and more unconditional.
By allowing yourself to be incomplete you honour your vulnerability and humanity. But you also honour your potential and natural tendency to grow. This perspective also helps in organisations: great leaders allow their people to make mistakes, and incompleteness implies a learning organisation. It's letting go of control and of "knowing", and opening up to the "wisdom of insecurity" (Alan Watts) with an open awareness of what wants to evolve.
Compassion belongs in the design
Compassion as resilience is a kind response when confronted with someone else's suffering. Compassion as robustness is different. It is about the wisdom to anticipate suffering and to see when systems steer away from what truly matters. Compassion can happen in the moment. But it should also take a wider view: on the systems that shape the future, and on how we can make those systems more robust and more human.
Robustness and compassion share a deep care for that which is vulnerable. The art is to find it, and start there. So where is your life, your team, your work – and our planet – running with no margin at all? That is where compassion belongs: not as a painkiller afterwards, but built into the design.
Postscript
I sent this piece to Olivier Hamant. He corrected two things, and when I asked him about the link between robustness and compassion, he added this:
There is a strong link between robustness and cooperation (going against our own performance to fuel the robustness of the group), which means exposing one's own vulnerability, i.e. develop compassion.
Olivier Hamant, in correspondence, September 2026
Sources and further reading
- Nate Hagens in conversation with Olivier Hamant, The Great Simplification, episode 230, the podcast that started this piece.
- Olivier Hamant, "Robustness: the inefficient truth?" (slides), McGill International Palliative Care Congress, October 2024.
Where these ideas go next
The written foundation under all of this is what is compassionate leadership, and the evidence sits in the research. The part about holding a plurality of opinions is what our psychological safety training is built on. Building margin back into a team is the everyday work of team coaching. Leaders who want to build it into how they lead can start with our compassionate leadership training.
Where is your organisation running with no margin?
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