Compassion as robustness

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 be indeed the most efficient way to build a high tower. This is the world we built, a world of efficient organizations, just-in-time management, tight plans… efficient, yes, but also fragile, not robust, and, as I will argue, not connected to the human experience.

After listening to this fantastic podcast with Olivier Hamant, it becomes 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 fragile. Let's explore!

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. Mistakes 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. Orchids, however, are the opposite. Beautiful, but co-evolved with one specific insect: so specialized 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 maximizing 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

Working for 20 years now as a trainer, team coach and organizational consultant, I have seen this. I have seen 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, insecurity, being lost in a world full of demands but so little comfort. Therefore, over the past few years I have started to work on Compassionate Leadership, to bring the human condition back into the equation by listening to these stories and creating communities of common humanity (the idea that 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, Non-Violent Communication and more, all aim to reconnect to what makes us human.

Resilience vs robustness

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! So my question is, 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

So let's look at a different kind of compassion. The kind of compassion that happens before the fall. The kind of compassion that understands that common humanity needs to be built into the systems: integrated instead of an afterthought.

How can we do that? In his lecture "Robustness: the inefficient truth?" (McGill International Palliative Care Congress, October 2024), Hamant lists 7 components of robustness:

The seven, in the language of compassion

So if we want to build organizations and help professionals to be more robust, how can (self)compassion help? Let me translate Hamant's 7 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 organizations can't handle one person getting sick. Often we break down if our one moment of self-care gets absorbed by an emergency. But it's the backups that keep us viable in unexpected circumstances. Connecting to compassion helps to have a clear vision of your purpose, and to make sure you have multiple redundant but meaningful ways of creating 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. Cyberattacks focus on dominant software. A second car is more of the same; a bike and 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: often, 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 organizational 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 one.

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 ever could. 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 fight; can you allow for such contradictions? In yourself it means for example holding both your ambitious part and your self-care part. It's about the ability to be with the question, instead of rushing towards an answer and suppressing any other thoughts. The same goes in teams: is there a space in your team for a plurality of opinions? Is there Psychological Safety (Amy Edmondson) to have 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 honor your vulnerability and humanity. But you also honor your potential and natural tendency to grow. This perspective also helps in organizations. Great leaders allow their people to make mistakes. Incompleteness implies a learning organization. It's letting go of control and "knowing" and opening up to the "Wisdom of insecurity" (Alan Watts) with an open awareness to what wants to evolve.

Conclusion

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 perspective on the systems that shape the future and how we can make those systems more robust, more human.

Robustness and compassion share a deep care for that which is fragile. 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.

Sources and further reading

• Olivier Hamant on the podcast episode that started this piece.
• Olivier Hamant, "Robustness: the inefficient truth?", McGill International Palliative Care Congress, October 2024.
• This essay first appeared on Imre's Substack, 4 September 2026.

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, and building margin back into a team is the everyday work of team coaching.