How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 154
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If you find (or create) a really good example of empathic risk communication and you don’t mind sharing it,
please email it to me at [email protected]. If I get a good collection, I’ll add an appendix of “Some
Examples from Earth.”
Afterword by Jody Lanard
In the wondrous age of Google searches and tags, I would tag this column Risk Communication, Empathy,
Havens, Buber, Sandman (although Buber is mentioned only briefly).
What is a reductionist seat-of-the-pants risk communication consultant like Peter Sandman doing on a list with
psychiatrist Leston Havens and philosopher Martin Buber? What are Havens and Buber doing in a risk
communication publication at all?
In the genealogy of risk communication, other important influences are far more obvious than Havens and
Buber:
The psychometric paradigm of risk perception, developed by Slovic et al., which underlies Sandman’s most
famous formulation, “Risk = Hazard + Outrage.”
The profoundly influential work of Kahneman and Tversky on the framing of decisions, prospect theory, and
judgment under uncertainty (heuristics and biases).
But at its deepest roots, our philosophy of empathic risk communication springs from the ideas of Leston
Havens and Martin Buber. In Peter’s column, he tries for the first time to bring Les Haven’s work to life for
students and practitioners of risk communication.
It almost feels like an oxymoron, to try to operationalize empathy. Les Havens was brave and brilliant enough to
do this in his 1986 masterpiece, Making Contact: Uses of Language in Psychotherapy. A Boston Globe reviewer
called the book a “grammar of empathy.”
Les Havens was one of my most beloved teachers in the years surrounding the book’s publication. When I
introduced Peter to Les’s work in 1985, I cautioned him, as my fellow students and I always cautioned each
other, that Les’s teachings could not, should not, be turned into a cookbook or checklist for communicating.
Nevertheless, it often seemed like novices were doing exactly that, when they practiced using some of Havens’s
difficult approaches. This sometimes led to scorn from more advanced practitioners or from closer “disciples” of
Dr. Havens – a very unempathic response to abashed students taking brave baby steps!
In the 1960s at Princeton University, Peter passionately studied the work of Martin Buber with his beloved
professor, Buber scholar Malcolm Diamond, and with philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who later translated
Buber’s masterpiece, I and Thou. Another Buber scholar, Robert E. Wood, discussed the “fraught” issue of
trying to analyze and use a complex structure such as Buber’s:
The attempt at analysis, though indeed fraught with the very serious danger of destroying the immediacy of
experience, likewise puts us in a position of being able eventually to experience the immediate more
profoundly…'. [T]here comes a time when, through persistence in analysis, along with attention to immediacy,
immediacy itself is deepened. The musical score, as Buber observes, is not the same as the musical
performance; and yet we may add that an understanding of the score may eventually enhance the appreciation of
the performance.
— Robert E. Wood, in Martin Buber’s Ontology
This applies as well to the work of Leston Havens, and to future attempts of risk communicators to embrace this
work.
I think it was courageous of Peter to take the risk of trying to operationalize empathy, to build guidelines but not
a cookbook around the difficult thinking of Havens and Buber. I hope you will take the comparable risk: the risk
of trying new approaches that might feel stilted or forced at first, even if they feel stilted or forced at first. I
believe it will help your efforts at Making Contact.
Copyright © 2007 by Peter M. Sandman
For [email protected]
Property of Bookemon, do NOT distribute
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