Conversations on Strategy Podcast – Ep 25 – Dr. Allison Abbe and Dr. Claire Yorke – On Strategic Empathy

This podcast explores the benefits of strategic empathy and its value as a leadership tool. Read the issue here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/9/Download the transcript: https://media.defense.gov/2023/Oct/10/2003316776/-1/-1/0/COS-PODCAST-TRANSCRIPT-ABBE-YORKE-FINAL.PDF

Keywords: strategic empathy, perspective taking, H. R. McMaster, Ralph K. White, Zachary Shore

CONVERSATIONS ON STRATEGY PODCAST – EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Allison Abbe and Dr. Claire Yorke On Strategic Empathy

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Stephanie Crider (Host)

You're listening to Conversations on Strategy (http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/cos). The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Today I'm talking with Dr. Allison Abbe and Dr. Claire Yorke.

Abbe is a professor of organizational studies at the US Army War College and author of “Understanding the Adversary: Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in National Security,” (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/9/) which was published in the summer of 2023 issue of Parameters.

Yorke is an author, academic, researcher, and advisor. Her expertise is in the role of empathy and emotions in international affairs, politics, leadership, and society.

Episode Transcript

Download the transcript: https://media.defense.gov/2023/Oct/10/2003316776/-1/-1/0/COS-PODCAST-TRANSCRIPT-ABBE-YORKE-FINAL.PDF

Welcome to Conversations on Strategy.

What is strategic empathy and what is it not?

Claire Yorke

So, strategic empathy emphasizes the importance of understanding the other side within strategic decision making, and this might be an adversary. And often a lot of the scholarship focuses on adversaries, but it can also be allies. It can be societies. It's a way of having a deeper awareness of how different people view the world and how that will have a bearing on the calculations and decisions that you make on the implications of strategy when it touches ground, when it reaches contact point with the natural situation in a context, and it encourages us to think more about the context that different people come from, their experiences, their histories, their socioeconomic backgrounds, their perspectives of the world, their cultural context, and also the meanings that they give to different ideas to different values, to different elements of a situation.

Allison Abbe

As Claire describes, it's taking the perspective of another party, looking at the situation in their shoes, as they would say, “walking in their shoes.” But it is important to distinguish this from just care and compassion. I think sometimes when people hear the term empathy, they automatically think that it just means compassion for someone else and sympathy for another person. And it's much more than that. It's much more of those cognitive elements of taking their perspective and understanding their context as Claire said.

Yorke

It's that idea of having a broader range of emotions and being aware of them. It's not a weakness to have strategic empathy. It's an essential element of dealing with other human beings.

Abbe

And I think that's really one of the keys is that it's purposeful. It's not just thinking about someone else's point of view for its own sake. It's really using that perspective and using their lenses to understand and better make decisions and to better include them in your calculations and your decision making.

Host

What can strategic empathy add to our strategic thinking?

Yorke

It can add a number of different elements. Firstly, I think it's a critical asset in creating more strategic humility and understanding that there is not just one world view that dominates and that is integrally, right, intrinsically right. Cultivating that around ourself, there are multiple different competing realities right now as people see them. How do we build that into our approach and our sense of self and our identity? And so, it compels self-reflection in how we make decisions, in how we think about the world and understand, as well, how we are experienced by others. How do our words, how do our actions, how our behaviors have implications and often unintended implications? Maybe our actions are intended to be good, but they're operating against a background where they won't be interpreted in that way. And so, it gives that checking point. It gives a sense of reflection and humility and greater consideration to how we interact.

Abbe

And I think that's exactly right. You know, the military perspective, where I'm coming from and teaching strategic leaders as officers that will be working for combat and commands and in other areas, it's critical to military planning that they consider the impact of their actions and how that will be perceived. Those actions are not going taken... as they plan, sometimes there are unexpected and unintended consequences that the other party, whether that's the local population or the adversary, will not necessarily receive those actions the way they might be intended, and there is huge room for miscalculation when you're talking about understanding the adversary’s perspective. You can go awry in many ways when you're trying to understand the adversary perspective, if you're not taking those different lenses into account.

Yorke

It also can contribute an awareness of the need to ask more people to think about who's missing from the table, who's missing from our consideration. Who have we not understood? Who have we not engaged with? And so, especially from that military perspective, how do militaries build in greater engagement with different communities in a respectful, engaged way that doesn't undermine them, that is engaging with them properly in a very considered way to make sure that you have taken in various sources of information, various perspectives, into account? And that should give you a more holistic, a richer picture of the environment you're operating, of the ways in which power may look very different on the ground to how we conceptualize it in theory or in abstract or from remote capitals, and so, fostering greater nuance and complexity within the process.

Host

What limitations does strategic empathy have?

Abbe

One potential limitation is the way that empathy in general has often been discussed. It's in terms of taking on the point of view of someone else. And there is some risk in that if you don't then shift back to your own perspective, your own party’s perspective. That's sometimes talked about as going native. I think that's sort of an extreme example of what we're talking about here with the risk of empathy, but the important thing, and what I've talked about in the paper, is that it's perspective taking rather than the broader empathy concept where you're taking on the perspective of another party but then moving back to your own. And so being able to shift among those perspectives is really critical, and I think empathy can be misapplied when it's just a matter of taking on the perspective of the other party and adopting that as your own, then you're not making those distinctions and being able to shift in and out of the lenses that will be important to decision making.

Yorke

One of the limitations can be that, especially when you're dealing with a military environment where decisions are often having to be made very quickly in very intense situations, you cannot be constantly processing various different perspectives. Someone at some point has to make a call, and it may be that they get that call wrong. But that is why this emphasis on strategic empathy becomes so important because, in theory, you should have all your information—as much information as possible at the outset—when you're designing the approach, when you're thinking about the strategic calculations involved, so that then when you get to the very intense critical moments, you feel equipped and able to then process what you have to do with as much information and insight as possible.

Abbe

Empathy definitely is demanding on your cognitive resources, and you can't always apply it when you're in a time limited or very stressful environment. When those conditions are in place, you really fall back to defaulting to your own perspective. And so there may not be time, unless you've taken those perspectives into account in an earlier planning phase, so that when conditions change, you're ready to apply those perspectives. So, it can be limiting in that you don't always have time to engage in that cognitively demanding process when you need to.

Yorke

And this is a great point, as well, because it emphasizes that one of the limitations of empathy is exactly that it can cause burn out. Having more conversations among practitioners, among policymakers, among military officials, and people involved in the military means that you develop a greater emotional literacy around what it means, what it costs, what it requires. So, then you are more aware of when you reach that overload, when maybe the people who are serving can't keep on trying to understand other perspectives or what are the signs when maybe you've reached that burnout point. And so, being aware of that, that that can be too much. And creating greater literacy is one of the key elements we have to be working on and increasing within strategic thinking.

Host

What is the state of scholarship on strategic empathy now?

Abbe

I think that scholarship on empathy has really waxed and waned and gone through cycles. Ralph White wrote about realistic empathy decades ago, now. This is essentially a very similar concept of strategic empathy, but then it lost traction in the 90s and disappeared for a while. In the US militar, there was some discussion about empathy and perspective taking early in the Iraq and Afghanistan engagements, but there was a loss of interest, I think, as we've moved to large-scale combat operations and focusing on that. So, I think that it’s revived again, potentially, at least, in the history community from H. R. McMaster and Zachary Shore’s work, but we'll see.

It seems like it gets attention for some period and then drops off again and so has not been making huge advances. Although, if you look within specific disciplines, like in psychology, I think there has been some incremental progress in understanding at least how to measure empathy and perspective taking and when in the life-cycle development you start to see those skills emerge. So, there has been progress there.

Yorke

I share your view. It definitely goes through cycles. And Ralph K. White was one of the earliest people to be talking about this in this space, in the context of conflicts such as Vietnam, and also Iraq. I find it really interesting to see how it's being talked about, especially in the context of things like strategic communications. How is empathy apart of engaging with diverse actors and different audiences within a very complex, constantly moving communications environment?

So, we do see some there, as Allison said. In psychology, it's really gaining traction, but often people don't like to use the word empathy because of the connotations that it has as being maybe something a little bit soft, of being all about feelings and compassion, and being a sign of weakness to even countenance another perspective and another point of view. And that's actually exactly what you've got to do, whether you're in the military, whether you're designing foreign policy or domestic policy, and it can be quite an academic intellectual exercise. You are not maybe caring for all the people you're trying to understand in the same way. Some people may be actively hostile to you and you to them, but that is a process we have to get better at talking about. And I think that's in the scholarship I'm seeing and how people use different words, which have a very similar connotation. Often, we can find it hiding, but not using the same, maybe, reference points and definitions.

Abbe

That's a question I have for you, Claire. Do you think it's important that we use the term empathy? Because I did find in some of my own experiences, at the 2008 time frame, that the term perspective taking or frame switching tended to be more well received than talking about getting soldiers and officers to learn empathy so that they could be more cross culturally competent. What do you think?

Yorke

I am of two minds, partly because what we need is more that people practice and are conscious of the importance of this thing that we're calling empathy. Whether you call it perspective taking or understanding an adversary, it's critical that that is something we start to be better at and do more of. I personally have a preference for using the term empathy precisely because I want to try and challenge this dichotomy we have between emotions and reason and the idea that, somehow, reason is the right way to do things, and emotions are irrational and should be dismissed from our calculation.

There's so much fascinating research in neuroscience and psychology and other disciplines that show us that reason and motion are intricately interlinked, and they're entwined in how we make judgments. We can't make judgments without understanding how different people feel about situations, how emotions move people, how emotions give meaning to what we value—to what we are willing to risk—by using empathy.

For me, it's a way of saying let's get better about talking about feelings, not as something soft and irrational but as sources of judgment and insight. And that, then, can help us have a far broader picture from which to make decision making that is reasoned but informed by judicious understanding of emotion, emotion intelligence, effectively.

Host

What is still missing when it comes to strategic empathy?

Abbe

One thing that's missing, as we referenced in talking about the scholarship on strategic empathy, is a consistent focus on including empathy in professional development and understanding it as another skill set where we talk about critical thinking, systems thinking—empathy should be part of that. And I think we have some attention to it now, again, but (we should) be concerned of it dropping off again and disappearing from conversations in professional military education in particular. I think our understanding of how it improves decision making and planning could be better defined. I don't think there's been as much progress there in really showing what difference it makes in planning and decision making to include empathy and understanding other perspectives as compared with when decision makers omit those perspectives.

Yorke

As a non-American, I find a lot of the scholarship is quite American focused, as a lot of work by people like Zachary Shore and H. R. McMaster has already been mentioned. And I think there's a huge range of work to be explored that says, what does strategic empathy mean from very different perspectives? Do Europeans do it in the same way? Do the Chinese do strategic empathy in the same way? What about in South Africa or Australia or Nigeria? How do these different countries maybe conceptualize empathy differently? What does that give us as an insight into strategic thinking, into how different people approach adversaries and allies alike, especially when we look at the threat and risk landscape right now and we're dealing with a range of different challenges in the future. Not only conventional military conflict, but also technology. There's going to be challenges with resilience and climate change, among other things.

How can we extend our strategic empathy to audiences and people who maybe have not traditionally been included? So, when we talk about climate change, how do we use strategic empathy as a beneficial way to do more effective diplomacy that brings in Pacific Island nations, small island states? How do we use it as a way to have a greater, more constructive dialogue that takes accounts of different people's needs and interests and values and priorities? And I think that's something that we really need to do.

Abbe

The recent literature on strategic empathy has really focused on understanding the adversary and, to Claire's point, there needs to be more focus on understanding a broader range of perspectives and actors and, in particular, for the US, and our allies and partners. It's understanding the perspectives within the Allied nations and partner nations to better improve interoperability. We talk about technical, procedural, and human interoperability, and I think empathy can really add to understanding human interoperability at different levels; cultural, interpersonal empathy could be really strong component of that.

Host

Allison. Claire. Thanks for making time to speak with me today. I really enjoyed it.

Abbe

Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you, Claire.

Yorke

Thank you. It's a real pleasure to join you both.

Host

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Additional Resources:

NSS Week noontime lecture: Dr. Allison Abbe discusses Strategic Empathy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HFCYDTO4F4)

Articles by Claire Yorke on empathy and strategy: Is Empathy a Strategic Imperative? A Review Essay (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.108001402390.2022.2152800) and The Significance and Limitations of Empathy in Strategic Communications. (https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/the-significance-and-limitations-of-empathy-in-strategic-communications/191/