The CompassionLab is a group of organizational researchers who strive to create a new vision of organizations as sites for the development and expression of compassion. Our focus is on the expression of compassion in work and in the workplace, including emphasis on roles, routines, practices, relationships, teams, and structures that impact the experience of compassion in organizations. 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.

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.