Courage, Humility, Curiosity, Compassion
By Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD
Healthcare has become remarkably sophisticated at solving technical problems, but remarkably poor at solving human ones. We have more data, more technology, more expertise, and more management tools than ever before. Yet many of our hardest problems remain stubbornly unsolved—not because we lack answers, but because too often we cannot work together long enough to find them.
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In his book Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt, Utah Governor Spencer Cox identifies an important reason why. Our greatest threat is not disagreement. Disagreement can be productive; it exposes assumptions, sharpens ideas, and allows us to learn. The greater threat is contempt.
Disagreement says, “I think you are wrong.” Contempt says, “There is something wrong with you.” That distinction changes everything. When I disagree with you, I can still be interested in what you know. I can test your assumptions against mine, listen to your experience, and perhaps discover something neither of us could see alone.
But when I hold you in contempt, I no longer see your perspective as information. I see you as the obstacle. I stop seeing the problem because I have decided the person is the problem.
This dynamic is evident throughout healthcare. Physicians blame administrators. Administrators blame physicians. Clinicians blame IT; IT blames clinicians. Management says the front line resists change; the front line says management does not understand the work. People label one another resistant, bureaucratic, arrogant, incompetent, obstructionist, or out of touch. The moment the label becomes the explanation, curiosity ends. And when curiosity ends, learning usually ends with it.
Contempt destroys the cooperation that complexity requires. Once IT believes clinicians are unreasonable, clinicians believe administrators care only about money, the front line believes executives do not understand the work, or executives believe employees simply resist change, each group begins collecting evidence for its story about the other. People stop asking questions because they believe they already know the answers. They can spend months fighting one another while the patients’ problems remain untouched.
Healthcare cannot afford that. Neither can our patients.
This is why the approach my colleagues and I follow, Living and Leading with Love, is more than a moral philosophy. It is an operating model for solving complex problems—and, even more fundamentally, for resolving the conflicts that prevent us from ever reaching the problem.
Living and Leading with Love begins with a simple but demanding belief: Every person is worthy and capable. Worthy means your dignity does not depend on whether I agree with you. Capable means I assume you possess knowledge, experience, and potential that matter. Neither belief excuses poor performance nor eliminates accountability. They create conditions in which honest accountability becomes possible.
But beliefs matter only when they become actions, especially when conflict makes those actions difficult. We have come to think of four of them as the Four Commitments: courage, humility, curiosity, and compassion. Together, they offer an off-ramp from contempt and a path back to solving problems.
Courage comes first because conflict is uncomfortable. Peacemaking is sometimes mistaken for avoiding difficult conversations. It is the opposite. Courage means walking toward disagreement, naming what is not working, surfacing what everyone else is avoiding, and being willing to hear something we would rather not hear. Love without courage risks becoming accommodation. Real love is willing to tell the truth.
Humility is next, because without it, courage becomes aggression. Humility says: I may be right, but I may not see the whole picture. My title, expertise, experience, or authority does not give me a monopoly on truth. In complex systems, the person closest to the work often sees something the person with the most authority cannot. Humility creates enough space in our certainty for someone else’s reality to enter.
Curiosity turns disagreement into discovery. Instead of asking, “How can they possibly believe that?” we ask, “What are they seeing that I am not?” Instead of assuming resistance, we investigate it. Instead of assigning motives, we seek the experiences, incentives, fears, and facts underneath someone’s position. Curiosity changes the purpose of the conversation from proving who is right to discovering what is true.
Compassion reminds us of who is sitting at the table. Before someone is an executive, physician, nurse, administrator, technologist, ally, or opponent, they are a human being. They carry fears we may never hear, wounds we cannot see, hopes and dreams we do not imagine, families they love, and burdens we know nothing about. Compassion does not lower standards. It allows us to hold people accountable without taking away their dignity.
Together, the Four Commitments create a practical sequence for productive conflict: Courage gets the conflict into the room. Humility loosens our certainty. Curiosity reveals what is really happening. Compassion keeps us together long enough to solve it.
Imagine beginning our hardest meetings with the Four Commitments. We would have the courage to name reality. We would have the humility to examine how we may have contributed to it. We would have the curiosity to discover what others see that we do not. And we would have the compassion to protect one another’s dignity while holding ourselves accountable for results.
The problem does not magically disappear. Something more important happens first: The problem becomes visible again.
That matters enormously in healthcare because our hardest problems cross boundaries. Improving patient safety requires clinicians, operations, technology, finance, and leadership. Transforming productivity requires management and the front line. Deploying AI requires technologists and people who understand the work. No group possesses enough knowledge to solve these problems alone.
We face enormous challenges: affordability, workforce shortages, patient harm, unequal access, an aging population, and technologies advancing faster than many organizations can absorb them. These problems are too complex for any profession, department, political ideology, or individual leader to solve alone. We need one another—especially the people with whom we disagree.
The Four Commitments do not ask us to abandon conviction. They teach us to hold conviction without contempt. They do not weaken accountability. They strengthen it by allowing people to confront difficult truths without first having to defend their humanity.
Perhaps that is one of the defining leadership challenges of our time. We face problems that demand more cooperation precisely when contempt is making cooperation harder. The answer is not to care less about what we believe. It is to become more disciplined about how we treat people who believe in something different.
Because the moment we make another person the problem, we lose sight of the problem we came together to solve.
Our first act of problem-solving may therefore be our most human: to see the person not as the problem but as part of the possibility.
SOURCES
Spencer Cox’s book: Spencer Cox, Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt, foreword by Jonathan Haidt (New York: Penguin Press, September 8, 2026), 304 pp., ISBN 979-8-217-06362-8. Also see Sacha Pfeiffer, “In divided times, Gov. Cox prescribes passionate disagreement, minus contempt,” NPR, September 10, 2026.
When curiosity ends, learning usually ends with it: Arieh Riskin et al., “The Impact of Rudeness on Medical Team Performance: A Randomized Trial,” Pediatrics 136, no. 3 (2015): 487–95.
The Illuminators is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.