Apology is Theater
The curtain rises and the lights come up. Effective apology demands good lighting. The time is the present. Off-stage, at a point in time before the play started, something happened. The details of what occurred—who did what precisely and who said what exactly—may be in dispute, but on one point everyone is agreed: the generally agreeable conditions that prevailed before are now, as the play begins, ruptured.
And whatever happened is a big deal. Even from the best seats, it’s always bigger than it looks. It’s clear that something fundamental is at stake. Someone must act if conditions are to be restored. That someone is the offender. Apology is that action. The drama, from the Greek dran— “to do” or “to strive”— begins.
The cast of characters may be as huge as the company of Les Miserables, or as few as two. Two is the minimum. There are no one-person plays in the drama of apology. Of the two principal roles—The Offender and The Offended—it is not clear in the beginning which is the leading role. The answer to that question, ultimately, is what the play determines.
It is easy to mistake apology as a private gesture that flows from one person to another. In fact, apology is a very public process, more akin to theater in its ability to reveal the truth of the human condition and what we are to each other. Apology operates as a performance with actors and spectators all weighing in on the moral claims of those demanding, offering, and accepting apologies. Few of us are comfortable with either end of the transaction. We must be able to distinguish between what apology is, and, just as important, what apology is not. To the extent we don’t know the difference, we issue apologies that are botched and end up with a meaningless and sorry ritual.
Drama requires conflict, and so, too, does, apology. But conflict is just the starting point, and with apology the starting point is often the least interesting part of the drama. Many of us have participated in apologies that referred to events lost in the haze of memory. The real power of theater is not the conflict, but its resolution. It is in the artful resolution of conflict that we reveal the true power of theater: explaining what happens when one or more people, isolated in time and place, collide with each other and then, as damaged goods, present themselves to each other and other people who may be watching.
Someone is Watching
And someone is always watching—that’s another common denominator between theater and apology. Apology is a narrative under construction. It occurs in a community of participants and spectators. How well the narrative binds the fates of the characters is the plot. Apology, like theater, provides a window into the human condition. It exists in a moral universe. In the theatre we see people in action—what they do and why they do it—and we advance our understanding of our world by seeing the situation through others’ eyes. And we, the spectators, are pitiless. We greet with contempt a character who offers an insipid apology, when what the plot requires is nothing less than a full-throated apology.
In apology, dramatic conflict and resolution have as their ends a common theme: the creation, destruction, and recreation of human relationships. Human connection is what really is at stake in apology. Sometimes we get distracted by issue of principal or money (and these are not unimportant), but make no mistake about it, the main prize is always the restoration of human relationships.
Obstacles are Real
The obstacles to apology are real. The principal obstacle to apology is our human need to be right. In classical theater, this overweening need to be right is called pride, vanity, or hubris. Pride is considered the gravest character flaw in classical theater. So it is in the theater of apology. The need to be right is the single biggest obstacle to effective apology and when an apology fails, the fault is almost always to be located in the apologizer’s determination to defend his or her interests. Those interests may be expressed in legalistic or financial terms (and as we will see, those interests may be real). But, let’s be honest, the most wrenching part of apology is parting with our need to retain some measure of being right.
There’s some possibility for confusion here, so let me be clear. The obstacle to apology is not being right; one never needs to apologize for being right. The obstacle to apology is the need to be right. We all recognize the unthinking pull of the ego to protect itself. Many leaders believe that they need to appear strong and apologies are an admission of weakness that will threaten their standing. In fact, as we will see, the opposite is true. Followers redouble their allegiance to leaders who apologize. Apology, not defensiveness, as I will show, is actually a sign of transparency, integrity, and strength, the very qualities that the most effective leaders display.
The need to be right dilutes apology. If you submit to your need to be right, when, in fact, your conduct was not right, you will undermine your best attempts at apology. The result will be an apology that attempts to share the blame and obscure the responsibility. In fact, it will be no apology at all, and may well make your position worse off than if you had not apologized at all.
Ask yourself this question. If you decide to apologize and it is not the strongest statement you can make, why not? What part of being right do you still cling to? In leadership terms, only when someone is willing to abandon the need to be right do they become moral agents worthy of the name.
Apology is critical because what’s at stake is the very currency of being human: our standing as moral actors in relationship to each other. Apology is the means by which we repair ruptured relationships, restore harmony, and set up the conditions for forgiveness and new possibilities for the relationship. The alternatives to apology, as we will see, are not attractive. When the impulse to value being right overwhelms valuing the repair of the relationship, entertaining conflict ensues, but authentic apology is impossible. Cultures without a theater of apology resolve conflicts and offenses by endless cycles of revenge.
By definition, private apologies—between two and only two people—never enter the public sphere. The apologies we can consider must therefore be public to some extent, involving family, friends, colleagues, communities, nation states, and history. These constellations of personal and professional relationships raise the stakes of apology, in the same way that a complex of human connections intensifies the most compelling theater. The loss of human connection is the paramount punishment in theater. It’s not by accident that in many plays, the ultimate punishment is not death, but exile or banishment. This is no less true in apology. When apologies fail, human connections are destroyed, brothers and sisters estranged, neighbors alienated, friends divided, business partnerships sundered.
Apology is one of the most complicated and little understood of human dynamics. Effective apology—apology that succeeds in healing strained human connections and recreating relationships with hopeful possibilities—is even less well understood.
Effective apology, unfortunately, is not like a recipe for a meal. Its ingredients and order of combination resist predictable organization. Every apology is as unique as the human relationship it is meant to repair.
There are No Guarantees
But there are no guarantees. And the fact that there are no guarantees is what gives apology its awesome power to transform human relationships for the better. One of the first questions that people bring to the subject of apology is, How can I be sure that the apology is sincere? More to the point, How can I be sure that the offender’s heart is in the right place and that he won’t victimize me again? And the answer is, you can’t. Not really. The heart of another is always a mystery.
That’s from the point of view of the person being offered the apology. But the situation is equally as perilous from the perspective of the person offering the apology. How can I be sure, the apologizer asks, that even my most humble apology, torn at great effort from my very intestines, will be accepted in the sincere spirit in which I offer it? And the answer is, you can’t. Not really. The heart of another is always a mystery.
Apology derives its power from this fundamental uncertainty. There are no guarantees. At both its magnetic poles, apology requires a leap of faith. The victim must swallow hard and take a leap that the apology is acceptable in full knowledge that the apology may be insincere and that the apologizer may re-offend. And the apologizer must take a leap that his sincerity will be accepted in the spirit that the apology is offered. It is this reciprocal exchange of faith that gives apology its mystery and makes it such a force for transformation. That’s why people so relentlessly parse the words of apology for clues to its limits.
With such limitations, how is apology even possible? In theater we have a name for the mystery. “The willing suspension of disbelief” is the term Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined in 1817 to refer to the willingness of one person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they appear to be fantastic or impossible. Is there a better description of apology at the moment when apology is offered or considered? Every apology is a work of fiction. The willing suspension of disbelief is the only thing that makes apology workable.
The premises of apology we can do very little about. But the limitations of effective apology are something else. There a little work can yield big differences.