As someone who is currently struggling through the writing of her first novel, I have grown increasingly appreciative of the difficulties involved in understanding other people’s points of view.

Despite the many pleasures of writing fiction, the attempt to imaginatively transport myself outside myself and see the world, even momentarily, through the eyes of someone else has been unexpectedly painful. Painful not only because it requires the perception and acknowledgement of genuine difference, but also because it results in glimpses of how I might appear, from perspectives other than my own. Glimpses that are not always flattering.

For policy makers, and other professionals in the industry, listening to what ill or injured workers have to say about return to work and the system in Australia can be similarly uncomfortable. Most people enter this industry and go to work each day with good intentions. Unfortunately, the people on the receiving end of these good intentions don’t always recognise or appreciate them. In fact, they sometimes describe the system as alienating, traumatising, damaging and confusing. And this isn’t easy to hear when you – and your good intentions – are responsible for creating the process.

In spite of this discomfort, listening to what claimants have to say about the system is vital if we are to improve it. This is not simply because workers give useful, practical input. It is because our systems are missing two qualities, which we at RTWMatters believe would significantly improve outcomes: “love” and “imagination”.

To those running the system, the dissatisfaction of its “victims” seems incomprehensible, unreasonable, uninformed, unanswerable, irrelevant. It is not. Nor are the complaints an absolute truth. They are simply another perspective; albeit a unique and important one, that may be painful for us, as “authors” of the system, to acknowledge.

 “Love,” said the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “is the difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”. For Murdoch, love is difficult because it forces us to confront other people’s difference from us (she calls it “the otherness of others”) head on. It requires radical, imaginative empathy, an empathy that goes beyond, “I feel for you because I’ve felt that way too,” to “I find it difficult to imagine feeling or thinking or reacting that way, but I acknowledge that you can and do.”

This is precisely the kind of love and imagination that true dialogue requires.

At RTWMatters we have decided, over the coming weeks, to try and bring our readers more of the perspective of the injured or ill worker. We will be writing about how the system fails to communicate clearly and humanely with those it is set up to help, about how it fails to foster a sense of ownership and empowerment and how instead it lets blame and suspicion fester.

This is something we have wanted to do for some time but could not find a voice for that perspective. We now have the opportunity to listen to – and hopefully amplify – that voice; to convey the workers viewpoint.

This week we, with the assistance of Rosemary McKenzie-Ferguson from South Australia, address the issue of communication from the worker’s perspective. You can read that article here.

Hopefully, a focus on workers’ perspectives will open up a world of possibilities for improved outcomes. We’re looking forward, over the coming weeks, to unleashing our imaginations, learning to love the “otherness of others”, and listening up.