DID YOU KNOW that my New Year's Pledge is to increase accountability at every level?

As I wrote in my 2013 New Year’s pledge post (http://patch.com/california/redwoodcity-woodside/did-you-know-that-my-new-years-pledge-is-to-become-more-ethical) this year, I took the impressively titled “Practical Ethics and Unethical Decision making in Organizations” online course.

The introduction to the course description explains:

“ Whenever we hear about ethical scandals, we tend to believe that unethical or illegal behavior in organizations is driven by character deficiencies of individual actors. Put differently, we simply assume that bad things are done by bad people (so-called bad apples). However, numerous corporate scandals, such as Enron, Ford, or Siemens, have demonstrated that even people with a high level of integrity can break the rules if they are put into a corrupt context. Good apples may become rotten in bad barrels. Regardless of their good intentions and strong values, individual actors might adapt to the unethical practices in their respective organizational context and, over time, lose the ability to see their wrongdoings. They become ethically blind.”

( https://www.coursera.org/course/unethicaldecision )

What I learned in the course is that there are ways to induce ethical thinking and actions and there are ways to increase unethical thinking and actions. One way to do this is to create frames. For example in the Ford Pinto and Challenger explosion fiasco unethical decisions were made because personnel were instructed to think only in terms of their particular jobs. You are a technical manager you must think of any decisions you make in terms of being a technical manager and not look outside that frame to a larger and more humane frame. In different words that is the power of context.

Another way to create an environment where unethical decisions will be made is to create time pressure. Creating time pressure effectively narrows your frame as you simply do not have the time to investigate other frames. Time pressure effectively forces someone to evaluate a situation from a limited perspective instead of considering a larger spectrum of options.

Finally the course delved into the institutional context in which organizations are embedded. Rigid, dogmatic and ideological institutions are often ethically challenged. The reality is that a lot of people just copy what others are doing regardless of whether or not it is correct. We are social animals and we want to be accepted by the group so when the group starts to go astray instead of standing up to the group and trying to right its direction we often follow along and simply conform. Institutions usually use ideologies to elicit certain behaviors. Ideologies are practical simplifications that we often use to make decisions that are thought of as objective, incontestable, natural and without alternatives but in fact are not. As Vaclav Havel noted the power of ideologies lies in their thoughtless acceptance.

The course did however end on a positive note by giving students some guidelines that can help reduce the probability of ethical blindness:

1. Being frame vigilant

2. Imagining a broader set of options

3. Applying a broader time frame

4. Making sure that we are accountable

Whether you are an individual, a corporation or an institution such as government join me in making these four guidelines part of your New Year’s resolution.