Balancing ethics and enterprise

A bulldozer driver unexpectedly unearths a human bone, and then a skull, as he’s clearing a path for a proposed new road being built by a state government.

He notifies his project manager, who advises the project supervisor in the department: they then fence the area off, aware that the bones may represent a crime scene, or even an important archeological find.

However, they are stunned when the supervisor, under pressure from the transport minister to get the road finished, not only fails to appreciate their quick thinking, but insists on sidestepping procedure and pressing on with work on the site.

The scenario is fictional, but illustrates all too well the sorts of ethical dilemmas that can rear their heads when codes of conduct fail to reflect the real world of business, says Howard Whitton, principal of the Ethicos Group.

Whitton uses custom-designed video case scenarios, including Make no Bones, in training programs to develop reliable ethical competence among public officials.

“It demonstrates how a project manager must choose between getting the job done and balancing other legitimate interests,” Whitton says.

Getting the balance right is not always easy, as the many scandals, inquiries and cases of corrupt and abusive conduct by elected and appointed officials (including those at the most senior levels of government) over the past few decades attest. It’s a pattern that seems unremitting.

“Scandals now leak to and stay on the web, in public, potentially forever,” Whitton says.

“So if an organisation’s staff are not ethically competent to recognise and deal with a problem appropriately, the CEO and minister responsible for the organisation are at risk in a new and permanent way.”

Whitton suggests that continuing shoddy performance could in part be due to the fact that we’re still attacking the problem in the wrong way, with our relentless focus on ethical codes and statements of core values, without effective implementation.

“I’ve led workshops of senior public servants, lawyers and other professionals, who can usually quote verbatim the legal definition of conflict of interest or corruption, but cannot solve a realistic ethics problem in a case study,” he says.

So he developed a new approach to integrity, professional ethics and anti-corruption training programs, known as MINDDS (multi-issue, non-didactic, diagnostic scenario).

This uses video case scenarios of realistic ethical dilemmas.

“In document-based training, describing the problematic situation usually serves to identify the issue or issues — and likely solutions — to trainees,” Whitton explains.

“But this difficulty is wholly avoidable with the use of a realistic video scenario-based case study coupled with a constructivist problem-based learning approach by the facilitator.”

Whitton says there are up to 20 different ethical issues in each of his video stories, some of which are related to professional or personal interactions between the characters.

But others raise more complex concerns, such as how to say “no, minister” when necessary, and how to make a defensible choice between competing ideas about what action is required by the public interest, rather than simple choices between right and wrong conduct. Participants are urged to share how many problematic issues they have identified in a given story, from professionalism to corruption to misconduct.

But it’s rare for even senior officials to pick up more than five of the relevant issues that have been depicted.

“The best response I ever saw was 11 from 20, and that participant was a lawyer and HR director, who had worked in an anti-corruption agency,” Whitton says.

“More interesting still is that when participants compare notes, you soon see that everyone has picked a different five issues.

“And it quickly becomes apparent that they use different terminology for talking about the problem, so that 75 per cent of the time we spend on a given problem is trying to agree on what exactly the problem is.

Participants find this both realistic and challenging.”

Consequently codes of conduct tend to be a waste of paper and time, Whitton argues, unless the people to whom they apply are trained to recognise the symptoms of typical ethics problems.

“If we don’t teach professional ethics to our public officials, it is unlikely that they will understand their code of conduct; but if we do, it is unlikely that they will need one.”

He notes that citizens have a right to expect ethical conduct from their public officials.

“Public office is inherently a trust-based profession concerned with the ethical exercise of delegated state power, not etiquette, by civil servants who are mostly not accountable in any meaningful way for the exercise of that power,” he says.

Whitton adds it is still possible to get to very high levels of the professional public service while having no relevant training in professional ethics, unlike most other established professions.

“This is an unnecessarily risky situation,” he says.