Compliance Culture

Practical insights for compliance and ethics professionals and commentary on the intersection of compliance and culture.

Kamala Harris and false choices in ethical decision-making

Kamala Harris is the junior United States Senator from California and was previously the Attorney General of California and the District Attorney of San Francisco. Throughout her career as a prosecutor and now legislator, Harris has been well-known for her advocacy of restorative justice initiatives and her progressive engagement with a wide variety of social issues.

In speeches and interviews, Harris frequently rejects simple interpretations of her record and urges people to consider more nuanced views on political and cultural topics rather than seeing various interests or goals as mutually exclusive or conflicting when they actually could be aligned. On this subject, Harris often refers to advice she received from her mother: “Reject false choices.”

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Happy Easter – and a look at the second book of Mere Christianity

Happy Easter from Compliance Culture!

In honor of the holiday, please check out the below extracts from the seminal work of C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, which are especially pertinent to ethics and morality.  For commentary on the first book of Mere Christianity, check out this post.  The below post contains selections from the second book of Mere Christianity.

Book II of Mere Christianity, “What Christians Believe,” explains the points which were persuasive to Lewis as he turned away from atheism and toward Christian devotion.  Lewis reckons with this personal transformation through logic and by seeking to make the abstract and unknowable both concrete and comprehensible where possible while relevant if not fully within the reach of human understanding.

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Happy Good Friday! – and a look at the first book of Mere Christianity

Happy Good Friday from Compliance Culture!

In honor of the holiday, please check out the below extracts from the seminal work of C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, which are especially pertinent to ethics and morality.

Mere Christianity contains insights which are so powerful for people to consider in expressing and understanding their own personal codes of ethics and values (even completely secular ones).  Individual commitments to a well-defined internal moral register form the foundation of any integrity-led organization with an ethical business culture.  This post contains selections from the first book of Mere Christianity. 

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Selected TED/TEDx talks from Sheena Iyengar on choice theory

Check out these talks by Sheena Iyengar on choice theory.  Mostly from TED or TEDx events, plus one INKtalks video, these lectures provide a great overview to Iyengar’s brilliant work on the psychology of choice in a variety of contexts.  Through Iyengar’s theories of choice, the many influences choosing and decision-making can have over individuals’ lives become vibrant and clear.

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Insights from management for compliance officers

This is the fourth and final in a series of four posts on insights for compliance officers from different fields of study.  The first post in this series covered lessons from psychology regarding, for example, self-interest and decision-making, from prominent figures such as Sheena Iyengar and Malcolm Gladwell.  The second post was about insights for compliance officers from self-development and coaching, including from people such as Wayne Dyer and Eckhart Tolle.  Last week’s post discussed behavioral economics, focusing on the work of people such as Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler.  Today’s post will suggest ways in which management theory can be applied to corporate compliance programs.

As a practice, compliance is greatly concerned with topics such as governance, controls, leadership, sustainability, business values, organizational integrity, risk controls, institutional decision-making, tone and conduct at the top, and corporate culture.  It shares these general disciplinary themes with management theory, which takes on the broad task of determining and guiding the strategic direction of an organization and steering its employees and resources in furtherance of these goals.  Given that the contributions of a robust compliance program to the regulatory, practical, and cultural aspects of this task are great, compliance officers stand to gain great insight from studying commentary from the field of management theory.

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Integrity of game play: Referee bias

This is the third in a series of five posts on the topic of integrity of game play.  The first post discussed the impact of various types of player misconduct on sportsmanship and game outcomes.  Last week’s post debated whether tanking can be ethical and looked at numerous examples of tanking across different sports to compare how it happens and what its effect is. Today’s post is about referee bias and how it affects games, players, and teams.  The fourth post, on March 14, will be about organizational cheating operations by teams.  The fifth post and the last in the series, on March 21, will be about unethical leadership of coaches.

Teams and their fans often accuse referees of being biased or making unfair calls. Whenever players or spectators disagree with the call made or penalty assessed – which, for those on the wrong side of the outcome of the decision, is not all that rare – bias is often suspected or assumed.

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Insights from behavioral economics for compliance officers

This is the third in a series of four posts on insights for compliance officers from different fields of study.  The first post in the series was about lessons from psychology regarding motivation and choice, from prominent figures such as Viktor Frankl and Barry Schwartz.  Last week’s post discussed insights from self-development and coaching, including the works of people like Brene Brown and Byron Katie.  Today’s will be about insights from behavioral economics.  The fourth and final post in this series, on March 13, will focus on the application of theories of business management theories to corporate compliance programs.

Behavioral economics is a multi-disciplinary field of academic study which integrates themes from psychology, sociology, and neurology, among others, to analyze and predict economic decisions and markets behavior of individuals.  Given that behavioral economics shares so much theoretical inspiration with other areas and covers such a wide array of human behavior, it is naturally quite insightful for compliance officers.  Like compliance, behavioral economics focuses heavily on factors to decision-making and conduct.  Behavioral economics also takes great interest in risk tolerance and assessment, the management of which is also important for compliance.

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Ethical decision-making and hard choices

Encouraging ethical decision-making is one of the main aspirations of any corporate compliance program.  At both the employee and organizational level, it’s important to support and promote the choices that are most consistent with both explicit rules and implicit values.   Individuals and corporations can demonstrate their principles-based identity through the choices they make.

Genuine commitment to making the most ethical decisions through the complex environment of inadequate information, lack of connection to consequences, competing interests, and limitations of belief systems/choice frameworks – just to name a few of the many risks inherent – is a critical component of a culture of compliance.  Individual persistence to honor internal codes of ethics and moral convictions will scale up to create heuristics and habits across the organization that support responsibility and thoughtfulness rather than a culture of fear and habits reflecting limited vision.

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Principles of ethical decision-making

Simply put, ethical decision-making is about making choices from a basis of integrity.  Decisions are not pure or in a vacuum.  People make choices in an often very complicated landscape of conflicting interests, isolation from consequences, stubborn habits and heuristics, and narrow cognitive frameworks.

Therefore effective ethical decision making has two components: first, the intention and second, the action.  The intention requires an individual determination to do the right thing for the right reason at the right time.  The action, on the other hand, requires commitment at both the individual and the collective/organizational level to maintain and support the intention.  This process happens amid a complicated context of incentives for, and obstacles to, both individual ethics and corporate culture of compliance.

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Selected TED & TEDx talks on ethical dilemmas

An ethical dilemma is a problem in decision-making between two or more possible choices which involve conflicting interests and challenging possible consequences. Often this can be understood as a scenario in which making one decision has an impact on the interests involved in the other decision(s) not made. Choosing to not make a decision is also, in its own right, a choice which implies these consequential dynamics. The below TED/TEDx talks are a sampling of some different dilemmas encountered and the ways that the speakers have thought about and attempted to resolve them.

  • The ethical dilemma of designer babies (Paul Knoepfler) – Biotechnology which was once the stuff of science fiction is now becoming an everyday reality, or at least a possibility that is easy to imagine for the not-so-distant future. For many years now there have been ethical questions about the use of gene editing technology in human embryos. This could allow scientists to mitigate the risk of certain auto-immune or congenital diseases, which would be a marvel of modern medicine. However, it could also make the way for individuals to use the technology to also alter physical appearance and pre-determine many of a person’s traits, perhaps also eventually personality characteristics. What answers does bioethics have for this dilemma? Is it worth the risks, too dangerous to justify the benefits, or somewhere in between – a technology that should be progressively and thoughtfully developed with both those risks and those benefits in careful balance?

 

  • Can we engineer the end of ageing? (Daisy Robinton) – While the prior talk considers the beginning of life, there are also bioethical considerations to scientific advancements made concerning the end of life also. Just as there can be cellular interventions on the biological makeup of embryos, therapeutic mechanisms of stem cell identity may already be useful in increasing longevity and health, such as by reversing the growth of cancerous cells or addressing other developmental diseases. However, what about the possibly to “edit” one’s DNA not for survival or to cure a sickness, but to improve capabilities or change aesthetic qualities? If some physiological differences are editable at the cellular then is it ethical to do so?

 

  • The Social Dilemma of Driverless Cars (Iyad Rahwan) – Self-driving cars have been in the news a lot recently as leading organizations such as Ford, General Motors, Tesla, and even Samsung are making major investments in developing field. In the US, the federal government has indicated that it prefers to let technological innovation take precedence over anticipatory regulation, perhaps taking lessons learned from the initial failure of the electric car industry in the 1990s and early 2000s. The artificial intelligence of self-driving cars is ethically challenging, in consideration that these driverless vehicles will share the road with pedestrians and conventional vehicles. Will they be safer than cars with human drivers, or do they bring up all kinds of new safety and privacy concerns?

 

  • Machiavelli’s Dilemma (Matt Kohut) – More to the point of typical everyday interactions than the abstractions of the limits of medicine and technology, what about character judgments? The classic question remains – do we want to be loved or feared? Liked or respected? Most people of course would say some combination of both, but in first impressions or in difficult leadership situations, sometimes the choice to be one at the expense of the other is unavoidable.

 

  • The paradox of choice (Barry Schwartz) – The thing of all these different dilemmas have in common is, of course, choices that individuals, organizations, and sometimes society as a whole must make. Facing the responsibility of making a choice indicates that there is freedom of choice in the first place. The privilege of decision-making can also be a burden. One must be able to decide in the beginning in order to feel some sense of personal dissatisfaction or insufficiency provoked by the idea that other choices, and other outcomes could have been possible.

 

As the above demonstrates, there are many diverse examples of ethical dilemmas which come from all areas of business and life. This effectively points out how ubiquitous these challenging situations are. From simple, everyday interactions to matters of life and death, ethical dilemmas present challenging, compelling moral questions.

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