[MUSIC] Welcome to the first video of week seven. Over the last weeks we analyzed the forces that drive ethical blindness. We learned that contexts can be stronger than people, stronger than values. We learn that we can do the wrong things despite the values we have and despite the good intentions that, that might drive us. Today, we will learn about possible defense strategies. We will learn how we can defend ourselves against ethical blindness. Let us start by looking at the main goal of this video first. As I said, contexts can be stronger than people. They can push us in the wrong directions. But we are not robots. We can defend ourselves against ethical blindness. So in this session, you will learn about individual defense strategies, and you will be familiarized with basically four defense lines that you have at your disposition to fight against ethical blindness. This course basically assumes that the things we do depend to a certain degree on the context in which we operate. Strong context can switch off reason. They can impose particular routines of perceiving the world on us. And over time, we might perceive the world through an ever more narrow frame, so we see less and less of what we should see. Decisions thus are often made on autopilot. They are mindless. They are unconscious. They are action without thinking. And as a result, we might run into ethical blindness. We might lose the ability to see the ethical dimension of a decision that we are making. So, because of that, we are highly vulnerable to make unethical decisions. Solutions or defense strategies against ethical blindness have to be analyzed on all the levels that we have seen, the individual, the organization, society. In this video here, we will focus on what we can do as individuals. As individuals, we have a kind of difficult situation. We are not just victims of context. We create context. As leaders, for instance, we are one of the main drivers of narrow context for others. We push others into strong context as leaders. So, the difference between being a victim and being a perpetrator is often very fuzzy. You remember the fairy tale that we discussed at the very beginning of this course, where we saw that the emperor creates the atmosphere of fear, but then he becomes the victim of that very same fear himself. Leaders that trigger a culture of aggressiveness in their teams, in their organizations, often will, at a certain point, struggle to keep that aggressiveness that they created under control. It's a bit like the scientist Frankenstein, who creates a monster in Mary Shelley's novel and then loses control over that monster. This difference between being a victim and being a perpetrator is even less clear when we look at group pressure. Who makes the pressure? Who is the victim? This can often be the very same persons. Let me tell you a story to illustrate the power of strong frames on our own perception of the world and our own behavior. Recently, my two boys, I have two boys of nine and 13 years, and they were shouting like crazy. And I couldn't really stand it anymore, so I was shouting at them to stop shouting. And then I remembered my own work on, on blindness and it dawned on me that something is wrong with the way I reacted in the situation. I was embarrassed by my own stupid reaction. But the good thing here is I, as someone who works on ethical blindness since quite awhile already, I'm not protected completely against it. I fall into this trap as well. But being sensitized for it, I have now the option to escape from it, to, perceive my own blindness and to develop strategies of getting out of that trap. I could change my frame when I was reacting to my two boys. So, if rigid framing is the problem, flexible framing must be part of the solution. What is flexible framing? Flexible framing is the ability to apply a holistic, a broader view, to a decision at stake. As we've seen, the problem is narrow frames. We see less and less of the world. So, making our frames broader, opening up the horizon of what we can see, is very important to find a solution or a defense strategy against ethical blindness. Flexible framing basically requires the combination of, of various abilities. The first thing is being mindful. What does it mean to be mindful? Mindfulness means, in our case here, to step out of a routine and to decide consciously. Our course gave you some tools to know about the forces that create strong context, so we might understand better in the future how these contexts might emerge, how these constellations slowly build up around us. Constellations are factors like leadership, like group pressure, like time pressure, like aggressive language, can form a whole that then pushes us towards behavior that we might not want to have. So you can see it coming in principle. But we should always be aware of the fact that knowledge alone doesn't protect us. As I could, as you could see in the story with my two boys. But you can also see this if you look at the experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo and others. The Milgram experiment recently was repeated on French TV. We, as scientists, we can no longer do this. This is forbidden for good reasons because it exposes participants to risks, but television can. So there was a reality show where exactly the same setting of the Milgram experiment with the, with the electric shocks was repeated and obedience went up to roughly 80%. One of the participants later explained that she knew about Milgram, the Milgram experiment. But while she was in this TV show, she forgot about it. She was sucked into the context. The context was stronger than her despite the knowledge she had about exactly that kind of context. So what can we do? We should always consciously observe our own decision-making situations. We should check on a regular and systematic base things like the shifts that we have around us in our culture, for instance. Is it going in a dangerous situation? Do we have elements of the the, the ethical blindness drivers that we have seen in our course such as aggressive leadership style, such as into highly individualized bonus systems, such as humiliating performance measurement systems? Do we have combinations of those that push us to a certain behavior? Do we see the emergence of in-group/out-group perceptions of people around us? Do we have leaders with master-of-the-universe attitude? Do we approach the world and our team with over simply, oversimplified interpretations? Furthermore, what, what, what we realized when we discussed about the temporal dynamics of ethical blindness is that the very important thing is how it starts. Remember that the first step is the decisive one. Mind the beginning. We have seen that we do not start to behave in a blind way from one day to the other. It slowly develops over time. It comes in small steps. And since we only compare the last two, three steps when we move forward, we might forget about the beginning when we were still full of integrity. So, the very important thing is that we should not make compromises on what we believe is the right thing to do from the very beginning even if it is about very small compromises. We move on a slippery slope if you do this. One sharp weapon against ethical blindness therefore is to stick to the rules even if we have the impression that the transgression is harmless. We systematically overestimate our power to stop what we have started. So, narrows frames develop slowly over time. They creep into our unconsciousness. We have to be frame-vigilant. We have to understand what kind of perspective our frame imposes on us. What can we not see when we apply a particular frame? For instance, if you're a manager and you make a decision on outsourcing, outsourcing a production activity somewhere in another country, what you normally do is you make an economic analysis of that outsourcing decision. So you frame it as a purely economic decision. But if you frame it as a purely economic decision, you might not see the risk of human right violations to, to which you might get connected through this decision later on. The second defense line that we have at our disposition is the ability to imagine a broader set of options when we make decisions. Coming back to this outsourcing decision, what we might want to do is to frame it also systematically through a moral lens. We might look at other corporations who made similar decisions in the past already. How did they do it? We might dialog with non-governmental organizations who are specialized in these kind of challenges. We might join a multi-stakeholder initiative, which is an initiative of NGOs, corporations, unions, sometimes governments that deal with the problems that might occur, for instance, when you outsource into countries where human rights are not protected as in your own context. We might apply a broader time horizon to our analysis, which already changes the frame considerably. So, what we should keep in mind is then we, if we frame a decision as a purely economic decision, as a purely engineering decision, as a purely legal decision, we run into the trap of ethical blindness. We need a broader lens. We have to look at it from a cultural perspective, a political one, as broad as we can see a decision, and then we might make a more mindful decision in the end. Being frame-vigilant means we are able to break the frame that drives our routines. We have to create a culture around us that makes this possible. We have to invite for dissent even if dissent is not always easy to bear. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, called this ability, the ability to have moral imagination, to imagine as broadly as possible what we are going to decide. The two colleagues, Rosso and, and Schumacher, they cite one of the most famous CEOs, in the history of, of, of American business. Alfred P. Sloan Junior, who was at one point the CEO of General Motors and who, whom they cite as follows. Gentleman, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about. So in other words, he tries to break two elements that create a narrow frame in his particular team, group conformity and time pressure. He gives them the time and he invites him to dissent from the consensus to find other ideas around the question at stake. So up to here, we have seen two of the four defense lines against ethical blindness and then I will be happy to continue our discussion with the next two lines of defense. [MUSIC]
