First thing first. Happy new year everyone. I hope you had a
restful Christmas break and a lively and fulfilling new year. Everyone I work
with seemed to have worked harder than ever over the Christmas break and I have
been no exception. I am now project managing a large and ambitious public
sector collaboration for The Open University. There will be plenty of material
here for future posts but for now I apologise if postings are more fractured
than late last year.
I have been thinking a lot about ethics in leadership over
the past months. This thinking has taken me through most of the classic texts –
Aristotle, Machiavelli, Kant, Locke, Bentham etc. I will have a little more to
say on Kant especially in the months to come. What I have quickly realised is
that there is no sense adopting one theoretical framework as some kind of
definitive guide. They are all ultimately different ways of thinking about
problems, a means of sensemaking.
Perhaps the most fundamental question to ask when thinking
about ethics in leadership development is whether we need to include such
discussions in our development activity at all. Yet perhaps leadership itself
becomes meaningless if stripped of its purpose. If we strip reflection on
purpose out of leadership all we are left with is a series of cold, detached
processes. And doing good with leadership is surely as important as doing
efficiency.
But what is doing good? And perhaps if this discussion is as
straightforward as distinguishing between good and bad, then there isn’t such a
big problem after all. Of course now we immediately enter into the terrain of
subjectivity – one person’s good is another’s bad etc – but I won’t bore you
with repetitive debates on moral relativism here.
Instead what I am going to do is report a conversation I had
recently with Keith Grint and have been following up with numerous chats with The OU's very own ethics sage, Anja Schaefer. Then I am going to talk to you about how a recent
film I saw – Zero Dark Thirty – seems to amplify some of the main points I drew
from this conversation.
Keith Grint put it to me that a hallmark of an ethical
decision was not distinguishing between right and wrong at all. That is not an
ethical dilemma because we can already distinguish to a large degree what is
right and what is wrong. This choice is one between courage and cowardice. We know
what the right course of action is but we fear too much for our own welfare.
An ethical dilemma is choosing between wrong and wrong. In
other words, each decision seems just as wrong – but in a different way. One of
the examples Keith cites in his lectures and development work is that of the
Jewish administrators of the Polish ghettos during WWII, placed in a position
about whether to sacrifice some of their number (the elderly, sick, children)
in order to save the majority. Of course with hindsight it is easy to look back
on such situations as not really ethical dilemmas at all – Nazism was one devil
one really could make no pact with at all etc. But we say that now, with all
the information at our fingertips and the horrors seared into our collective
psyche. At the time things would have appeared quite differently.
The first lesson then – if we’re talking about leadership of
ethics – things are never straightforward. So let’s turn to Zero Dark Thirty. For
those of you who might not be aware of the film, I won’t give away the plot –
you know a lot of it already, or at least the ending. It is the back-room story
of those in the CIA tracking Osama Bin Laden. It really is a wonderful
character portrayal of the kinds of obsessive, intelligent, detail-hungry
people who populate intelligence services. But that’s not the film’s genius.
That genius lies in its vivid portrayal of ethical
ambiguity. In fact its hallmark is that it steadfastly refuses to take sides.
Perhaps that is why it seems to have upset people of all political persuasions.
The film begins with visceral clips of people trapped inside the World Trade
Center, some aware of their imminent deaths. We hear these voices in darkness. So
immediately any idea that this is going to be a film taking ideological
pot-shots at Bush et al is cast aside. We are then introduced to a torture
scene – CIA on terror suspect. And so similar scenes are enacted for the
majority of the film – at least until the point at which Obama takes over. For
information I debated about whether to put ‘torture’ in inverted commas because
as we know there is a lot of disagreement around the definition and specifics
of torture. The fact I ultimately chose not to do the academic ‘xxx’-thing I
think conveys my opinion on this debate.
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| Ethical dilemmas in the Zero Dark |
Kathryn Bigelow, the director, neither exercises her
narrative power to express these actions as right or wrong. The scenes are
violent but perhaps less violent than the original terrorist act or the
subsequent suicide bombings. We are granted some views of the chaos of
Afghanistan many have argued was perpetuated by the Bush administration. But
the ambiguity and difficulty of making leadership decisions in such situations
is also brought to the fore. The Obama administration is portrayed as cautious
but hardly naive. If something had to be done then what and how? There are no
easy answers. Just ethical dilemmas – wrong and more wrong, the problem being
that we don’t really know what the ‘more wrong’ is until later. And often not
even in hindsight to these matters become much clearer.
So now we get to the meat of the problem for developing
leadership. Leadership development comes into the equation because it is one
way in which participants can hone their sensemaking. It is one way in which
they can develop – with their teams – a means of holding each other to account,
of questioning held moral assumptions, blind spots etc.
I know that can sound a little vague and postmodern. And for
the record I accept bits of the postmodern ethics argument while others are a
little relativist for my liking. Here is just one of those shortcomings. To
some extent developing an ethical sensemaking framework could lead, perversely,
to a false sense of security, that the veracity of following a process of
sensemaking defends us against ethical wrongdoing.
There is a role for some generalist ethical framework in all
of this, and I’ll have more to say on this in the future. But the bulk of the
ethical task is surely to help participants find their way – together,
collaboratively – in those times of Zero Hour Darkness.
In the meantime, I would love to hear what you think of all of this. Post a comment, get in touch.
- Owain
