This course 'Unethical decision making in organizations : A seminar on the dark side of the force' will teach you how strong organizational contexts push good people towards unethical decisions. You will also learn how to protect yourself and your organization against such forces lurking in the dark. About the Course This course teaches how narrow frames and strong contexts can push good people towards unethical decisions and how they can protect themselves and their organization against ethical blindness. The goal of this course is to empower the participants to analyze the risks of unethical or illegal behavior that might be triggered by powerful contexts. It draws from various disciplines such as management, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and literature, in order to learn what these disciplines contribute to a better understanding of unethical behavior. The course also analyzes some of the most prominent organizational scandals of the recent decades through the lenses of these disciplines. Whenever we hear about ethical scandals, we tend to believe that unethical or illegal behaviour in organizations is driven by character deficiencies of individual actors. Put differently, we simply assume that bad things are done by bad people. However, numerous corporate scandals have demonstrated that even people with a high level of integrity can break the rules if they are put into a strong context. A better understanding of why and under what conditions good people make bad ethical decisions will enable us to better protect individuals as well as their respective organizations against the potentially overwhelming power of the context. It will also enable us to cure societies from problems like corruption. At the end of the course, you are able to: 1. Explain the impact of social context on individual decision making using various theories (from Management, Sociology, Psychology, and Philosophy) 2. Apply these theories to the analysis of some of the most eminent organizational scandals of the recent decades 3. Assess risks of ethical blindness in your own organizational context 4. Design interventions to reduce such risks for yourself and your organization Recommended Background No background expertise is required. The course is open for interested layperson as well as experts who work on related topics, be it as researchers or practitioners (e.g., compliance managers in corporations). Why is this course important for me? Currently, the understanding of why good people make unethical decisions is rather limited, related research is rather fragmented, and the management of such problems in organizations is overly simplistic, legalistic, and inadequate. Understanding contexts, including the dangers of routines, the mindlessness of our daily decisions, and the healing power of mindful decision-making routines is of increasing importance. In this course, you will learn the latest knowledge and the appropriate tool box for dealing with ethical challenges that you will face throughout your life! What do I need to follow this course? We build bridges between various scientific disciplines and will familiarize you with those disciplines smoothly. You need no expertise, just come and share your own real-world experiences about unethical decisions. After all, we are all experts in making decisions—some more ethically, some less ethically—aren’t we?
3.1 - How People Make Sense of Their World
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En provenance du cours de University of Lausanne
Unethical Decision Making in Organizations
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À partir de la leçon
Week 3- The power of frames: How people construct their reality
In this third week, we will examine how framing can contribute to unethical decision making. After having introduced you to the concept of framing in general, we will use it to interpret the Enron scandal. We will then discuss the recent Lehman Brothers collapse along one particular element of framing – the language we use in organizations. Building on this case, we will finally go deeper into the link between decision making and language and discuss how language influences what we can see and how we decide.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Guido PalazzoProfessor of Business Ethics
Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC-Lausanne)
Ulrich HoffrageProfessor of Decision Theory
Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC-Lausanne)
[MUSIC]
Welcome to the first video of week three of our course on
unethical decision making.
In our previous session,
we have introduced you to a central concept of this course.
Ethical blindness.
In this video we will focus on one important aspect of
ethical blindness, Framing.
That is, we will discuss how people look at the world and
how they construct reality, their reality.
In this session you will learn what frames are.
You will understand why they are useful and dangerous at the same time.
And you will learn how you can protect yourself against narrow frames.
Let me show you this painting.
In fact, you do not only see the painting, but also rather huge and
very stylish frame around it.
Why are there such frames around paintings, pictures,
photos, what is their function?
A frame, in particular this one here, separates inside and
outside the painting and the environment.
It focuses your attention.
Focuses your attention to the painting and
it separates the painting from the whole environment out there.
That's exactly what a photographer does when taking a picture.
He selects and thereby determines what can be seen on the picture and what not.
For this purpose, he can also use a zoom.
Sometimes it is important to see the details.
At other times, it is important to see the big picture.
Such a switch of focus is also central to artworks like the following.
Here we have several parts and you can focus on these parts.
But with a wider frame, you see something else.
Now consider this problem.
Here are nine dots.
Your task is to connect them with four straight lines.
If you want, you can now try it yourself.
Back?
Fine.
Let me show you one attempt to solve it.
The first line.
The second.
third.
Oops.
Okay. One more.
First.
Second.
Hm.
Third.
Oh.
I failed because I tried to find a solution within this area here.
That does not work.
The only way to solve this problem is to widen the frame.
Let's do it together.
Here is my first line.
The second.
Third, and here you go.
Maybe you have heard the expression, to be able to think out of the box.
This example here nicely illustrates how useful it can be
to adapt a wider perspective and
to extend boundaries and note, often these boundaries are self-imposed.
Here's a new task.
You will see a short video clip with three people in
white shirts passing a basketball to each other and
three people with black shirts doing the same thing.
Your task is to count how often a player with a black shirt passes the ball to
another player with a black shirt.
Was there something unusual in this video?
If you do not know what I mean, please go back to the video, but
this time you don't count, but you just lean back and watch.
There are 20 passes and a woman with an umbrella walking through the scene.
If you have not seen her, watch the clip again.
The phenomenon that I try to demonstrate has been termed inattentional blindness.
It is to failure to notice an unexpected stimulus that is in one's field of
vision when other attention demanding tasks are being performed.
It has been studied by Ulric Neisser and his colleagues in
the 1970s who also produced the video with the umbrella woman.
These researchers and others, such as Daniel Simons reported that
about 50% of the people failed to see these unexpected stimuli.
How is this phenomenon linked to our present topic, framing?
If our attention is focused,
we may fail to see things that are not in the focus of attention.
And now, you can also understand that frames are not only out there
around paintings.
There was no physical frame around the nine dots.
There was no physical frame around the black players.
When social scientists use the word frames,
they use it as a metaphor to refer to mental structures that simplify and
guide our understanding of a complex reality.
They focus our attention.
They force us to view the world from a particular and limited perspective.
As an illustration, consider the following story.
A Sultan was once attending a meeting of his advisers.
A meeting during which they had heated discussions and
couldn't agree on how they should see the issue at hand, and what to do.
To illustrate what he, the Sultan,
has seen by watching their dispute, he told them about several men.
Who have been blindfolded and
brought to an elephant with the task of finding out what that was.
Now, one was standing near to one of the legs and claimed it's a tree.
Another touched the tail and said it's a rope, and so on.
The point the Sultan wanted to make,
disagreement can result from limited perspectives.
That is from narrow frames.
Let us now consider a real case that once happened
at the pediatric ward of a hospital.
A six year-old child just had an important surgical intervention.
And the physician prescribed,
as a painkiller, five milligram of morphine every four hours.
The child received it correctly two times, at 8 a.m.
And at 12 p.m.
The nurse made a severe mistake at 4 p.m.
She gave him five milligram of methadone,
a different drug that should not be used in this situation.
At about 5 p.m.
The patient became very sleepy and finally stopped breathing.
Fortunately, he could be resuscitated by the reanimation team, incubated, and
transferred to the intensive care unit,
from where he could be released after three days without lasting damages.
Now the question, what to do with the nurse?
He mentioned you have to make this decision, think about it for
a while, before you continue.
Most members of the Pediatric Executive Board who actually had to
make this decision pointed out that this error was really, really serious and
the patient almost died.
They concluded that the nurse should be fired.
So when asking what contributed to this mistake they focused their attention on
the nurse.
After all, she made this mistake.
Now, in the university hospital, there is an internal procedure on error and
risk analysis.
When unexpected serious events happen, a group of experts is formed.
They analyze the situation in detail, interviews, they call us and
publish an internal report on the situation.
The Pediatric Executive Board agreed to wait with the decision until this
group published its report.
This group adapted a wider frame and they took the whole context into
consideration through interviews with stakeholders and experts and
based on their literature review, they identified these contributive, factors.
Patient.
Parents put high pressure on the nurses and
the doctors to alleviate the pain of their child.
And we will talk about pressure in the next week.
Environment.
One nurse was sick.
There were only three nurses for
22 patients so there was a significant stress for every nurse.
Material.
The morphine pills and boxes and the methadone pills and boxes look
very similar and on top of that, they are beside each other in the pharmacy.
The nurse was young and had not much experience with this kind of drugs.
There was no double check, before drug administration was performed.
And the team, the young nurse didn't get any
support from other nurses to prepare and check the drug.
And finally, the institutional context,
there was no automated pharmacy in the wards.
There was permission to have methadone in the pediatric division.
There was no poll of nurses able to replace sick staff.
So based on this systematic analysis, this panel of
experts concluded that the nurse was only a part of the drug administration mistake.
And so they gave the following recommendations to
the Pediatric Executive Board.
Limit the number of patients per nurse to six and
create a poll of nurses that can replace sick ones on a day-to-day basis.
Do not allow methadone in pediatric wards.
As it is not a common used drug in this setting.
Change the label of the methadone box to make it
clearly different than the one in the morphine box.
Use a systematic double check procedure.
Either two nurses or one nurse and
the physician before administrating any opiate drug.
And do not fire the nurse, but offer her additional training.
The board decided to follow these recommendations and
they did not fire the nurse.
So they ultimately,
took the complete opposite decision they initially came up with.
They learned that framing is really important before making any
major decision.
Let us now consider how frames distort reality.
Frames filter what we see.
They control what information is attended to.
And just as important, what is obscured.
Frames themselves are often hard to see.
We construct reality with our mental structures, but
we see only the result, which we call reality.
But note the underlying construction process.
Frames appear complete,
usually we don't realize that there are different frames that we might also use.
Seen from the outside, we may miss important aspects but
seen from our own inside view, there are no holes or gaps.
Frames are exclusive.
It is hard to have different views or
interpretations of the world at the same time.
Frames can be sticky and hard to change.
Once we are locked into a frame it can be difficult to
switch especially without conscious effort.
When people have emotional attachments to their frames,
changing frames can seem threatening.
How to becomes aware of your frames.
How to evaluate their fit.
How to generate new frames.
Do not only look for the mirror of your frame, but into the mirror, and
try to find out how you construct your reality.
Start by considering the possibility that there are multiple ways to see the world.
Observe the symptoms of frame misfit.
Start by considering the possibility that your frame is just one way to
construct reality.
Role play your adversaries and stakeholders.
Put yourself in the other's shoes.
Try to anticipate how they see the world,
which aspects they focus on, what they would have done in a particular situation.
Ask others for their views and
opinions but make sure that they can speak openly and without fear.
If you cannot exclude the possibility that they are afraid of negative consequences,
think about how they can express their views anonymously.
Use subgroups.
In an organization setting, each group is likely to notice different highlight.
Embrace your opponents.
The best devil's advocates are those people you continually disagree with.
Approach them and face their challenges.
But not within defensive mindset.
Rather appreciate their potential to widen your frames.
Seek opportunities to meet people from other cultures and
find out how they think, what they consider to be important.
Marcel Proust once said, The real voyage of
discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.
So traveling will not only allow you to see other places, but
to learn about yourself.
You would see you own environment differently after you returned.
Now, coming to conclusions.
Frames are mental structures.
We use them to construct reality.
They help to focus our attention and to navigate in a complex world.
This beneficial effect comes with a price.
Frames have blind spots.
Usually we are not aware of the frames we use.
And so we do not realize our blind spots.
A central question related to this course is,
do our frames allow us to see ethical dimensions?
Thanks for watching.
[MUSIC]
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