Reasoning through a dilemma step by step

The three previous blocks gave you the ideas: what ethics is, how it takes shape in your job and what a decision is made of. This one turns them into working tools: a method for deciding, a code that is actually followed, a channel for raising the alarm and a culture that sustains it.

When a real dilemma arrives, knowledge is almost never what fails. Time is. There is a lorry waiting, a boss on the phone or a client who wants the answer today, and under pressure you decide with the first thing that comes to mind and reason afterwards, to justify it.

By the end of this lesson you will be able to work through a dilemma in six steps without skipping any, tell a temptation apart from a conflict between two valuable things and name what is clashing, and prepare the conversation in which you say what you think to someone who would rather not hear it.

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Now it is your turn to decide. In the next practice you have five work situations. First answer with what you would really do, without thinking too much, and notice which principle your way out protects, which one it sacrifices and where its short-term and long-term consequences diverge. Then go back to the case you hesitated over most and walk through it on paper using the six steps.

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Takeaways

• A method does not decide for you: it forces you to look at what haste skips over.
• If the only thing on the other side of the scale is your own convenience, it is not a dilemma, it is a temptation.
• Naming the two good things that clash is half the way to a third option.
• Knowing what is right is not enough: saying it has to be prepared and rehearsed.