Welcome

This course is born of a conviction: you work better, and live better, when you know why you do what you do. You will cover ethics from its foundations to the desk: first the ideas, then the cases and, finally, the tools for deciding when the answer is not obvious.

What you will find

• Block 1. Ethics in organisations. What ethics is and what it is not, why its aim in an organisation is to build trust, and which reasons make it a dimension as necessary as effectiveness and efficiency.
• Block 2. Ethics in the workplace. Ethics seen from your own position: which intentions drive your work and how to measure its ethical degree, how to recognise a dilemma, what you are responsible for even when you are following orders, and what distinguishes a good professional, a good team and a good middle manager.
• Block 3. Ethics of human behaviour: person and action. What makes an action human —feeling, intelligence and will—, how a decision is assessed ethically by looking at its end, its means and its circumstances, and the ways in which you answer for it: for what you do, for what you keep silent about, for what you induce and for what you cooperate with.
• Block 4. From values to practice: dilemmas, codes and ethical culture. The tools that bring ethics down to the day-to-day: a six-step method for reasoning through a dilemma, what makes an ethical code get followed, how a whistleblowing channel that protects the person reporting works, and why culture depends on the example set by those who lead.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.