ProjectEthics3
There's a link back to the second installment there, too.
This series, the final installment will be posted next week, encapsulates what I've retained about project work. The distillation might make some of it hard for you to swallow, but this is how it is for me over here. What seemed at first necessary knowledge has evaporated in practice to become beside the point. What wouldn't even register then on my innocent radar has taken central position in my understanding now.
The executive summary: Project Ethics are about choice. Once any action becomes a must-do mandate, ethics evaporates. Without choice, there can be no ethics. Does it follow then that creating choice is the key to satisfying the ethical responsibilities of project work?
The challenge is that the choice points are cloaked, hidden from casual observation. It might even be true for you, as it most certainly has been for me, that the greater the choice point, the less it feels like one in that moment where my choice might make all the difference.
The series became a treatise on mindfulness. Please feel free to comment on the P@W site. The editor there likes people to leave comments, and so do I, though I don't always know how to respond to them.
ProjectEthics
What prompts me to write about ethics now? In Thomas Friedman's
Sunday, October 18 NYT column, he makes the provocative assertion that "We’re all connected and nobody is in charge." It seems to this humble chronicler that management science ignores this one great truth, assuming that we are natively disconnected and that someone's in charge. Consider a world where Friedman's assertion holds true AND where we assume otherwise. What kind of witch hunt might result? I imagine torches and pitchforks, accusations and indictments, the righteous search for those who were supposed to be in charge and failed to properly connect us, initiating yet another round of symbolic regulations (how do you spell Sarbaines-Oxley?) intended to hold those SOBs accountable. Again. Slip over here for more ...