In many domains, audiences are expecting more ethical practices from those providing them with goods and services. Fortunately, many of those providers are also benefitting from conducting their businesses in more positive ways. Of course, it shouldn't take such incentives to precipitate ethical behaviour – it should be a given. Nevertheless, hopefully this kind of positive feedback loop will continue to grow, driving more ethically minded business over time.
Here we look at some of the positive attitudes and behaviours that underlie pacesetting enterprises. We go beyond the more distinctly ethical practices that clearly benefit the world or reduce harm, and try to place them in a wider context of good strategy.
"Hey I've an idea: let's do ethics!"
It should go without saying that any venture should be grounded in good ethical principles but the attitude of "business is business" can generate an ethical vacuum in industry. As people increasingly make more ethical choices about the products and services they support, and the organisations they work for, we may be seeing a growing economic driver towards businesses built on positive values. This also brings a danger of ethics washing or ethics shopping, in which business leaders claim their benevolence as a marketing tactic.
You can't just "do" ethics, you can only develop your thinking and actions towards your best guess at the right directions. The idea of an "ethical organisation" is not a concrete term but we can imagine a spectrum of more or less positive values exemplified in various orientations, such as ecology and society. Perhaps the most instructive pioneers in this space are not the "obviously" ethical players such as charities, but instead are those that are firmly standing their moral high-ground amidst complex tides of temptation towards easier gains. As far as we can tell, they have an authentic and practical approach to doing the right thing. Salient examples we have run into include Patagonia, W.L. Gore and Hanno, but there are many more. And there are many different ways to cut the ethical pie, depending on your perspective, such as by comparing these lists:
Indeed, our very definitions of whom we consider more or less ethical carry ethical values in themselves.
When asking respondents to list who they saw as the pioneers of the neo-world, some reminded us that it's not just organisations or prominent leaders from whom we can learn, but ordinary individuals too.
Anyone, or any collective, who is prepared to try something (or someone) different. I don't see sufficient leadership from organisations, and that will thwart future creative process. This malaise worsens the closer we approach national, governmental agencies.
Individuals, Activists, Freelancers, Anyone with an entrepreneurial mindset.
People are the pioneers.
– Neoco survey responses to the question "Who are the pioneers?".
With increased access to tooling, knowledge and contacts, a lone operator can now harness a vast wealth of resources to carve out their unique way of bringing positive impact to the world. But when we hook people together to collaborate in groups this individual power can be stifled or lost. The challenge for a forward-thinking organisation is to make space for diversity, independence and inclusivity, while providing structures that amplify wisdom and output of the collective. Some of this comes down to choosing the right Cooperative Behaviours for your group, which should itself be a collective decision, trialled and iterated over time.
Making room for diversity and equality should not only be a self-evident ethical priority in any group but is also a process than can be approached with deliberate, strategic design, leading to tangible business outcomes.
In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group. In other words, the quality of a group's collective output appears to depend on how effectively a group can unlock its human-to-human dynamics. The key is in the linkages, not the nodes. The way a group's members communicate and relate to one another is more important for solving problems than the inherent abilities of individual people in the group.
– Quote combined from Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups, published in Science by MIT & Carnegie Mellon, and from Rainforest, by Hwang & Horowitt. Our emphasis.