MAKING THE RIGHT DECISION AT WORK
 
Marvin T. Brown, Ph.D.
 
           
Can we agree that when business leaders are faced with making a decision, they want to make the right one?  If so, then in most cases when business leaders disagree, the conflict is not between right and wrong but between different views of what is right.  If we look at the question of how to respond to decreasing profits, for example, some may say that laying people off is the right thing to do.  Others may want to decrease everyone’s salary.  Or, someone might argue that increasing productivity instead of cutting costs is the right thing to do.  How can we tell which proposal is the right one?  That’s the question I want to answer in this article.
 
Some may want to know if I am thinking of the right “ethical” decision or the right “business” decision.  If I have to choose, I am thinking of the right business decision, from an ethical perspective.  By “ethical perspective” I mean a perspective that examines the quality of reasons that support different decisions.  So I am thinking of occasions where teams or individuals wonder which of the decisions they are considering is the right one, and they are willing to explore the reasons for their different views.
 
These decisions are answers to specific questions – question like  “Should I tell Jose that his job does not appear in our re-organization chart?”  rather than like, “Should I be honest?”  They are more like: “Should we require our team to work through the week-end to finish the project?” than like, “Should we respect our employees?”  People usually do not disagree as much about how to answers the more general questions as they do about how to answer the more the specific questions.  As they say, “The devil is in the details.”
 
Some might say that the problem isn’t so difficult.  After all, “Good people will make good decisions.”  Much of the current work in character education and virtue ethics seems to assume this.  But this approach implies that disagreement only occurs between good and bad people.  That’s not usually the case.  Equally good people can disagree about what to do.  In most cases, and especially when we consider our co-workers, most people do what they think is right considering the world they think they live it  As I said before, most disagreements are between different versions of what seems right.
 
If we cannot explain our disagreements by dividing the population into people who are right and people who are wrong, then why do we disagree?  In many cases, it’s because we look at things from different perspectives.  If you look at cost-cutting from a financial perspective, for example, you may think that the easiest way to cut costs is to decrease the payroll.  If you take a political perspective, on the other hand, you may think that those governing the organization should be the ones who bear the burden of not governing it well.  In Japan, for example, managers are the first ones to take a salary cut during hard times.  They may be “right” from their perspective.  This conclusion, however, tends to lead us into a kind of ethical relativism where everyone is right from her or his perspective.
 
We can go beyond this by returning to the earlier distinction between general and specific questions; that is between values and actions.  Even though we can observe people in different cultures acting very differently, they all may share some of the same beliefs or values.  Take respect for the elderly as an example.  Traditional Alaskan tribes acted on their “respect for the elderly” by placing them in the snow when they were ready to die, whereas modern US citizens are likely to spend their family savings keeping an elderly person alive as long as possible.  Their actions are quite different, but their values may be quite similar.  So the relativism occurs at the level of actions or practices rather than at the level of values or principles.  Instead of calling this “relativism,” it seems more accurate to call it “relationalism.”  Our actions, in other words, always rely not only on our values, but also on our experiences, social groups, and cultures.
 
When we disagree, we all “have our reasons.”  Some of the reasons may be easily explained, such as our understanding of the situation or the values we hold  dear.  Other “reasons” may lie beneath our awareness, such as our taken-for-granted assumptions that create the perspective from which we view the world.  In a group decision making process, how we view each other’s observations, values, and assumptions will affect the quality of our decisions.  If we view them as our enemy’s stormtroops, then we will either run away from them or knock them down as soon as they see them on the horizon.  Behind this view of “us versus them” usually resides a zero-sum mentality that assumes that if another’s reasons have merit then mine do not.  Instead of making the right decision, this mentality usually increases the likelihood of making a mistake. 
 
I want to suggest another way to respond to disagreement: to see another’s reasons as additional information about the situation.  Examining the different reasons that support different views can give the group a more complete understanding of the situation, just like listening to different witnesses describe an accident can give a more complete picture of what happened than only listening to one witness.  When we begin to listen to each other’s reasons, we usually discover that another’s reasons for a different course of action do not conflict with my reasons, they are just different.  I may favor working through the week-end, for example, because we can get a project finished.  You may not because it will mean that we cannot spend time with our families.  Both of these observations could be true.  Even the values that probably support these different positions are not necessarily in conflict with each other.  You and I may value both finishing projects on time and balancing family and worklife.  So if our observations and our values are not necessarily in conflict with each other, but are merely different, why do we disagree?  Probably because we have different assumptions. 
 
Exploring assumptions requires some imagination, because we usually remain unaware of them.  So let’s try to imagine some assumptions that could support the different views.  One could imagine, in this case, that the side wanting to work during the week-end to finish the project may assume that “time is money.”  If we “spend” time finishing the project, it will be time “well spent.”  This is a widely held assumption about time in ourculture.    Can we imagine a different assumption about time that would support not working on the week-end?  Try this: Imagine different kinds of time; that is, imagine that family time is a different kind of time than work time.  In this “world” we could say that while work time should be used, family time should be enjoyed.  Family time, in other words, is not a “thing” to control, but a human dimension to be enjoyed.  Like the time when we play with children or hang out with our loved ones.  In such a world, while we could agree that work time should be used well, we would also hold that family time should not be converted into work time.  It has its own domain.  If these different images of time can help to explain the reasons for our disagreement, can they also help us decide what to do?  That depends on whether the exploration has also enabled us to learn from one another.  Do we know more than we knew before?  If so, then we may come up with a new proposal that would honor the strength of each other’s perspective.
 
To help us evaluate the strength of the reasons we have developed, we can bring into our conversation three standards of performance or decision making criteria:  integrity, fairness, and effectiveness.  Each of these comes from an ethical tradition or approach, which we will touch on later, but first let’s apply them to the issue of whether or not to work on the week end.
 
To ask about the integrity of an action is to explore whether or not the action aligns itself with the purposes of those engaging in the act.  For example, an accounting firm may have the purpose of auditing corporate financial reports, and of cooperating with each other in a way that ensures careful work.  We can name these the firm’s external and internal purposes.  It is what the firm should do and what kind of firm it should be.  Given these purposes, then we can ask if working on the week-end to finish a project aligns itself with our purposes or not.  In this case, of course, we also have persons who have internal and external purposes as family members, so they could also ask whether working on the week-end enables them to achieve their purposes.
 
The second standard examines whether the proposed action is fair.  Fairness, of course, has different meanings.  The key meaning we want to use here is that of consistency.  To be fair, in other words, is not to make exceptions or to treat some differently than you would treat others, without a good reason for making such a distinction.  The easiest way to determine the fairness of an action is to first develop a principle that you could see as embedded in the action and then to ask whether this principle could be consistently held.  For example, in this case, a principle behind working on the week-end might be that work should come before family.  Can you consistently hold this?  Can you hold this not only for yourself but for others as well?  It not, then the act is not fair.
 
The standard of effectiveness offers yet another way of looking at the issue.  It examines the consequences of each proposal on the persons and groups effected.  After analyzing the positive and negative consequences, it chooses the action that brings about the most positive and least negative consequences for all involved.  That act is the most effective that gets the most out of the situation.  If you take the different groups into account – your firm, your client, and family members – will the consequences of working on the week-end have more positive and less negative consequences than if you finish the project later?
 
When we consider the reasons for the two positions and the three ethical criteria, we can see that the proposal of working through the weekend would probably find the most initial support with the criterion of effectiveness. The assumption we explored behind this position – that time is money – does fit with a kind of thinking that looks at consequences and getting the most out of a situation.  The position against working through the week-end may get more support from the criteria of integrity, especially when one begins to ask about the integrity of the family.  Integrity would also support the assumptions about different kinds of time in different domains.  The third criterion, fairness, may tip the scales toward one side or another depending on what kind of principle you try to consistently hold.  In any case, the best decision will be the one that meets all three criteria of integrity, fairness, and effectiveness.
 
The following chart shows how these three criteria for evaluating decisions may relate to some corporate resources and to different ethical approaches.
 
 

 
On the first row, one can think about the integrity of an act by examining how it aligns itself with the corporation’s mission statement, which itself can be examined in terms of what the corporation’s purpose should be.  The second row begins with the question of fairness, which may be spelled out in a corporation’s Code of Ethics, which can be examined in terms of consistent principles.  And the third row on effectiveness can examine the consequences of an act on the different stakeholders, and then see what action will be the most effective use of resources.  The stakeholders are all those who have a “stake” in the decision.  People involved in this discussion may have different ideas about the firm’s purposes, the relevant principles, and the impact of the action.  These differences, however, can be treated as resources for making the best decision, rather than as barriers to making any decision.  It all depends on whether the process of applying these criteria is a learning process.  If we take a step back from the process we have just followed, we can see it involves the following steps:
 
 
1.     Agree to talk about what should be done.
2.     State the different options
3.     Ask about the reasons that support these proposals: observations, values, and assumptions.
4.     Apply the criteria of Integrity, Fairness, and Effectiveness
5.     Use all the group’s resources to make the right decision.
 
As you examine the process laid out here, it’s clear that the right decision will probably reside someplace in the middle between our differences; our different reasons and the different ethical approaches.  Where that middle is, of course, is a matter of group discernment.  We may discover later, of course, that what we thought was the right decision may have been a mistake.  If we develop and use the best resources we can make available, however, then we will have made the best decision we can.
 
This process has other benefits besides making good decisions, especially for on-going teams.  It increases a group’s flexibility to respond to different situations by distinguishing between general values and specific actions.  It increases confidence and group motivation because the decisions will be grounded in examined values and assumptions.  It also increases mutual recognition of each other as persons.  We may be different in what we think is right, but if we acknowledge one another as similar in wanting to do the right thing, then this process will help realize that goal.
 
Remember the question we began with?  “What should we do about decreasing profits?”  The “right” answer will be the one that is based on the strongest observations, values and assumptions in the group and the one that meets the criteria of integrity, fairness, and effectiveness.