The Red Line Reflection: drawing a line on acceptable consequences
All organizations have a mix of positive and negative impact on the world. Even those that do good things make tradeoffs and cause some harm. As employees, we tend to focus on the positive over the negative and also pay more attention to local effects, blocking out macro-level consequences. They’re almost too big to take in.
Still, the macro drives into the micro, affecting our organizational culture and behavior. With repetition, harm becomes normalized. When the heat fades from the horror of hurting each other, we settle into tepid resignation. Meanwhile, living with external injustice makes it more likely we’ll commit small-scale, local harms. It affects us, whether we know it or not.
We might like to think of ourselves as being against any organizational wrongdoing, but obviously we’re OK with some of it. We couldn’t cope in the world without learning to accept some injustice. But equally, if we never think about what harm really matters to us, we just give up an and accept all of it. I believe this is a bad outcome.
This reflection helps you understand your red lines, lines you personally don’t want to cross in choosing to be a part of an organization. You may find it useful for figuring out whether to stay or go in your current role or for finding your next role.
If things are calm, now is a great time to think values. It is incredibly difficult to reflect during an ethically-charged dilemma. There’s enough going on with the stress and swirl of the event itself. Even if you are in the thick of it, though, I still hope this will help you make space to think, so you can respond in a way that represents the real you.
Hence, this reflection, which draws from team exercises like Consequence Scanning and Black Mirror Brainstorms to consider the impact our organizations have. By the end, you should have a better sense of your no-go zones and be better prepared for the organizational harms you might face.
The Red Line Reflection
In this reflection you’ll ask yourself questions to explore which negative consequences really matter to you. You can block yourself out half an hour and think deeply or you can leave these open in a tab and return in bursts. Feel free to pick and choose from the questions. There’s no right or wrong way.
- Pick up to 1–5 lapses of corporate values that cause a strong emotion for you. (If you need inspiration, see the list at the end.)
- For each one, why does it stand out to you?
- What does it mean to you personally?
- What do you notice about all of them taken together?
2. Have you ever worked somewhere that crossed an ethical or values line that was important to you?
- What happened? (/ is happening?)
- What was the impact on others? On you?
- What were the first signs you saw about what was happening?
- Would you approach the situation differently today? If so, how?
3. Have you seen anything in the news that has stuck with you as unacceptable organizational behavior?
- Which value(s) did it violate?
- Why do you think that news sticks with you?
- How might the story relate to your current organization or role?
4. Are there unethical things you are afraid your org might do in the future? (feel free to get inspiration from Questions 1–3)
- What makes you think this could be a problem?
- How might you be involved? How might you act?
- What could be the impact on others?
- How close would you need to be for it to really matter to you? If it were done anywhere in the company? Just your team? Or only if you were personally involved?
5. Drawing from the questions above, what could be signs that it’s time to part ways from your current org?
- Start from a few extremes and move inwards towards the more likely scenarios. What would be some cases where you were sure you couldn’t stay? Less sure, but still likely to leave?
- When might you try to stay to mitigate harm? How might you distinguish between mitigating and enabling the harm?
- What are the other opposing forces that would hold you in the org? How might you compare the forces holding you in with those pushing you away?
This last question is important to acknowledge. Unfortunately, companies behave worst when the job market is at its worst; or conversely, they mask pretty well when they’re competing for talent. This means that the most difficult situations often happen when you feel least able to vote with your feet. Hence, needing to think through what these tradeoffs really mean.
There are plenty of other directions to go after this: How might you hold your standards? How does your identity or situation affect what responses are open to you? What can you learn from your responses about when and where to look for your next job? Obviously feel free to follow where your thoughts want to go.
And that’s it! So.. did this help? I’d love to hear what you learned or if you have other approaches to this problem.
(Partial) List of organizational ethical fails
- Compromising privacy / surveillance
- Damaging the environment
- Exploiting customers
- Undermining democracy or other good social structures
- Promoting falsehoods or misleading people
- Extracting profits rather than reinvesting
- Breaking promises
- Breaking the law
- Stealing intellectual property
- Promoting conflict or violence
- Rewriting history / gaslighting
- Restricting rights or freedoms
- Landing consequences of excessive risk taking on the wrong people
- Encouraging addiction
- Making decisions that cause people physical harm or death
- Promoting mental illness
- Exploiting staff
- Oppressing marginalized people
- Harassing dissenters / union busting
Yes, many companies do many of these, so it’s a matter of degree. Luckily, you and you alone get to be the judge of what it means to go too far.
Thanks to Facebook, Uber, Boeing, Halliburton, the New York Times, United Healthcare, Goldman Sachs, Purdue Pharma, Amazon, and OpenAI for ongoing inspiration!
(And a more sincere thanks to Tadhg O’Higgins for useful feedback)
