Aldo Raine and the Team as an Ethical Engine

Michael Anton Dila
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read

Aldo Raine is an unusual leader. Descended from the mountain man, Jim Bridger, the Tennessee native led an unorthodox unit of Jewish-American soldiers in a mission to terrorize the Nazi regime through the use of spectacular violence: “as a bushwacking guerrilla army we’ll be doing one thing, and one thing only…killing Nazis.” His charter to his men is direct and simple: “We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are…and the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us.”

Quentin Tarantino made Aldo Raine one of the central characters of what is easily one of the most interesting and unconventional war films in the history of cinema. I am quite sure the he never expected to see Aldo Raine held up as a model of ethical leadership. But, hell, the world is full of surprises.

What is unmistakable in the short scene above from Tarantino’s film is that what Aldo Raine is describing for his small team is an ethic. We can debate whether the mission he sets them on is, in any usual sense, an ethical one, but there can be no doubt that he means to set them on a principled and purposeful course of action and that he understands his charter to be a moral one. It’s intent: to destroy a great evil. As ethical intent goes, that’s kind of the gold standard. It even recalls the Google ethical dictum: Don’t Be Evil.

What interests me is that this example powerfully, if controversially, demonstrates the thesis that teams can be agents of ethical conduct and comportment. As it turns out, ethics belong to groups, they are the “code” that guides and governs the conduct of a group or a community. We sometimes talk about someone having a personal ethic, but we usually mean something more akin to a discipline or a set of principles that are a matter of personal style or preference. An ethic creates a public norm and often at least an implicit and occasionally an explicit social contract.

For example when we talk about professional ethics, we are almost always talking about ethical codes set out and adopted by members of a profession, such as medicine, law or engineering. These codes are not legalistic, but rather they are normative. Violating an ethic is neither criminal or legally culpable, as such, but can lead to criticism of conduct, or to censure and in extreme examples to some form of social shunning, like expulsion from a “society,” e.g. disbarment (in the case of the legal profession). It is this regime of criticism that the professional ethic exists to institute. Creating a standard and holding people to account to adhere to it is the express purpose of such ethics.

Phrases like Don’t Be Evil or Move Fast and Break Things do not describe or set out an ethic, but they do signal and give character to an ethos. An ethos, especially in the context of an organization or company is what we ofter refer to as the culture of the organization. It is at the level of the team, however, that ethics get real. At the level of the phrases or slogans above, ethics remain a matter of rhetoric. But when an ethic is instituted or adopted by a team, it becomes a matter of practice.

Recently I met the co-founder of an AI company. He is the company’s COO, and among his many duties, he takes responsibility for building and guiding the team. I was in the room when he described his philosophy of team building for a group of would-be entrepreneurs. An ex-Navy SEAL, he started with a principle he had derived from the culture of those teams, which he expressed as the meta-level norm of his team: “it is not about you.” He explained that SEALs rely on each other in matters of life and death in the most extreme of circumstances and that there is no room on such a team for people who put themselves first. The second principle was about bringing positive energy to the job. The last one had the tempo of a mantra. He said that he expected that his teammates should constantly ask themselves, “what did I do today to earn my place on this team”?

I was impressed by both the simplicity and the power of the three pillars of this ethic. I had no trouble at all imagining the kind of environment that such principles would create, a place where putting ego before mission would be unacceptable, a place where people worked actively to contribute not only ideas but the energy that give others the power to persevere, and a place were people understand that resources are precious and must be consumed only by those who daily devote themselves to their shared mission. I want to work at a place like that. Don’t we all?

The dangerous thing about ethically loaded rhetoric is that people can easily make the mistake that merely saying the words or posting them on the wall is sufficient to creating an ethical workplace. But an ethic isn’t just a matter of subscribing to a slogan, it must be a guide to and a set of norms that both inform and and shape your daily practice. Teams give us a meaningful context for judging how a group’s ethic shapes its practice.

These words certainly didn’t make what happened at Auschwitz ethical.

When I say a team is an ethical engine, I do not necessarily mean to say that it’s rules and behavior are either moral or positive. Whether they are or not is settled by the content of the ethic and the effects of its practice. But whether a team’s ethic is constructive or destructive, it is the fact of it being a guide to the team’s action that make it effective. The point of having an ethic is to create certain effects as the product of deliberate intention. This does not mean that having the “right” intention is sufficient to acting ethically, though intent does matter. But for the connection between an ethic and the effects it is meant to create in the world to be productive is must be carried out by a group of people who not only use this ethic as a guide, but also as a critical tool that makes it possible to constantly reflect on the effects of their actions. This feedback loop is the core characteristic of an ethical system and, in this case, it the team is the engine that powers such a system.

When we think about how we approach creating an ethical workplace we should think about how that ethic must become integral to the work that teams do. The work of the team provides us with the most direct access to examining the effectiveness of an ethic in serving the goals of the work that the team does. An ethical workplace creates a tight fit between the principles which guide the work of teams and the nature of the work that they do. The judgments we must make are not settled by the binary question, “is that organization ethical”?

The Nazis had an ethic and, sadly, there is little question as to whether it was effective. The question of whether the ethic of Nazism was immoral is one that can only be settled by appeal to a higher ethical order that we believe (or don’t) that any ethic must conform to. To many of us, and with the hindsight of history, the immorality of Nazism is obvious, there for any child to see. And yet, if we are to understand history, we also need to understand that to many Germans, the immorality of Nazism was not obvious, and it was not only Germans who failed to see Nazism as evil.

The point is that it is not enough to want to be ethical or to act ethically, the ethic you create must stand up to tests tougher than your intent to be guided by principles, even what you see as moral ones. An ethic informs behavior and work and thus over time, if effective, begins to shape a world. What kinds of worlds do we want to make? What kinds have we already made? How do we fix our broken worlds? How do we make better worlds? Ethics are not a list of answers to these questions, instead, an ethic sets the terms of how and whether we engage with such questions. If you want to make a change, make a difference, to make things better: start by building an engine. Start by building a team.

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Michael is a Design Insurgent and Chief Unhappiness Officer

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