Your ethics should work for you — they should engage you and make you feel healthy, with a sense of pride and meaningful self-direction. Your ethics provide the groundwork for traits like integrity, authentic collaboration, and trust-building.

Beyond the personal, relationships begin with ethical evaluations. Does a person’s profile align with my needs and values? Will this merchandise solve my problem? Is there enough common ground to establish a relationship? Is it worth the effort? We then adapt as required, seeking to thrive in relation to others and our own physical circumstances… and sometimes we compromise to make it all work.

This site provides tools, discussions, and resources in a collegial space for learning, exploring, and building usable understanding. Use it to do better by doing right.

As individuals and groups, we design, operate, and relate according to our ethics — subsumed decisions that we have about ourselves, our relationships, language, cultures and so on. The ethics of those previous decisions and actions determine options currently available. Today’s decisions, in turn, then influence everything from personal health, to the value of brands, to the resilience of a society. In sum:

On a personal level, operating on an effective ethic simplifies life and reduces stress because you know the next right thing to do, and why. Furthermore, ethical frameworks reduce decision fatigue, impulsiveness, and paralysis.

Naturally, working with others whose ethics align with yours is easier. Distinct from morals and feelings, group ethics determine organizational behavior. Whether those rules, policies, and statements are written or just “understood,” ongoing membership requires upholding the organization’s operating policies. These policies derive directly from organizational ethics. If those ethical principles are muddled, then chaos ensues, for example, in contradictory HR policies. We codify, acculturate, and practice ethics like technology, “set it and forget it.”

By contrast, morals are values that are primarily personal and close-held. Often shared in religious or community settings these moral beliefs guide behavior. For example, do you prefer Montana, Louisiana, or NYC? Which companies have similar values to yours? Where can you align and work collaboratively with others?

Successful ethics must operate within legal constraints. Willful illegality and corruption force conflict between your internal and public ethics. You lie a lot, compromising your integrity and your well-being.

Effectiveness therefore arises from ethics, morals, lawfulness, and dialogue.  A sustainable ethic focuses primarily on human stakeholders each with their own ethics, their unique approach to life. Thus groups increase sustainability and effectiveness when they declare their principles.

Acknlowedgeing that ethical frameworks can be put to ill uses — a destructive person or corporation still has a “way of operating” — it’s hard to keep customers if your motivations are corrupt. Even though it’s illegal to steal, immoral to swindle, against policy to x, unjust to y, executing these activities must still follow an ethic, even if it’s misguided, harmful, and ultimately doomed to failure. Goodfellas movie.

In sum, a successful ethical system respects the law, accommodates competing moral frameworks among stakeholders, and advances collaboration by virtue of it’s constructive, prescriptive formula.

When a crisis arises, our initial response is habitual – we ask, “what do I usually do?” If that approach fails (and we can remain calm), we start formal decision-making – gathering and analyzing what we know, striving to learn more, and seeking alternative solutions before making a decision.

Informed deliberation then leads to better outcomes. Such well-made decisions not only solve current problems but also set precedents that we can repeat effortlessly.

These principles apply to individuals, organizations, cultures, and governments. For instance, production lines incorporate industrial design decisions, and managers then learn how to accommodate inevitable design shortcomings. Government procedures, once established, can either facilitate or hinder its citizens. Thus, the quality of life depends on thousands, if not millions, of accumulated decisions over time.

Here you will find tools, discussions, and resources to help you articulate your subsumed ethics and, if you are so inclined, challenge yourself to build on them.