How to work out whether your beliefs — Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unspash

A version of this article was first published as a LinkedIn post in December 2022

How do I know if my ethical framework matches my business approach?

Three long-term projects have reached significant milestones in 2022 for Datchet Consulting. The third is to connect business ethics with behaviour.

Motivation

Several years ago, I started to research the connection between ethics and practice in companies aiming for something beyond profit. B-Corps are well recognised in this field and there are many other organisations with similar aims. However, I found it hard to find good theory connecting the life-values of those in charge with the company procedures. Later, I found highly capitalist companies that were taking ethical stances on such issues as pay and transparency. Was there an underpinning linkage?

Building a framework

I teamed up with Phil Hanson, who had run a consulting business in IBM and we started to work, initially using faith, hope and love as a triplet of virtues. However, the generic framework shown in figure 1, enables other value systems to be connected, creating a powerful tool.

Figure 1: An approach to connecting ethics to behaviour in business

The RR3 Framework appeals to three bridging concepts – Realising Renewal, Rewarding Relationships, and Resilient Reliability – to connect business best practice ideals (in aqua to the right) to ethical values (in yellow to the left). The strength of these central RR’s relies on making sound connections in each direction. We also aimed to allow considerable flexibility in selecting the best practice models and ethical framework. This is a first-pass example of how the thinking works. The opportunity is for you to design your own plug-ins.

We examined both Baldrige and EFQM and showed that they can restructured in terms of purpose, people and process (see Hanson & Young, 2022). We believe other business models can be adapted in the same way. On the orange side, we used the virtue triplet cited above although it operates a little counterintuitively at times. We would welcome collaborators, religious or secular, who would be interested in developing further plug-ins for either side of the framework.

Figure 2: The RR3 Framework connecting business processes of Purpose, People and Process to the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.

A version of this article was first published as a LinkedIn post in December 2022

To begin with, consider Realising Renewal. As best practice this captures a business’ purpose and how it is being led. Its strategy and its impact in bringing better products or newer services to market clearly connect to this theme as do its green or social agendas and any intent it has to liberate the ingenuity of its clients, partners or workforce. On the orange side, hope (see A lens on the Kingdom, 2022) harnesses our creative drive to make a lasting difference and our taste for elegance in design, as well as our aspirations for the planet we live on. This orange agenda now extends well beyond the bounds of workplace or workforce in blue.

Rewarding Relationships captures all people-facing business processes – inside and beyond the organisation. The orange side of the RR3 Framework moves the emphasis from merely treating people well to seeking their greatest good and forging lasting relationships through which good business may also be conducted. The natural tensions along the Rewarding Relationships line are critical to the long-term health of a business.

Resilient Reliability, the reproducibility of effective processes and the integrity of knowledge management is clearly central to any commercial organisation. This mirrors a primal hunger we have, ethically expressed in different ways, to do the right thing, to continue to do better and the satisfaction we experience in what is genuine and reliable – which how is faith fits in.

We note anti-virtues are also evident in the workplace (see Spoiling the job, 2022). This highlights how hard it is to harness human failings – vaunting ambitions, selfishness, greed – for the betterment of businesses.

Why does this matter?

Our studies indicate how major companies are already articulating virtuous goals and implementing ethical standards, sometimes in overtly moral ways (see The longings of people, 2022, and Is God at work?, 2022).

Businesses are often asked to sign up to ethical positions which may be hostile to one another or to the business itself. The RR3 Framework enables senior management to work from first principles with their ethics to reach the company’s culture, output and impact – or to work back from their business processes to identify what their cultural ethics are.

Hanson & Young, The Most Excellent Way, is due out in early 2024.

Interested? For an ethical audit, or to build your own version of the RR3 framework, contact terry@datchet.consulting.