Measuring and managing ethics

KPMG's Soft Controls model caught my beady eye this week:

KPMG are evidently using these 8 factors to analyse, measure and help clients manage their corporate cultures, claiming that "Our model gives organisations a valid tool for getting a clear picture of the current organisational situation, confront it, and break through the silence and passivity." Hmmm, 'silence and passivity', really KPMG? Well OK, whatever. It appears to be a viable approach.

Muel Kaptein is professor of business ethics and integrity management at the Department of Business-Society Management, Rotterdam School of Management, and a KPMG partner. Muel's research has involved tracking, examining and drawing out lessons from over 3 decades of 'scandals' in the Netherlands, reportedly occurring pretty much every week.

According to his online CV, "Muel believes that ethics makes a positive difference in the lives of people and the performance of organisations. His purpose is to help organisations improve their ethics, in terms of both culture and policies and both their current constituents (managers and employees) and future constituents (students). For Muel, defining and measuring ethics makes ethics manageable and improvable."

The ability to quantify, manage and improve ethics intrigues me. Muel's approach appears to involve:

1. Deconstructing ethics and morality in detail to understand the complex interplay of beliefs, boundaries, aims etc.
   
   
2. Examining relevant factors in the personal and corporate context that are understood to determine ethics and morality i.e. those 8 areas called out in the model, and perhaps others.
    
3. Influencing the factors in various ways in order to 'break through the silence and passivity'. In relation to 'scandals', I guess the focus is on realigning the evidently misaligned corporate/personal ethics and morals that led to, or failed to prevent, such scandals towards some notional socially-acceptable norms - a neutral non-scandalous target? Short of a complete ethics overhaul for the worst offenders, perhaps rounding-off the sharpest corners is sufficient as a starter, tackling whichever of those ~8 factors are the most in need of change.

I haven't spotted much in the way of human behavioural biology in Muel's writing so far but I've only read a small fraction. 

Anyway, stimulated by all that, today I've been inspired to redraft the ethics policy template for SecAware - a code of ethics if you prefer.  In just 2¼ pages, the template neatly complements our information security policy suite, in the same style as all the others.

I'm tempted to explore the quantification avenue as well, perhaps developing a scoring process and a set of metrics to measure those ~8 factors. If you're intrigued and excited by the prospect of getting a grip on your corporate ethics culture, let's talk. I'd love to help. If your budget won't quite stretch to KPMG partners, I'm sure we can reach an ethical, pragmatic, cost-effective solution.