The Ethics Challenge
August 4, 2009 by Steve Cohen
A little more than ten years ago I was in my Boston office with a stack of ethics cases, a pile of Dilbert comic strips, a box containing the game “Clue” and a deepening sense of anxiety. The idea was to figure out whether we could produce an effective ethics training program based on a board game using actual ethics cases and Scott Adam’s dysfunctional Dilbert characters. An “uncertain” mix at best. Our client was Carol Marshall, then head of the Lockheed Martin Office of Ethics and Compliance. Ultimately we came up with “The Ethics Challenge.”
Looking back on it, it’s a miracle we got the idea approved – though we soon discovered that people tended either to love or hate the whole concept. And yet, despite protests from doubters (and some of them were at the highest levels of the organization) Carol Marshall and her team (including team leader Paul Haney) fought hard for what they believed would be a powerful way to get all 180,000 employees engaged in the program. It worked. In fact, it exceeded our highest expectations. We found ourselves being interviewed on television and quoted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. My favorite headline was from the Philadelphia Inquirer – “Curbing corruption is no laughing matter, but a board game with Dogbert makes the lessons stick.” A decade later, I still believe that getting people genuinely engaged in ethics learning is the most important thing we do.