Wisdom is action-oriented, but who has the time? Enacting our choices takes effort and persistence.

Moreover, the constant companion of action is risk. When we act, we risk failure. We put our reputation, and possibly our job, on the line. In some cases, our actions may endanger our life and health. When such efforts and dangers threaten us, an evening spent playing your favorite video game or choosing to keep your head down at work and only doing what you are told seems tempting. Sometimes, it is wise to hold back and stay on the sidelines.

Yet, failing to act is also a choice, and choosing to do nothing comes with its own risks.

How, then, can you find the courage and motivation to do what your values guide you to do? You may read all the books your teacher assigns, pass all their tests, yet fail to apply those lessons in the heat of the moment. You may know what needs doing, yet remain silent. You may have the best of intentions, yet freeze, paralyzed by fear. How can we flip the switch from good intention to wise action, from knowing to doing?

Well, there’s nothing this textbook can say that will flip that switch for you. What this text does is provide an understanding of the structures that constrain and enable our willingness to act. The following section briefly defines courage. The parts after that then consider several structures constraining people’s desire to act per their values. After this, the chapter explores structures enabling moral actions. This book then focuses on aspects of your own life that may help you find your motivation and courage to act.

What is Courage

What is the difference between courage and foolishness? Is a teenager who shows off by leaping off a bridge into unknown waters brave? Or, are they being an idiot? How about instead of doing so to show off, they leap to save a drowning child?

In the context of wise action, this textbook views courage as the taking of practical and deliberate action to achieve a moral end in situations that may be dangerous. The danger of acting may be to your life and health, as may be the case when firefighters run into a burning building or social activists resist an oppressive government. In other situations, the danger may be to your career or reputation, as is the case with whistleblowers, innovators, or people trying overcome resistance to a change in their organization.^[1]

The emphasis on achieving a “moral end” brings to mind the importance of values, for it is our values that define which ends we believe are moral. If the ends we pursue are, in fact, moral, why is there a risk in pursuing them? If society shares our morals, it stands to reason that members of our society would support our actions and protect us from harm. Yet in many situations, taking action in pursuit of our values often retains an aspect of risk. The following section looks at social structures that constrain our ability to take moral action. Following that, this chapter explores structures that enable moral action within organizations as well as in your individual life.

Structures Constraining Our Ability to Act Per Our Values

Unfortunately, there exist several structures within many organizations that constrain people’s ability to act per their moral convictions. These structures include an organization’s culture, the legal status of corporations, moral mazes, and the myth of rationality.

As you read the following sections, you will note some of the items discussed are specific to Western business practices (e.g., the legal status of corporations). Every item listed below may not apply to every culture, and other cultures may have different structures constraining action. Be sure to develop your institutional and contextual (cultural) rationality of the social context in which you operate.

We will start this discussion by considering the role of organizational culture in constraining our willingness to act in pursuit of our values.

The Role of Organizational Culture

In the same way that nations or ethnic groups develop distinct cultures, so, too, do organizations. Cultures promote specific values and behaviors among their members. The stronger an organization’s culture, the more likely employees will identify with its moral code.^[2] If the behaviors and morals promoted by an organization’s culture align with the norms held by the broader society, then life may be fine. If there are differences between the behaviors accepted by the community and the organization, however, employees may find themselves in situations where they must act contrary to societal (and perhaps their own) values.

How does an organizational culture promoting behaviors contrary to society’s morals arise?

It happens slowly. An organization may, for example, pursue the value of competitiveness. If this value dominates, employees become infused with the desire to beat the competition at all costs. In pursuit of victory over competitors, leaders model desired behaviors, and individuals are rewarded for certain actions and punished for others. People develop and reinforce policies that begin to justify morally gray actions in the name of winning. People further exhibit the ability to compartmentalize their actions, mentally separating unethical behaviors at work from the rest of their life. They, thus, retain the belief they are good people despite the morally questionable actions they perform for their job.^[3]

The Impact of Corporations’ Legal Standing

In societies adopting Western business practices, the legal status of corporations exacerbates these dynamics. Western societies define corporations as individuals under the law. Legally, it is the organization that acts unethically, not the people. Victims of an organization’s action may pursue legal action against it, but not the people working for it. For the people working in the organization, this dynamic depersonalizes the consequences of their actions. They may feel that they are not acting unethically; the organization is. They may further feel the organization is justified in its actions since it acts in pursuit of a value that the culture honors.^[4]

Moral Mazes

The bureaucracy of organizations can create a sense of moral relativism among its members. In many organizations, an individual’s success is not based on doing the right thing, but by impressing the right people, having the right contacts, and fitting into the social setting. Those who climb the corporate ladder do so through their ability to adapt their beliefs, values, and behaviors to align with the organization’s culture. People who are successful in this environment thus become susceptible to allowing others to direct their actions rather than acting per their internal values. In such an environment, doing whatever it takes to win while avoiding blame for failures is key to success.^[5]

The Myth of Rationality

Further structures are amplifying this dynamic in Western businesses. Western business schools promote the values of productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness coupled with a reliance on disembedded rationalities (e.g. economic, technocratic, and bureaucratic). Under such systems, it becomes easy for organizations (or rather, the people in an organization) to exploit individuals for profit. Humans become tools to achieve goals. Once members of an organization dehumanize people in this way, any behavior becomes possible.^[6]

Moreover, exclusive reliance on disembedded rationalities implies a lack of emotions. Recall from Chapter 5 that emotional rationality conveys important information about the status of our social setting and how well our actions align with our values. It is through emotions that we create connections between people within our social setting. Disregarding emotions and other subjective forms of rationality creates blind spots, allows us to dehumanize others, and limits an organization’s ability to challenge questionable actions.^[7]

Western businesses rely on disembedded rationalities to make their operations run smoothly and predictably. Their goal is to eliminate operational uncertainty. You can only eliminate uncertainty, however, if you possess perfect knowledge, which, of course, no one possesses. The exclusive reliance on disembedded rationality creates the illusion of certainty by hiding or ignoring what we do not know. Such reliance helps deflect criticism and inconvenient issues by dismissing them as subjective (and therefore irrational) or irrelevant to the financial analysis.^[8]

“When managers put aside their personal moral convictions in pursuit of supposed rationality or some perceived social pressure, they can act with neither courage nor wisdom.”^[9]

The above section paints a bleak picture of the organizational landscape. There is hope, however. Just as there exist structures constraining moral actions, other structures enable them.

Structures Enabling Our Abilty to Act Per Our Values

Structures enabling our ability to act per our values include an organization’s culture, supportive bureaucratic rationalities, and the values that motivate individual behavior.

Recall from Chapter 3 that even though social structures have the power to influence behavior, individuals can act to either reinforce or change those structures. The structures below are the ones individuals would want to create and support to promote people’s ability to act per their values.

Organizational Culture

Just as the beliefs, behaviors, and values of an organization’s culture can lead its members to commit morally ambiguous actions, so, too, they can promote courage and strong ethics. Professions such as firefighters and smokejumpers, for example, maintain cultural taboos against cowardice and share stories that exemplify desired moral ends. Members of such organizational cultures develop rituals and rites that test newcomers. These tests dramatize hazards and moral quandaries people are likely to encounter in their job to see how they act under pressure. The culture, then, quickly excludes any newcomer who fails to adhere to appropriate standards during these rituals.^[10]

Supportive Bureaucratic Rationality

Recall from earlier chapters that bureaucratic rationality reifies power. Bureaucracy is the means through which organizations and societies control the behaviors of its members. Dysfunctional bureaucratic structures may stifle action and cause harm. Effective bureaucratic structures, conversely, facilitate effective action. Members of an organization can support ethical behavior by creating bureaucratic structures that enforce standards of accountability, transparency, and disclosure.^[11] Additionally, creating systems that protect the identity and reputation of whistleblowers further reduces the risks people face when challenging the actions of their organization.

The Values and Moral Convictions of Individuals

These structures that promote ethical behavior–and, indeed, facilitate organizational wisdom–can only exist if people create them. Herein we return to the problem that opened this chapter. Wisdom is action-oriented, but taking action requires effort and risk. What is it that motivates people to turn off the TV and champion a cause in the face of resistance and danger?

The answer is a person’s values. When we see a cause aligned with our values, we are driven to act. It is a person’s moral convictions that give them the courage to face significant risks in pursuit of their goal.

Earlier sections, however, highlighted several structures that guide people away from their values to engage in questionable actions. How can we avoid those traps that lead us away from wisdom and incentivize us to continue perpetuating harmful actions?

Understanding those structures that promote poor behavior combined with continued vigilance to spot such structures in your environment is a start. Choosing to support and develop structures that enable people’s ability to enact their values is also vital.

Another way to ensure your ability to act per your moral convictions is to pursue careers and work with organizations whose values align with your own. The first step to either of these processes, though, is to develop a strong sense of your values. What is it that you stand for?

Your Choices Matter

Please indulge me as I drop the pretense of the distant third-person narrator in this closing section and speak with you, author to reader, person to person.

At the time of writing this, I have been a teacher long enough that many of my students have graduated, found jobs, and re-connected with me years after they sat in my class. I have had the joy of taking them out for coffee to catch up. Every so often, one of them will relate how something I said or did in class resonated with them, changed their outlook, and altered how they approached life. Whenever I hear this, my first thought is some version of, “Holy cow, if I thought any of my students were listening to me, I’d pay attention to what I was saying!”

You see, as a teacher, when you look out on your class, you are met by a sea of bored faces staring back at you. When that listless wall of boredom looms in front of me, it is easy to think that nothing I am doing is having any impact. Those stories over coffee, however, show me that this belief is untrue. Even though I may be blind to the effect of my actions, my actions still, nonetheless, have an impact.

One of the great tragedies of the human condition is that we will live our entire lives without ever knowing the real impact our actions had. How might our lives differ if we could see the full extent that each of our choices had on the world? What decisions might we make if we could see how a friendly gesture lifted someone’s spirits enough to bear the weight of their life? What actions might we choose if we could see how a thoughtless word crushed someone’s dream?

Whenever an old student tells me of the significance of some comment I made years past, it reminds me of the following truths. Your life matters. Your choices matter. They matter because within your actions lies the power of creation. Your actions create our world. Whether you choose to act or do nothing, to build something new or honor the old, to be kind or cruel, each choice shapes our civilization.

The world we were born into, with all its blessings and follies, was created by the actions of every previous generation. Now, the spirits of our ancestors have passed the torch of creation to us. For these few years that we live and breathe on this earth, our actions will shape and influence not only our reality, but the reality into which future generations are born. Here, now, in this time and place, we are the creators of our world.

Let’s make it a good one.