#ethics21 Leadership and the Duty of Care

I've been casually following a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) structured by Stephen Downes, Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care. While it is mainly focused on how ethics applies to analytics (particularly Artificial Intelligence) and learning, it strikes me as relevant to well, everything. In particular, leadership.

Leaders must make decisions guided by their ethics on an almost daily basis. As the discuss in #ethics21 has pointed out, though, while it may seem clear what ethical behavior means, it is much more complicated than that. Ethics, when examined with any level of curiosity, uncovers more questions than answers. Maybe that's best, but it is also challenging.

I did take one course in ethics in graduate school working on my masters in Organizational Leadership. Every course, though, contained ethical overtones. I learned that leaders must examine their motives and reconcile them against their values while behaving ethically. I learned that there are many more shades of gray than right or wrong. Should our choices be absolute? Are ethics relative to the circumstances? Who gets to decide?

What I enjoy about this program (#ethics21) is the connection to duty of care. Even there we find multiple meanings. Any search of the terms "duty of care" will uncover bunny trails that are hard to climb out of.

I do like this meaning uncovered by Downes, "reasonable care becomes an obligation when performing any acts that could cause harm." That applies as much to leadership as anything else. When we seek to achieve our goals, when we work on solving problems, when we lead people into uncharted territory -- we owe our constituents care -- the effort to protect them from unnecessary harm.

As leaders we owe our teams the ability to discern truly ethical acts and to always -- ALWAYS, consider our duty of care.

-- doug smith

Image of Stephen Downes retrieved 27 November 2021 from:

https://www.downes.ca/images/cover-image.PNG

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