Notes from 46th International STC Conference
Cincinnati, Ohio, May 16-19, 1999

Dilbert™ Goes Corporate: How to Navigate the Thorny Thickets of Corporate America Without Selling Your Soul

Featuring Lockheed Martin Corporation's Acclaimed "The Ethics Challenge"

Moderated by Dan Voss
Lockheed Martin Electronics & Missiles, Orlando, FL

Session Description: This unique and lively workshop is based on an ingenious board game developed by the Office of Ethics and Business Conduct for the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Teams of technical communicators compete to find the best solutions to ethical dilemmas.

• With the permission of the Lockheed Martin Corporate Ethics Office, the presenter used the company's widely acclaimed ethics game, "The Ethics Challenge," which enlivens in-house ethics training for employees by packaging 50 controversial ethical conflict scenarios in the workplace in the context of a surprisingly entertaining board game. Small teams compete to find the best ethical alternatives, all to the droll accompaniment of Dogbert™ and the whole entourage of Scott Adams' immortal cartoon characters.
• "The Ethics Challenge" encourages employees to resolve ethical conflicts through a 3-step approach:
   
1. Apply the company's 6 ethical "pillars", or basic values:
    
• Honesty
• Integrity
• Respect
• Trust
• Responsibility
• Citizenship
2. Consider the interests and welfare of the company's 5 basic groups of stakeholders:
    
• Employees
• Customers
• Communities
• Shareholders
• Suppliers
3. Determine the best course of action that takes into account relevant values and stakeholder interests.
   
   In other words, chart a course of ethical behavior that does the most benefit (and the least harm) to the largest number of stakeholders.
• Points are awarded for the teams' answers, ranging from 0 points for unsuitable responses -- see Dogbert™ -- to 5 points for highly appropriate choices. Teams then move their game pieces (Dilbert™ characters, of course... what else!) along the game board in quest of ethics tokens -- the acquisition of which, naturally, determines the winner. Competition can become quite heated, but given the nature of the training, cheating is discouraged.
• The session, which played to a capacity audience consisting of six teams of eight, was highly successful. Participants explored five of the scenarios, became involved in heated discussions, and left a number of questions unresolved. In essence, they explored the gray penumbras that encircle ethical conflicts in the workplace and emerged with a profound appreciation of how complex ethical conflicts can be.
• The scenarios:*
   
• "Case #42: Sexual Harassment": Setting the Standard: Respect. When a particular male supervisor talks to any female employee, he always addresses her as "Sweetie." You have overheard him use this term several times. As the supervisor's manager, what should you do?
  
  Outcome: There was universal agreement that the best course of action would be for the manager to talk to the supervisor directly and let him know that even though he might have the best of intentions, the use of the term could be offensive to employees and must stop. The consensus was that it is best to work a specific case of sexual harassment directly and specifically at the source, rather than to rely on broad policy statements to a group and hope that the individual in question picks up on the message.
• "Case #43: Vendor Relationships": Setting the Standard: Responsibility. You are a purchasing manager for your company. Your spouse works for one of your vendors. Your spouse's company has given her two tickets to basketball playoffs valued at $60 each. Can you accept one of the tickets and go to the playoffs with your spouse?
  
  Outcome: Responses on this one ranged the full gamut. Even though the team leader's Answer Guide says it is perfectly appropriate to go to the game because the personal spousal relationship transcends the company-vendor relationship, several teams felt that to do so was to violate an corporate axiom that "the appearance of impropriety can be as harmful as the impropriety itself." That was hard to argue with.
• "Case #47: Scientific Integrity": Setting the Standard: Integrity. As a senior research scientist, you receive a research paper for peer review. The paper essentially duplicates research you are writing up for publication. If this paper is published before your paper, you will be "scooped" in the profession. Christmas holidays are coming--and you had planned to use the free time to complete your paper and submit it for open literature publication. Reviewing the competing paper will take valuable time, and allowing it to be published first will drastically affect your career. What do you do?
  
  Outcome: Again, there was considerable variation in the team's responses. Some felt the scientist in question could review the other paper objectively, make suitable comments, return it promptly to the journal, and then proceed as quickly as possible with his own project. Others argued that while it might be possible to be fair in the review, it would be impossible to totally ignore contravening scientific evidence while completing your own paper. Once you had the information, it could not help but affect what you did with your own data. An attempt at collaboration would be ethical--as long as it was processed through the journal, not directly with the other author--but it might raise issues of senior authorship. And, if it were rejected by the other author, then what? The best response was to explain the situation to the journal, decline to review the other paper, not read it -- an important point! -- and then finish and submit your own paper as quickly as possible.
• "Case #4: Bribery": Setting the Standard: Citizenship. Your company wishes to expand its operations globally. Bribery payments to local government officials are common in the market you wish to enter, even though such payments are illegal under the law of that country. If you don't make the payments, you will likely lose the contract. Which of the following actions are acceptable?
  
  Outcome: A key point was that the payments are illegal under the law of the host country. This raised an interesting corollary: What if the bribes were legal over there, but illegal in our country? However, in this case since the bribes would be unlawful in both countries, there was little doubt it would be unethical to pursue them--whether directly with the government officials there or by "laundering" the bribes through an independent third-party in-country contact, essentially by covering one eye and asking no questions. The biggest controversy was whether to bid at all. One team raised a salient business issue--if bidding ethically reduces win probability to near zero, then the best business decision is to pull out altogether. In essence, either play by their unwritten rules (in this case, ignoring ethical considerations) or don't play at all.
• "Case #26: Training and Development": Setting the Standard: Honesty. A company-sponsored training course is being held in Orlando, Florida, and you have been selected to attend. You have no interest in the training, but you are ready for a vacation and have never been to Florida. What would you do?
  
  Note: Any resemblance, real or imagined, to the 47th Annual International STC Conference in Orlando in May 21-15, 2000, was strictly coincidental!
  
  Outcome: The controversy here swirled around one of the choices which offers the employee an ethical option to go if his/her supervisor so directs, even if he/she questions the value of the training. Two teams strenuously objected to this, on the basis that supervisory sanction does not obviate the individual's responsibility to decline the training in which he/she sees no value, in order to make the funds available for others in the department who might benefit. On the other hand, two other teams argued that perhaps the supervisor really did have better insight into the value of the training and the employee, and at the very least, the employee should discuss the matter and find out whether he/she could actually benefit. Needless to say, the tie-in to next year's conference in Orlando made this one particularly interesting!

• * Scenario descriptions excerpted from "The Ethics Challenge", Copyright © 1997 Lockheed Martin Corporation. All rights reserved.