How can you make a profound difference as a leader? One under-explored skill is to take ‘moral risks’ through shocking actions that transform norms. Moral risk-taking requires courage not only because success cannot be guaranteed but also because you will break from the morality of your community. You risk being immoral. Matthew Hancocks explains in more detail what this means and how moral risk can be applied to contemporary impasses.
How would you describe the word ‘disruption’? In his book What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub described it as “newness for people who are scared of genuine newness”. If we’re really going to tackle challenges such as financialization, ethical AI, diversity, inequality and climate change, we need to introduce the kind of radical newness that scares people. In other words, we need to be making history. Yet many of the ways in which business, government and society are currently attempting to tackle the big challenges create little real change – they merely rehash old approaches with all the usual failings and limitations.
Take the current UK rail strike. In the early days of the strike, public support was weak but, as people returned to working from home, its disruptive effects were minimised and public support for the strike rose eight points to 45%. Fear of a General Strike now haunts the Government. Public discourse is toxic and divisive.
At first, the Conservative Government looked on, tacitly supporting the employers but refusing to become involved in negotiations. According to Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, the strikes are “indefensible” and meeting with the unions would be a “stunt”. Despite rising public support, no-one on the government side is prepared to listen to the arguments of the unions.
But what if Shapps took a moral risk? What if, to the disgust of many Conservative MPs, he invited RMT union leader Mick Lynch to his home for an informal one-to-one chat? What if he got to know Mick and understand the concerns and fears of RMT members? And when a junior transport minister mocks the union leader in a speech to the Commons, what if Shapps forces him to resign?
Imagine also if, despite the Twitter storm raging around them, Shapps and Lynch find common ground and respect for each other’s positions. They join with the employers and resume formal talks. And when Shapps then appears on BBC TV’s Question Time and is attacked for speaking to “dinosaur” union leaders, he makes a passionate defence for the role of trade unionism in British society.
Of course, the above scenario is a fiction. But does it not offer a more realistic prospect for a settlement than the current stand-off? It requires a leader to have the moral imagination and moral courage to take action which, as well as putting themselves in the line of fire, not least from their own side, could result in total failure. That action is called moral risk.
Let’s unpack what’s happening here. Making a difference entails, inevitably, changing our conventional sense of right and wrong and that demands the moral imagination to put ourselves in others’ shoes. What does such moral imagination involve? First you have to notice and take seriously a moral anomaly – anything that disturbs a settled sense of right and wrong. Most of us most of the time step over such anomalies. Think of the way, before Enron and the crash of 2008, how many in business stepped over warnings about the risks of advanced finance tools that were certainly there in the 1990s.
Leaders don’t step over anomalies. Instead they are attracted to them. The second move they make is they intensify their anomaly by taking a dangerous moral risk that reframes the convention into something very different. Finally, leaders take a series of shocking actions to overcome resistance, and, with practical success, make their actions into new moral norms. At the very least, if successful, their actions are sufficiently morally acceptable for people to be grateful for the leader’s handling of the anomaly and so give the leaders a moral pass. In short, leaders risk their own morality in order to create new normals.
In the case of the rail strike, the new normal would be changing the public’s common sense antipathy towards industrial action into one of listening for the sense and reasoning of their opponents.
And in our fictional example of the rail strike resolution, those steps would have been:
1) Shapps is captivated by a moral anomaly. He notices the strange pride he and his colleagues feel about shunning relationships with union leaders. He questions this and breaks with the pack by publicly declaring his desire to get to know Mick Lynch.
2) Then Shapps takes an action that shocks many by forcing his up-and-coming junior colleague to resign for anti-union remarks.
3) Finally, Shapps takes radically shocking moral risks that, if they work, usher in a new normal. In our fictional scenario, he expresses his appreciation for the role of trade unionism (within the context of his own Conversative world view) on live TV. Further actions might include declaring transport workers highly skilled and shifting transport policy away from individual car use towards public transport to increase its revenues.
And what would be the transformation brought about in this scenario? It would be to take the UK closer to the industrial relations culture of Germany where, for instance, union representatives sit on corporate boards. Or, if he went further, to break decisively with car culture and his party’s association with individualism and anti-collectivism.
To recap, history-making leaders embrace moral risk when they see something that no one else has noticed. They then start to take progressively morally risky steps until they bring about a fundamental transformation in expectations and behaviours.
And moral risk is something you can apply within your own organisation to achieve a transformative outcome. That could be to turn your company into a true champion of tackling climate change. It could be taking a stand against financial engineering. Or it could be revolutionising your recruitment policy to create true diversity and opportunities for all.
Moral risk is far from easy and it’s likely to require that you force other people to become complicit in the risks you’re taking. It therefore requires a strong sense of conscience. Are you definitely doing the right thing, even if it involves pushing your way through others to get there? There are no rules, no easy answers – but you can achieve a lot through moral risk. That’s why it’s tough being a leader.
You can read more about history-making in my earlier posts (such as this one ) and read more about moral risk-taking here.