1 Pausing for ethical purpose

Ethics is a complex area, because there are usually many competing claims for doing the right thing. Equally, all decisions and actions, no matter how good, usually have a downside. To further complicate matters, it can be hard to see the ethical issues because our minds are full of the demands of everyday life – deadlines from work, our home lives playing on our emotions, our bodies telling us to rest, exercise, eat, and so on. All of these pressures come together to create noise, making it hard to identify and act upon the ethical.

For this reason, Ladkin (2015) talks about the need to pause in leadership, to come to a temporary standstill in order to reset the mind and body to create space for ethical reflection and reasoning. None of us have time to stop, but advocates of doing so say it helps us filter out the pressures and parts of our lives and work that are less important.