7 Key practice: ethical reflection

You have already engaged in lots of ethical reflection this week and we now want to underline it as an important practice for leadership. You have reflected ethically by:

• reflecting on organisational purpose as something powerful yet also as something that can be contested and that can and ought to adapt
• considering the complexity and multiple dimensions of ethical dilemmas
• engaging with how you can, in a present and embodied way, stick around after a decision has been made to help your colleagues through the consequences.

In summary, ethical reflection is important because it deals with dilemmas and problems for which there is no straightforward or satisfactory answer.

Ethical reflection allows you to approach a problem from a number of different perspectives. It also invites you to think about problems from the perspective of a number of different people. The idea of ethical reflection is to make a problem more complex and difficult, to see more sides of the puzzle, rather than solving the puzzle itself. Ethical reflection is also very much an emotional and embodied task. It asks you to pay attention to how certain options, issues and people make you feel.