Does a former ethics commission member have a special obligation not to make misstatements with respect to government ethics matters? This question arose from a 2010 case in Florida I just came across, where the state senate president hired a former chair of the state ethics commission as his attorney. According to an Associated Press article, the case involved the senator's numerous omissions in five years of disclosure statements, including earnings from a teaching position, real estate investments, and business clients. There were also misstated values of property owned. The senate president admitted to the omissions and misstatements.

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid's spokesman said with respect to questions regarding his hiring of a tax adviser away from General Electric, "The impulse in some quarters to reflexively cast suspicion on private sector experience is part of what makes qualified individuals reluctant to enter public service."

When someone is asked to be a Senate majority leader's tax adviser, or a council president's development aide, the fact that she just worked for an infamous tax dodger, or that he just worked for a big local developer, creates an appearance of impropriety with regard to the advice she or he will give. It is not a matter of "reflexively casting suspicion." This situation requires concern for how people will feel about a government that hires "experts" who appear to be helping their immediately former employers.

Self-Evaluation and Getting One's Bearings
To change oneself (and to support change in one's environment), self-evaluation is required. Before you change, you have to have your bearings. The problem is that, unlike evaluation of others, self-evaluation is rarely rational. It is more commonly emotional, taking "the rosiest possible interpretation of the facts," according to the Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010). Most of us think we're above average at everything, from driving a car to making judgments regarding our conflict situations. Officials see themselves as people of integrity, trying to do their best for our community. This makes it hard to orient themselves with respect to possible ethics reform.

You Can't Teach Ethics
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath say that there are two kinds of mindset:  the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Those with a fixed mindset believe that things and people are the way they are. There are people of integrity and there are people who are corrupt. Those with a growth mindset believe that people can change, that "the brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise."

When government ethics reform becomes an issue, many politicians respond that you can't teach people to be ethical. They either are or they aren't. These politicians have a fixed mindset with respect to ethics.

Government ethics practitioners have a growth mindset with respect to ethics. They believe that government ethics can be taught and that ethics advice can make a huge difference in preventing ethical misconduct.

Simplifying Self-Supervision
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath note that self-control or, more accurately, self-supervision is an exhaustible resource. What looks like laziness or selfishness is often simply exhaustion. Self-supervision gets burned up by managing the impression we make on others, by coping with fears, and by trying to focus on complex instructions.

With respect to government ethics, officials have trouble following ethics rules, especially those with numerous exceptions. At best, they put all the ethics burden on their lawyers, that it, the city or county attorney. At worst, they ignore the rules altogether.

Neither solution is good. The best way to change the way officials deal with conflict situations is to keep the rules simple. This is consistent with another of the Heaths' "surprises" about change: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. If you want people to change, the directions have to be crystal clear.

Why Scandals Lead to Poor Ethics Reform
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath note that John Kotter and Dan Cohen argue in their book The Heart of Change that the sequence of change is not analyze-think-change, which is how most people (including me) try to bring it about, but rather see-feel-change. The thing that local government officials are most likely to see in a way that makes them feel strongly enough to embrace change is a scandal in their government organization, or even sometimes in the state or a neighboring government (Watergate raised such strong feelings that it had an effect at all levels of government).

The problem with change coming from scandal is that it points to a problem (often a mostly irrelevant problem), but not to an effective solution. When negative emotions are involved, the solution, according to Martin Seligman, is essentially removing a stone from one's shoe, not fixing the shoe itself. The response to negative emotions lacks creativity, flexibility, or ingenuity. So the results are not usually effective or well thought out.