Winter Reading: Switch II - Shaping the Path Toward Change

In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath focus on three general ways to shape the path toward change:  tweak the environment, build habits, and rally the herd.

Rallying the herd means letting people know what others are doing. When most people do something, the others generally follow on their own or can be embarrassed into following. A government ethics example is posting on-time filers (and nonfilers) of annual financial disclosure statements online and in departmental e-mails.

Habits to build in government ethics include (1) seeking ethics advice (leaders should do this as openly as possible, letting everyone know in e-mails or even press releases what they asked, what they were advised to do, and how helpful the advice was); and (2) having every board chair ask for possible conflicts (from members, involved parties, and the public) whenever a new matter comes up.

Habits are not as personal as we think they are. Many of them come from our environments. That is why tweaking the environment can make a big difference in how we act.

Predecision-making
If officials were to predecide that, whenever faced with a conflict situation, they would seek ethics advice from the ethics officer, this would effectively pass control of their behavior to the ethics officer, ensuring professional handling of the conflict situation. By doing this, temptations, competing goals, and bad habits are no longer impediments. This is why this predecision to seek ethics advice is the central act of government ethics. Establish this as a habit (by means of leadership, training, an ethics officer, reminders, and visible ethics advice) and you've gone a long way toward the goal of an effective government ethics program.

Social Norms
But this kind of habit can be seen as unnecessary, like goggles in a factory. The Heaths note that most workers consider themselves exceptions to rules requiring goggles. It's a macho thing. Similarly, officials think they are exceptions to the need to seek ethics advice, that advice is useful only when they need to protect their behinds, not because they can't figure it out on their own.

The macho thing is made stronger by peer pressure. If no one's doing it (except to protect one's behind), it's harder for any individual official to do for the right reason.

The social norm of not seeking ethics advice needs to be changed in order to weaken the personal feeling that one is a person of integrity who knows how to deal with conflict situations (usually by insisting, "I can't be bought" or "What I did is legal"). In an environment that does not take advantage of ethics advice, a simple rule may be necessary:  a requirement to seek advice whenever one has a relationship to someone involved in a matter.

The Haddon Matrix
"Is it possible," the Heaths ask, "to design an environment in which undesired behaviors—whether yours or your colleagues'—are made not only harder, but impossible?" This is the central question of government ethics reform. What's their answer? "Lots of people actually make their living contemplating how to wipe out the wrong kinds of behaviors." The Heaths focus on industrial safety experts and others who seek to prevent injuries, for example from car accidents. We know these experts have come up with many valuable solutions, many of which people have been reluctant to accept.

What about government ethics? Hardly anyone is trying to design such an environment, and hardly anyone is looking for experts to help them do this. But it's important to add, At least not yet. When this starts happening, the field of government ethics will start changing.

Injury prevention experts have a framework to think systematically about prevention, called the Haddon Matrix. The matrix focuses on three times:  pre-event, event, and post-event. Consider injuries from car accidents. Pre-event interventions include things that will prevent accidents, such as highway lighting, antilock brakes, and campaigns against drunk driving. Event interventions assume accidents will still occur, but injuries from them can be reduced by seat belts, air bags, and the like. Post-event interventions assume that injuries will still occur and, therefore, seek to optimize health outcomes through emergency medical teams.

Government ethics programs generally focus on none of these. The principal form of prevention is enforcement, that is, preventing through fear of punishment. This is the norm even though it doesn't work very well. There is some training, but it is rarely very good. There is advice, but it is usually not timely, not professional, not independent, and not taken advantage of. There is disclosure, but it is limited, and often not made public.

A good government ethics program focuses on pre-event prevention, including good ethics training, timely, professional, independent ethics advice, and three kinds of disclosure. It would be nice to market government ethics as conflict enlightening, antiscandal brakes, and a campaign against making decisions with blinders on.

But what about event and post-event interventions? Is there a government ethics seat belt or emergency health team? Yes, I think there is. There is the intervention of colleagues and subordinates. If they know, they can intervene pre-event, but if they only find out as or soon after ethical misconduct occurs, they can try to stop the process, prevent the official from participating in the matter, tell the official to immediately return the gift, refuse the job, or resign from a nonprofit board. They can recommend that the official call the ethics officer, convey the facts, and find out whether the conflict situation can be rectified or whether the official needs to report himself and enter into a settlement. This can turn what could be a painful scandal into a nearly heroic admission of a mistake. That is the government ethics way of optimizing a health outcome.

Colleagues and subordinates can be the antiscandal brakes, seat belts, and ambulances of government ethics. And yet this is rarely acknowledged in a government ethics program. Here is a great opportunity for change.

Click here to read the other six blog posts on Switch.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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