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If, after considering all these factors, the decision maker is uncomfortable making the decision and thereby assuming responsibility for the outcomes, it is appropriate to escalate the decision to those with greater authority and responsibility. Based on the above, there are four possible actions a decision-maker can take, and each is described below. This framework was vetted through these groups and was bettered from their feedback. Ross Upshur is supported by the Canada Research Chair in Primary Care Research. We also thank our three peer reviewers, Angela Bate, Ezekiel Emanuel and Akria Akabayashi for their helpful insights and comments. Lastly, while knowing how to use the framework to inform decision-making is vital, there is more to ensuring that the framework will be used or useful.
- Also, because it emphasizes the importance of role models and education to ethical behavior, it can sometimes merely reinforce current cultural norms as the standard of ethical behavior.
- It is important, too, to recognise that values are not static, and that circumstances will evolve rapidly during a pandemic influenza outbreak.
- Self-transcendence empowers us to avoid the dichotomy between knowing and doing and to imbue the community with meaning and values that promote the common good.
- The exercise of defining the matrix is almost as valuable as using it since it clearly lays out who is responsible for what in the decision-making process.
- If, after considering all these factors, the decision maker is uncomfortable making the decision and thereby assuming responsibility for the outcomes, it is appropriate to escalate the decision to those with greater authority and responsibility.
This “well-established approach…to mediate crises” (Sikka, 2015, p. 2) fails to recognize that “ethical responsibilities lie, not with the corporation, but with the individual agents, real persons, who form and function the corporation” (Miller, 2005, p. 220). Our working group was formed in response to the pandemic planning initiative that took place at S & W in early 2005. The hospital’s Clinical Ethics Centre was invited to provide ethics support in this planning initiative. It soon became apparent that the scope of the issues went beyond the purview of clinical ethics to include organisational and public health ethics. Expertise in organisational and public health ethics was quickly procured through the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics which is a partnership between the University and sixteen affiliated healthcare organizations that includes S & W among its partners.
A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making
It privileges the flourishing of embodied individuals in their relationships and values interdependence, not just independence. It relies on empathy to gain a deep appreciation of the interest, feelings, and viewpoints of each stakeholder, employing care, kindness, compassion, generosity, and a concern for others to law firm bookkeeping resolve ethical conflicts. Care ethics holds that options for resolution must account for the relationships, concerns, and feelings of all stakeholders. The use of ethical frameworks to guide decision-making may help to mitigate some of the unintended and unavoidable collateral damage from an influenza pandemic.
But when your organization has to scale decision-making, the formula is far more complicated and the process can take much longer. If you’re a leader at a company, do you know what these unspoken, unwritten things are? Have you documented the beliefs that guide how you make those decisions? I list this here because I’ve lost count of how many times I had to create a Golden Circle of my own to drive decision-making. When you have to pick from multiple options at the table, it’s often just a matter of thinking about why you need to make that decision in the first place. Since decision-making is so important and puts so much strain on a single individual, people have come up with all sorts of frameworks to aid product managers in making the best calls.
What are Decision-Making Frameworks?
The remainder of the article outlines proven and fundamental concepts for decentralizing decision-making in a SAFe Enterprise. It has been our experience that the values in the framework did resonate with the pandemic planners with whom we have shared this ethical framework. The primarily pragmatic justification for the selection of the values in the framework means that the framework is provisional so it ought to be subject to revision in light of compelling argument, empirical evidence and further stakeholder feedback. We intend that the framework invite further dialogue about its legitimacy and its adequacy.
Discerning whether the dynamism of these patterns of cooperation progress or decline the common good, is a judgment based on values (McAleese, 2012). Finally, decisions and actions taken are a culmination of the cognitive activities and are in accordance with the good. This method of self-discovery, a movement towards moral conversion, by way of the cognitive transcendental process, leads us to a sense of ethical agency, or communal responsibility, an end point representing Lonergan’s dynamic invariant structure of the human good.
Situational Leadership
The essence of the framework lies in a visual representation of a problem decomposed into small chunks. Recognizing an Ethical IssueOne of the most important things to do at the beginning of ethical deliberation is to locate, to the extent possible, the specifically ethical aspects of the issue at hand. Sometimes what appears to be an ethical dispute is really a dispute about facts or concepts. For example, some Utilitarians might argue that the death penalty is ethical because it deters crime and thus produces the greatest amount of good with the least harm.
Even though we think we know what to do, let’s give it 24 hours.” She’s saved us multiple times with that wisdom. There are decisions that deserve days of debate and analysis, but the vast majority aren’t worth more than 10 minutes. Some decisions can’t be easily reversed or would be too damaging if you choose poorly. Most importantly, some decisions don’t need to be made immediately to maintain downstream velocity.