Years ago, management supremo Peter Druker wrote a paper for the Harvard Business Review entitled “Effective Decisions”. In that paper he suggested executives knew when to make decisions based on what is right as opposed to what is good.
More recently, I was discussing the issue with a colleague who introduced me to the idea of moral heuristics: shortcuts we take in our values in order to make difficult decisions a little easier to bear.
As an example of this case was offered as follows:
A funeral arrived at the crematorium and there were procedural irregularities that ‘should’ have prevented the cremation taking place. The family were obviously distressed. It was impossible to satisfy all points of view, and the manager had to make a decision. Because there was no right answer, the manager chose to make the decision on the basis of what he felt was ‘the right thing to do’ in that situation. He waived the procedures and the cremation went ahead. Audit’s view is that the ‘right thing to do’ is to follow procedure and censured the manager.
To me this is a typical case of process driven inflexibility that throws morality out the window and yet in the strict sense of the word… is rational
